You have such a knack for distilling the overwhelmingly emotive, complex and divisive in to simple, easy to read fact. It’s my favourite newsletter. Thank you for everything you write.
Progress also means moving beyond our biases and relying on data, and I'm glad you mentioned climate change.
Nuclear power is our best option by far, and our only feasible one. It takes up less than a thousandth of the space of wind and solar and less than half the space of fossil fuel per kWh. Including Chernobyl, it's right between wind and solar in deaths per kWh by a decimal point, and rising in the rankings in terms of safety because in a typical year or decade, it kills no one.
This is a scientific consensus, and I used to call it a quiet one, and to an extent it still is, because we're more concerned with messaging than reality, but at this point, no numerate person could look at the data and draw any other conclusion. The data increasingly indicates that wind and solar are a net loss and lock us into dependence on fossil fuel. Every time a reactor has been shuttered, the price of electricity and use of fossil fuel has gone up. The last reactor at Indian Point was shuttered a few years ago, and since then, air pollution in NY has increased by 33%.
We do have to escape a growth mindset economically and otherwise, but at the same time, we invented math and science for a reason, and there has always been the underlying motive of short-term greed. Fossil fuel companies subsidize wind and solar, or call them the perfect partners, because they know they aren't reliable enough to work without them. Nuclear operates at maximum capacity over 90% of the time. Fossil fuel is just below that and falling. Wind and solar are at about 30%.
Nuclear power is 100% responsible for their waste, much of which we can now use in our newest reactors, and produces about 175,000 times less waste than fossil fuel per kWh, which directly kills 1.5 million people a year.
The majority of people in the US are now in favor of nuclear power, just as they have been in favor of a living wage, single-payer healthcare, a woman's right to choose, and several other issues that our government increasingly defers to the wealthy, who get a significantly greater amount of the legislation they want passed vs the majority.
When we still admitted COVID is a problem, Republicans quietly passed legislation to fund nuclear power passed without acknowledging climate change or deferring to science. They said we were #1 at nuclear energy production and technology, and should be again (neither of which is exactly true).
We have the solutions to most of our major problems, or at least to mitigate them (climate change is already out of the barn), but we forgot that money is a tool. It isn't something to be hoarded, and it's supposed to work for people, rather than people working for money.
AI is just a tool, and it could be and in some cases already is being used to make life more efficient and better, but it can already do things beyond human comprehension, it's in the hands of too few people, and it will ultimately obey. If you ask AI how to reduce the population to increase profit and maintain the status quo, it isn't going to raise an ethical argument, it's going to spit out an answer.
Statistically, we're probably already screwed, and we deserve it.
‘We have the solutions to most of our major problems… but we forgot that money is a tool’ is such a great point! This really resonates with me as I constantly feel frustrated by the feeling that solutions exist to our problems but our governments are too spineless to implement them. It is always whining about money (I live in the UK, the 6th wealthiest nation in the world last I checked) rather than aiming to address a problem and then working out how to fund it — for goodness sake we can afford funding to not incinerate the planet.
I don’t believe it was always like this either, projects like the moon landings in the US showed how valuable government investment is. They did not whine about money but instead funded a hugely impressive project that brought numerous (and unexpected) benefits later down the line.
The only point I disagree with you is ‘we’re probably already screwed, and we deserve it.’ I don’t think we do deserve it. I recycle, I eat a reasonably sustainable diet, I cycle rather than drive unless totally unreasonable, I use public transit to get to work etc etc. Everything I’m supposed to do. And I imagine the vast majority of those reading this do this too.
But it’s not enough, we need massive government action to mitigate climate change, primarily revolving a shift away from our current carbon intensive economy (and if this requires a change to economic thought and system, I was already in favour of that anyway).
"Only governments in countries where quality-of-life measures are the highest — like Switzerland or the Scandinavian nations — hardly leave everything to the markets. They treat human well-being as a necessity, not a lucky by-product of some ‘growth fairy,’ and then intentionally direct resources to improve it. Who would’ve thought that works, huh? However, the same logic should also be applied to the well-being of our planet."
I have some commentary on the above: I often see the Scandinavian countries held up as commendable examples of countries that should be emulated because of their sensibilities around the importance of providing a high quality of life to their people, but what I rarely see is a mention of how they achieved and continue to maintain this high quality of life, which involves direct and indirect extraction of resources and labor from disempowered populations (including some populations within their own borders, such as the Sami people).
