Messy business: Polluted ‘biosolids’ derail recycling of human waste
Recycling always sounds like a good idea unless what you are recycling has become dangerously toxic.
Kurt Cobb
The world made by hand
In the cellar of my parent’s house sit a series of tools that have served my father and grandfather and great-grandfather, for they were created before the throwaway world was conceived. … They were made for a nation of craftsmen, of people who bore in themselves the power that all humans once had, to reshape wood and hide and stone into a human landscape.
Yet more boondoggles: Extracting carbon dioxide from the air, mining asteroids
Many of the proposed solutions to climate change and resource depletion are really just boondoggles that benefit a few insiders
Dr. Seuss and the weight-loss drug craze
The chemical soup we live in every day is a major cause of chronic disease including obesity that no weight-loss drug can address.
Presidential immunity and the ‘Dark Age Ahead’
I’ve been thinking about Jane Jacobs’ book, Dark Age Ahead, as I’ve contemplated the idea that former presidents of the United States should be immune from prosecution.
Are your Cheerios impairing your fertility?
A lax U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is aiming right at your reproductive organs.
Why we call it climate change
Our damage to the climate will make temperatures go up in many places, but in some places temperatures will plummet.
The short-circuiting of societal feedback mechanisms
Virtually all human and natural systems require feedback to operate properly. Modern global society has been manipulated to prevent effective feedback that could allow us to address the critical environmental problems we face.
Biofortification: The latest technical fix for depleted soils
In the tradition of filtering air that we’ve polluted and treating water that we’ve sullied, we now have replacing minerals in soil that we’ve depleted because of industrial agriculture.
The hidden potential of bicycles
In perhaps one of the great ironies of human civilisation, mechanical devices to truly magnify human power came along as soon as we didn’t need them.
Why don’t humans respond to extinction-level risks?
Human extinction is a topic much in the air these days. But we humans are very short on action in response to the many threats.
Owning your own information revisited
Now that AI has made it possible to reproduce anyone’s image and voice for video or audio communications, it is more imperative than ever for the law to give each of us ownership of our own information, image and voice.