Category: Less of What We Don’t Need

The Oil Kills uprising is highlighting that the problem of aviation is part of a bigger story of injustice — it is in fact a pillar helping to hold up a system of injustice. The air travel industry is contrary to the need to eliminate fossil fuel use; it is tied to the military-industrial complex;…

Data centers are massive, boxy, windowless buildings filled with computer servers that process data and handle internet traffic. Those servers generate extreme amounts of heat, the removal of which requires powerful water-chilling equipment. That includes arrays of large fans that, in turn, generate a thunderous wall of noise.

Recently, Congress has made three decisions that bear directly on uranium mining on the Navajo Nation: it banned the purchase of Russian uranium processed for nuclear power-plant use, except when no other suitable uranium is available; it discontinued the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA); and it approved $2.7 billion for development of the domestic uranium…

“Our society tends to see growth as an unalloyed good, but an expanding body of evidence is now telling us to think again.” My family and I spent 25 years in Washington DC. They were good years, and every morning I began with coffee and The Washington Post. The newspaper was a wonderful companion—and reliably…

Climate change is a huge, complicated problem. Therefore, many people have an understandable tendency to mentally simplify it by focusing on just one cause (carbon emissions) and just one solution (alternative energy). Sustainability scholar Jan Konietzko has called this “carbon tunnel vision.” Oversimplifying the problem this way leads to techno-fixes that actually fix nothing. Despite…

It’s not entirely your fault that the intended final handful of chips was not, indeed, your last for that snacking session. Many common snack foods have been expertly engineered to keep us addicted and almost constantly craving more of whatever falsely satisfying manufactured treat is in front of us.

The year 1991 was significant as the new Government in India brought a series of policy reforms that liberalized the economy, moving away from self-reliance to market and consumption oriented. Neo colonialism is one of the basic causes of grotesque inequality. Countries of the Global South that are encouraged to imitate the development of the…

In one of the most twisted forms of logic ever to appear in politics, liberals believe that screaming “Trump is a fascist” somehow proves that Biden is not. If what Biden is helping the Zionists do in Gaza is not a fascist war crime, it is difficult to know what is.

A friend recently told me of a new study showing that the “life cycle” of electric vehicles (EVs) causes fewer CO2 emissions than gas-powered cars. This is important since research comparing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per mile have left out the enormous emissions associated with the complex mining, manufacturing and disposal phases of EVs. Is…