Substainability

Sustainability is something I never really thought over too much. I had always assumed that it was ways in order to preserve the environment. In a way, I was right, but there was more to the term than I initially thought. After reading the first chapter of The Age of Sustainable Development, I was impressed with how broad the term really is. It can mean dealing with the environment, economics, government, and society. With that said, sustainability is useful for discussion on the world at large and ways to improve the quality of life. We can look at this subject in multiple ways and find new solutions. We can also examine our entire life structure and learn from it. I find it quite amazing how sustainability is broad and open to debate.


For the upcoming project on examining a country, my first choice would be India. My second choice would probably be Italy.

Reaction to The Bet

After reading The Bet by Paul Sabin, I found myself enjoying the material. It was a good book with a great background on both Ehrlich and Simon and how conflicted they were on climate change. Not to mention, both sides were considered valid, which goes into the bulk of my opinion towards Simon oddly enough. Despite my background in Environmental Science, I found Simon more sensible than Paul Ehrlich. This book made me better appreciate the economic side of the climate change debate.

Hoff's review of The Bet  has an attitude to the book that the rest of my class share. While he praises the book for highlighting the bet between Ehrlich and Simon, he notes that Sabin is "fair-minded to a fault" (Hoff, 2015). Much like my class, Hoff believes Sabin's book is too balanced to the point where he refuses to show the extremes of the bet. As Hoff explains, " Sabin is too kind, and too eager to avoid coming across as biased environmentalist" (Hoff, 2015), which I also agree with.


Hoff, 2015

Climate Change Not Caused by Man

In a new article by Politico, French politician Nicolas Sarkozy stated that climate change is not caused by man, believing that climate change has existed for billions of years. The web news site this article came from seems to focus on more political stories rather than environmental ones. Even the author, Hortense Goulard, focuses on more political topics. As such, the authors of this story probably would see climate change in a different point of view than most others on the matter, like environmentalists.

With that said, there is a complete lack of scientific views or environmental evidence to Sarkozy's claim. (Admittedly he's not completely wrong. The Ice Age was a thing due to climate change, and the humans that existed back then were not advanced as they are today.) My problem with his train of thought is that he contradicts himself. The article stated that he once upon the time believed climate change was caused by man(and it links to a French article where he defends the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC]).

This begs the question. How and when did his views on climate changed? Did he just change his views to appeal to majority to remain in the government or did something happened that changed his mind? Was he convinced by a close friend about the relationship between man and climate change or did a politician did that? I may never know the answer to that question, but I will never stop speculating.

Costa Rica Going Green

In one of the more recent articles from Vox, Costa Rica has been using nothing but renewable energy(such as hydropower dams and geothermal energy) to power their electricity for 76 days striaght. While the article does state Costa Rica is not completely green yet, it also states it'll be much harder for other countries, such as the US to follow in its footsteps. The author of this article, Brad Plumer, seems to focus on a lot of environmental stories (both good and bad) and takes an unbiased and educated look at the issue. The result is usually that the story has its positives and its negatives, as is the case with this story.

However, I can't help but feel the hopefulness of this success story in Costa Rica is very misleading. As mentioned Costa Rica is not completely free from fossil fuels. They still use cars that run on diesel and gasoline and the country has two cement plants that burn coal. I feel as though this part of the article was pushed to the side and not really given that much attention overall. If the author truly wanted this to be a positive, the author would try to mention how Costa Rica still has a lot of work to do to be 100% on renewable energy.

Another omission I noticed was how the author stated that other countries will never be able to follow  in Costa Rica's advancements 100% due to a number of factors. For example, he mentions the US damming up every river in the country can lead to people being displaced and geothermal energy is limited by location. Personally, I feel Plumer is giving the US too little credit. Sure, the country as a whole hasn't really made any huge strides in eco-friendly technology compared to other countries, but the people are extremely innovative and are clever enough to think of a reasonable solution.

Malthusian and Neo-Malthsian Thoughts

After learning about both Malthusian and Neo-Malthsian ideas in the book The Bet, I have very different reactions to each of them. Firstly, I agree with the Malthusian ideals about population and how we are growing faster than the planet can replenish them (similar to The Tragedy of the Commons). I have always believed the human population is growing faster than the resources restore themselves.

Neo-Malthsian ideas, on the other hand, sound a little too extreme to my liking. Neo-Malthsians follow the basic ideas of Malthusian but takes it even further. Such Neo-Malthsians, such as Paul Ehrlich, try to "tackle controversial issues such as birth control, abortion and women's rights" (Sabin p.37) and Ehrlich's organization Zero Population Growth try to "legalize abortion and the removal of restrictions on contraception in the interest of population control" (Sabin p.37). I don't agree with the idea of forced abortions for the need of a "smaller family". Women deserve to have a say in whether they wish to have children and how many they should have. It is their right to decide if they want an abortion, not on some random organization. They deserve a say in this.



Reference:
Sabin, Paul.  2014.  The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and OurGamble over Earth’s Future.  New Haven: Yale UP

Commenting on the Passaic River Cleanup

I have very mixed feelings about the article on the Passaic River cleanup. On one hand, I can appricate the EPA's efforts to restore the Passaic River of pollution for recreation and other notable reasons. On the other hand, I can't help but agree with the critiques of Jeff Tittel, the president of the NJ Sierra Club. In the article, he states the EPA was doing the bare minimum to clean the pollution and they doesn't even punish the companies responsible for polluting the river. I agree with his ideas. I feel in order to solve a problem you need to get to the root of the problem(i.e. the companies that caused the problem). The EPA should at least go off with a warning that they need to clean their mess if this happens again.

Another problem I find with this article is what they are cleaning. In the picture shown to the right, they are only cleaning part of the river. Rivers do have currents and the pollution can travel all throughout the river. I feel if the EPA truly want to clean the river, they need to they should clean the whole river (or at least where the pollution starts, which the article never states).

Besides this, I can still understand the EPA's need to clean this river for the good of the community. For more information on the subject, click here.