I agree "the same logic should also be applied to the well-being of our planet," including the people of the planet, but figuring out how to achieve that necessitates having honest discussions about how this population held up as a goal thrives at the expense of others who do not enjoy a high quality of life.
Thank you for your thoughts! I definitely agree that we shouldn't put these countries on a pedestal or assume they are without faults. They aren't. But I think we can still learn a thing or two from some of their public policy programs.
I am actually using A.I. myself, but for the very opposite reasons that most people use it. I am trying to solve the issue of the mindset that lead us to this point. So I am with it thinking through things, reading countless books, doing research on my own as well. To look at how we got to this place of thinking in the first place. Where did we go wrong with our mindset. And what can we do to turn this around. So I am using a potential poison, in small doses to help me create the medicine. As the problem is not out there. Some people are too stuck in the ancient idea of nature is chaos, civilisation is order. One needs to control the other. Whilst this worked as ancient hunter gatherers for survival. It has become the very source of chaos. Though people think more tech or more control and order will make things better. Yet the culture (minus those like you who see), tend to be culturally blind. Too caught up in the frames that have been created. Starting with Plato, and evolving until this point.
I also hope that your family will be safe! I am sorry to hear about what is going on there. I also have a friend in Florida.
This is such an important piece of writing! Thank you Katie for expressing it so well.
It is heartbreaking to me to see those who live by the values of regeneration and restoring our ecosystems constantly get marginalized, shut down and invisibilized for doing that vital work during others’ relentless pursuit of “more” and “progress” 💔
I hope and pray that enough hands and hearts come together in time to give our next generations a livable future.
Thank you for this article. Would you be open to writing one about what we can do to mitigate this progress bias in our own lives to help? It's one thing to see the problem but what steps do we take other than not using AI, to be useful and agents of change? I feel like it's fighting a losing battle to try eat sustainably or live sustainably when the majority isn't or can't. It always feels like an uphill battle.
This is quite sobering and educational. I had no idea my neverending questions on Google Gemini and ChatGPT contribute to this situation. Thank you for educating me!
Unfortunately it seems like we're too far gone to recognize this. I fear that the only way for us to do so is to first face the full force of those questions in a catastrophic way in which no way ends of progress justify the means of destruction. Who knows how long that'll take and the impact it'll leave on our species.
"lifted billions out of utmost squalor" is highly debatable. Certainly aspects of it are. We're the aboriginal peoples of Australia living in "utmost squalor" before the arrival of colonial settlers? Have their lives been improved because their dollar income has increased from $0 to some paltry amount? It just goes to show how even accepted measures of progress can contain the kind of hidden externalities this article well outlines.
One of the things that is painfully obvious is that we are in overshoot: beyond carrying capacity of our planet. Our consumption is a result of multiplying two factors: overpopulations and overcomsumption. And yet people don’t accept that hard truth, and talk about impossible scanarios, such as everyone living fair and long lives together in harmony, as if that changes the math. It’s not about the rich global north sharing wealth with the south, regardless of how fair and just that is. It’s about the rich global north slashing consumption to an impossible absurd degree (which is why we can’t and won’t), and degrowing globally. Ecological realities are devoid of ideologies and feelings of fairness; these exist only in our minds. Unfortunately, hard truths that are painfully obvious are difficult to accept, and the human mind will do anything to avoid it. We’re slamming face first into reality. Yes, we should have been much, much wiser.
I find "progress" is directly linked with the concept of "development." Development is Euro-centric, for example Highly Developed States and Developing States. Since colonisation, it has been a very specific group of people who define what it is to be "civilised" and those values were written into what became current international law, structuring global trade systems and continuing financial and ecological colonisation of the world. BUT, language also shapes our perspectives. If we flip the script and say Overconsuming States and Low Consuming States, it opens up our imaginations to think about "development" and "progress" differently and it places environmental responsibility where it belongs.
'Unchecked, relentless growth is progress, and progress is always good and desirable, right?'
That's the message the global elite have been instilling within our society, all to satiate their greed for maximum profits.
And it's sadly been working.
brilliantly expressing what too few of us have always seen, thankyou 🌱💚🌳
Thank you for reading and for your kind words!
You have such a knack for distilling the overwhelmingly emotive, complex and divisive in to simple, easy to read fact. It’s my favourite newsletter. Thank you for everything you write.
Thank you, your comment made my day!
