The Environment will Be Saved if We Just Avoid Doing Icky Things
[ I’m breaking from my usual technical posts, since I have some wonderful news to share with you all; opinions mine, not those of my employer, etc. ]
For readers of elevated left-leaning publications such as the Guardian, one of the more remarkable discoveries one might make is that the sources of environmental devastation are not what you thought they were. Dim-witted people such as me might fixate on things like “heating and cooling”, agriculture (particularly the production of meat), and “ground and air transport” as significant sources of resource use and global warming. However, I bring my fellow members of the upper middle class good news. Fear not! It turns out (https://jsomers.net/blog/it-turns-out), that endless trips to Europe, our large cars, our big houses and our luxurious diets are in fact not the sources of global devastation we might have feared.
I bring good news: none of these things are that significant. Nearly all major sources of environmental devastation are perfectly aligned with things that, in the rigorous language of the social sciences, “give us the ick”.
