Oil isn’t the only thing we’re running out of. Rare earth minerals that you’ve probably never heard of but that are essential for modern technology are, well, rare. Many are located in countries we compete with and getting them out of the ground requires willingness to absolutely destroy that local environment. We’re going to have to make unpleasant political and environmental decisions in the next few years if we want new cars and cell phones.
Oil
Something terrible is supposed to happen on my birthday in 2012. I don’t put much stock in the predictions of the Mayan calendar, but the world oil shortfall that’s predicted to occur in 2012 probably won’t have many good consequences. We are completely unprepared to transition to a non-fossil fuel based economy, so I can understand why Obama opened so many new areas to offshore drilling.
I still think it was a bad decision. The rig that sank in the Gulf of Mexico last week is just one of many environmental disasters caused by offshore drilling. Considering all of the other problems the oceans are facing because of climate change, we should be working frantically to keep the ocean from dying, not doing more to destroy one of our most valuable natural resources.
High density cities
If we all lived at the density people in Brooklyn do, everyone in America would fit in New Hampshire. I’m not suggesting that we all move to New Hampshire, of course. But imagine the problems we’d solve if our major cities were condensed.
If places are closer together, people can walk more. This doesn’t just make for a healthier population though exercise, it reduces pollution. For distances that aren’t comfortably walkable, a good public transportation system wouldn’t be as daunting a project as it is now, again reducing pollution.
We’d reduce the amount of building materials needed per person and energy needed to heat/cool homes because most everyone would live in an apartment. Because people would be concentrated in certain locations, we’d reduce the transportation costs for food and goods.
The most important consequence of increasing the density of cities would be all of the land we wouldn’t be taking up space on. Less habitat destruction and fragmentation would give so many more species a chance as the climate changes.
As nice it it could be, implementing this kind of design seems almost impossible. Will people ever leave the suburbs? And what will happen to the suburbs if they are abandoned?
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Ben Sherman - Goldtone Dress
Where is your god?
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
One day the Gestapo hanged a child. … The child who, Wiesel recalled, had the face of a “sad-eyed angel,” was silent, lividly pale and almost calm as he ascended the gallows. Behind Wiesel, one of the other prisoners asked: “Where is God? Where is He?” It took the child half an hour to die, while the prisoners were forced to look him in the face. The same man asked again: “Where is God now?” And Wiesel heard a voice within him make this anser: “Where is He? Here He is – He is hanging here on the gallows.”
Dostoevsky had said that the death of a single child could make God unacceptable, but even he, no stranger to inhumanity, had not imagined the death of a child in such circumstances. The horror of Auschwitz is a stark challenge to many of the more conventional ideas of God. The remote God of the philosophers, lost in a transcendent apatheia, becomes intolerable. Many Jews can no longer subscribe to the biblical idea of a God who manifests himself in history, who, they say with Wiesel, died in Auschwitz. The idea of a personal God, like one of us writ large, is fraught with difficulty. If this God is omnipotent, he could have prevented the Holocaust. If he was unable to stop it, he is impotent and useless; if he could have stopped it and chose not to, he is a monster. Jews are not the only people who believe that the Holocaust put an end to conventional theology.
What I’ve Noticed
Arizona enacted a law this week that makes it a state crime for undocumented immigrants to be in AZ. It’s basically an excuse for police to fuck with any and all brown people who accidentally leave their driver’s licenses at home.
Did you get flowers for your significant other this Valentine’s Day? Did you know those flowers were likely grown by heavily exploited child workers in poisonous working conditions on land that should be used to grow food in countries where people routinely starve to death?
Sometimes peer review is just a good way to cheat.
India actually has a reasonable copyright law that will encourage – rather than stifle – innovation.
Mexican abortion law says that a pregnant 10 year old raped by her stepfather must carry the fetus to term. Oklahoma is only a little better.
Christian health insurance might be worse than Blue Cross Blue Shield.
Academia doesn’t pay nearly as well as most people think it does, but at least we get paid to do something we’re interested in.
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