Progress also means moving beyond our biases and relying on data, and I'm glad you mentioned climate change.
Nuclear power is our best option by far, and our only feasible one. It takes up less than a thousandth of the space of wind and solar and less than half the space of fossil fuel per kWh. Including Chernobyl, it's right between wind and solar in deaths per kWh by a decimal point, and rising in the rankings in terms of safety because in a typical year or decade, it kills no one.
This is a scientific consensus, and I used to call it a quiet one, and to an extent it still is, because we're more concerned with messaging than reality, but at this point, no numerate person could look at the data and draw any other conclusion. The data increasingly indicates that wind and solar are a net loss and lock us into dependence on fossil fuel. Every time a reactor has been shuttered, the price of electricity and use of fossil fuel has gone up. The last reactor at Indian Point was shuttered a few years ago, and since then, air pollution in NY has increased by 33%.
We do have to escape a growth mindset economically and otherwise, but at the same time, we invented math and science for a reason, and there has always been the underlying motive of short-term greed. Fossil fuel companies subsidize wind and solar, or call them the perfect partners, because they know they aren't reliable enough to work without them. Nuclear operates at maximum capacity over 90% of the time. Fossil fuel is just below that and falling. Wind and solar are at about 30%.
Nuclear power is 100% responsible for their waste, much of which we can now use in our newest reactors, and produces about 175,000 times less waste than fossil fuel per kWh, which directly kills 1.5 million people a year.
The majority of people in the US are now in favor of nuclear power, just as they have been in favor of a living wage, single-payer healthcare, a woman's right to choose, and several other issues that our government increasingly defers to the wealthy, who get a significantly greater amount of the legislation they want passed vs the majority.
When we still admitted COVID is a problem, Republicans quietly passed legislation to fund nuclear power passed without acknowledging climate change or deferring to science. They said we were #1 at nuclear energy production and technology, and should be again (neither of which is exactly true).
We have the solutions to most of our major problems, or at least to mitigate them (climate change is already out of the barn), but we forgot that money is a tool. It isn't something to be hoarded, and it's supposed to work for people, rather than people working for money.
AI is just a tool, and it could be and in some cases already is being used to make life more efficient and better, but it can already do things beyond human comprehension, it's in the hands of too few people, and it will ultimately obey. If you ask AI how to reduce the population to increase profit and maintain the status quo, it isn't going to raise an ethical argument, it's going to spit out an answer.
Statistically, we're probably already screwed, and we deserve it.
‘We have the solutions to most of our major problems… but we forgot that money is a tool’ is such a great point! This really resonates with me as I constantly feel frustrated by the feeling that solutions exist to our problems but our governments are too spineless to implement them. It is always whining about money (I live in the UK, the 6th wealthiest nation in the world last I checked) rather than aiming to address a problem and then working out how to fund it — for goodness sake we can afford funding to not incinerate the planet.
I don’t believe it was always like this either, projects like the moon landings in the US showed how valuable government investment is. They did not whine about money but instead funded a hugely impressive project that brought numerous (and unexpected) benefits later down the line.
The only point I disagree with you is ‘we’re probably already screwed, and we deserve it.’ I don’t think we do deserve it. I recycle, I eat a reasonably sustainable diet, I cycle rather than drive unless totally unreasonable, I use public transit to get to work etc etc. Everything I’m supposed to do. And I imagine the vast majority of those reading this do this too.
But it’s not enough, we need massive government action to mitigate climate change, primarily revolving a shift away from our current carbon intensive economy (and if this requires a change to economic thought and system, I was already in favour of that anyway).
there is no future-proof disposal of nuclear waste, would you like it buried close to your artesian basin?
"Only governments in countries where quality-of-life measures are the highest — like Switzerland or the Scandinavian nations — hardly leave everything to the markets. They treat human well-being as a necessity, not a lucky by-product of some ‘growth fairy,’ and then intentionally direct resources to improve it. Who would’ve thought that works, huh? However, the same logic should also be applied to the well-being of our planet."
I have some commentary on the above: I often see the Scandinavian countries held up as commendable examples of countries that should be emulated because of their sensibilities around the importance of providing a high quality of life to their people, but what I rarely see is a mention of how they achieved and continue to maintain this high quality of life, which involves direct and indirect extraction of resources and labor from disempowered populations (including some populations within their own borders, such as the Sami people).
