LifeItself

My Dear Western Friends, As one of the old classics said, and I paraphrase, "Where you look, defines your outlook."  By email, you asked me several questions. Below are some of my answers. As links in green, I picked two of my old blogs and kept on adding several articles from the New York Times that were published in the last few days.  I am not the only person who is morally troubled. On the fracking revolution It used to be that massive environmental destruction happened in the God forsaken foreign countries or the poor empty parts of our motherlands.  Not anymore.  Now heavy industrial activities come to where we live and work, and environmental damage happens in the ecosystems we actually care about.  That's the reality of resource exhaustion paired with the ever-growing appetite for these resources from us, the Bubble People. Take "shale revolution" as an example: 10,000 tons of clean, round, well-sorted fracking sand per well, or one hundred 100 t...

As Nicholas Taleb stated in "Antifragility": Now as a skeptical empiricist, I do not consider that resisting new technology is necessarily irrational: Waiting for time to operate its testing might be a valid approach if one holds that we have an incomplete picture of things. This is what naturalistic risk management is about. [ I.e., management of risk by nature, TWP.] However, it is downright irrational if one holds on to an old technology that is not naturalistic at all yet visibly harmful, or when the switch to a new technology ... is obviously free of possible side effects that did not exist with the previous one.  (Page 191) So what does this statement have to do with the current developments in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas?  It turns out that a lot. First, both sides in the Arctic disputes have taken fragile, absolutist positions. Environmentalists claim that there is no technology that could ever be applied in the Arctic from here to eternity, because all techno...

Dr. Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate and professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton, wrote this in his Op-Ed, entitled " Natural Born Drillers ": And this tells us that giving the oil companies carte blanche isn’t a serious jobs program. Put it this way: Employment in oil and gas extraction has risen more than 50 percent since the middle of the last decade, but that amounts to only 70,000 jobs, around one-twentieth of 1 percent of total U.S. employment. So the idea that drill, baby, drill can cure our jobs deficit is basically a joke. Why, then, are Republicans pretending otherwise? Part of the answer is that the party is rewarding its benefactors: the oil and gas industry doesn’t create many jobs, but it does spend a lot of money on lobbying and campaign contributions. The rest of the answer is simply the fact that conservatives have no other job-creation ideas to offer. His piece was followed by 554 reader comments, many of which read like this: ...They...