I agree "the same logic should also be applied to the well-being of our planet," including the people of the planet, but figuring out how to achieve that necessitates having honest discussions about how this population held up as a goal thrives at the expense of others who do not enjoy a high quality of life.
Thank you for your thoughts! I definitely agree that we shouldn't put these countries on a pedestal or assume they are without faults. They aren't. But I think we can still learn a thing or two from some of their public policy programs.
I am actually using A.I. myself, but for the very opposite reasons that most people use it. I am trying to solve the issue of the mindset that lead us to this point. So I am with it thinking through things, reading countless books, doing research on my own as well. To look at how we got to this place of thinking in the first place. Where did we go wrong with our mindset. And what can we do to turn this around. So I am using a potential poison, in small doses to help me create the medicine. As the problem is not out there. Some people are too stuck in the ancient idea of nature is chaos, civilisation is order. One needs to control the other. Whilst this worked as ancient hunter gatherers for survival. It has become the very source of chaos. Though people think more tech or more control and order will make things better. Yet the culture (minus those like you who see), tend to be culturally blind. Too caught up in the frames that have been created. Starting with Plato, and evolving until this point.
I also hope that your family will be safe! I am sorry to hear about what is going on there. I also have a friend in Florida.
What AI tools do you use?
ChatGPT. That is really it. A few times messing around with Gencraft. But really it is mostly ChatGPT.
Nice. You should try perplexity. I found it very useful lately.
Incredible piece! Thank you for writing this! This Floridian is thinking of and sending love to your Florida family. 💜
Thank you ☺️ I hope you're safe where you are!
❤️❤️
This is such an important piece of writing! Thank you Katie for expressing it so well.
It is heartbreaking to me to see those who live by the values of regeneration and restoring our ecosystems constantly get marginalized, shut down and invisibilized for doing that vital work during others’ relentless pursuit of “more” and “progress” 💔
I hope and pray that enough hands and hearts come together in time to give our next generations a livable future.
Katie!!! Thank you for writing this. I just mentioned AI’s water consumption this morning and thought, God I wish someone would write about this.
Thank you so much for reading and sharing! 🙏
Thank you for this article. Would you be open to writing one about what we can do to mitigate this progress bias in our own lives to help? It's one thing to see the problem but what steps do we take other than not using AI, to be useful and agents of change? I feel like it's fighting a losing battle to try eat sustainably or live sustainably when the majority isn't or can't. It always feels like an uphill battle.
I’ll definitely consider writing about this!
This is quite sobering and educational. I had no idea my neverending questions on Google Gemini and ChatGPT contribute to this situation. Thank you for educating me!
Timing is everything
True. And the #1 reason startups failed. (There is a ted talk about it)
Unfortunately it seems like we're too far gone to recognize this. I fear that the only way for us to do so is to first face the full force of those questions in a catastrophic way in which no way ends of progress justify the means of destruction. Who knows how long that'll take and the impact it'll leave on our species.
"lifted billions out of utmost squalor" is highly debatable. Certainly aspects of it are. We're the aboriginal peoples of Australia living in "utmost squalor" before the arrival of colonial settlers? Have their lives been improved because their dollar income has increased from $0 to some paltry amount? It just goes to show how even accepted measures of progress can contain the kind of hidden externalities this article well outlines.
One of the things that is painfully obvious is that we are in overshoot: beyond carrying capacity of our planet. Our consumption is a result of multiplying two factors: overpopulations and overcomsumption. And yet people don’t accept that hard truth, and talk about impossible scanarios, such as everyone living fair and long lives together in harmony, as if that changes the math. It’s not about the rich global north sharing wealth with the south, regardless of how fair and just that is. It’s about the rich global north slashing consumption to an impossible absurd degree (which is why we can’t and won’t), and degrowing globally. Ecological realities are devoid of ideologies and feelings of fairness; these exist only in our minds. Unfortunately, hard truths that are painfully obvious are difficult to accept, and the human mind will do anything to avoid it. We’re slamming face first into reality. Yes, we should have been much, much wiser.
I find "progress" is directly linked with the concept of "development." Development is Euro-centric, for example Highly Developed States and Developing States. Since colonisation, it has been a very specific group of people who define what it is to be "civilised" and those values were written into what became current international law, structuring global trade systems and continuing financial and ecological colonisation of the world. BUT, language also shapes our perspectives. If we flip the script and say Overconsuming States and Low Consuming States, it opens up our imaginations to think about "development" and "progress" differently and it places environmental responsibility where it belongs.