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TUESDAYS — YOUR INBOX — ASSUREDLY
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CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS
Capitalist profit taking via the climate crisis
“As COP30 got underway, the UN Secretary-General announced that ‘Humanity has failed’ [because] 1.5 degrees of global warming has now been locked in. Once again, humanity takes the blame for the impotence of corporate-led summits.
“The truth is that humanity includes billions of land-based people who have not yet been pushed into resource-intensive cities and consumer lifestyles. Humanity includes hundreds of thousands of people who – like you, perhaps – have been taking active steps to reduce their ecological footprint.
“Why should humanity take the blame for the blind, top-down policy frameworks that, above all, treat ecocide and climate breakdown as a ‘carbon market’ — as an opportunity to grow corporate bottom lines?
“The COPs have consistently ensured that billions of dollars get sunk into false but lucrative solutions. Ostensibly to monitor carbon, technologies like A.I. and Internet of Things are being rolled out. Carbon markets are commodifying land and water and biodiversity and turning them into financial assets to be traded.
“In the face of all this, humanity is not about to declare failure and give up. Come what may, what action makes most sense? Local food. Hands-on ecosystem regeneration. Strengthening community and the local economy. And raising awareness about the fact that governments don’t have our back.”
Local business leverages social change better than nonprofits
“When my post-60s generation sought to do good in the world, a common career path — and the one I followed — was to go to law school, work for a public interest group, and learn how to get by on a salary of $10k per year. But I gradually became annoyed at letting my agenda be set by precisely the privileged institutions that most needed to change.
“As Merrian Fuller and I wrote in Profits for Justice for the Nation in 2005, nonprofits are actually the worst vehicles for social change. They are generally poorly managed, treat their employees like indentured servants, and are legally limited in their ability to lobby in electoral politics.
“I now teach classes in economics, economic development, community investment funds, and ‘sustaining mission’. And what I can report is that the several hundred students I taught have created, run, or improved an amazing assortment of mission-oriented enterprises.
“A lot of people think about driving social change through policy or education. But no matter how many rules we change through policy, or minds we change through education, business ultimately has the power to change the game. This means radically reinventing how we get food on the table and keep the lights on.
“Almost all business schools today are trapped in a profit-first paradigm. You have to make money, of course — ‘no margin, no mission’ — but we teach our graduates how to put mission and sustainability first, with confidence that financial success will follow.
“We are the only MBA in the world to offer a year-long course in sustainability consulting where students work in teams for corporations, both startup and nonprofits. In addition, our students conduct B-corporation assessments as part of their coursework.”
Innovation as the basis of wellbeing rather than profit
“What does innovation look like when profit and capital accumulation aren’t the goal? Over a year ago, I began exploring this question in the context of technological innovation. Watching the AI arms race unfold between major tech companies, all claiming their innovations would reshape our lives, I wondered: what’s the point? The answer was — and remains — for profit.
“Innovation in our current imagining has led to extraction of resources and depletion of people and planet. With this in mind, how will innovation be re-imagined in the context of a post-growth economy?
“Innovation is currently defined as ‘introduction of a new idea, or new methods’ — emphasizing that ‘new’ is an essential aspect of innovation, and leads to better outcomes. But this doesn’t ring true. We’re in the midst of climate breakdown, mass biodiversity loss, poverty persists, and mental health issues are commonplace.
“But new hasn’t always made things better, and if we continue to ‘innovate,’ where does it stop? In 1972, The Limits to Growth predicted that at some point during this century our planet would essentially collapse. This book argued that on a planet of finite resources there must be a stopping point. This idea of a limit is necessary to how we reimagine innovation.
“How can we create a new definition of innovation that is aligned with a post-growth world? Our ultimate goal should be making our societies more equitable and happier, within our planetary boundaries.
“Looking at the world’s happiest countries, a few patterns become clear. Firstly, GDP is not always an indicator of happiness — as shown by Mexico (10th) and Costa Rica (6th). Secondly, robust social welfare and health, strong community, generosity, and high levels of trust are key factors in a country’s happiness.
“Prioritizing people’s happiness and equity is paramount to post-growth innovation. Shifting away from financial incentives towards community wellbeing is at the core of this work. Making mutual aid the cornerstone of innovation will not only lead to people being happier, it is also likely to reduce the potential harms and waste of previous versions of ‘innovations’.”
AI and climate emissions — Google conflates conventional AI with generative AI
“A few years ago, Ketan Joshi read a statistic about artificial intelligence and climate change that caught his eye. In late 2023, Google began claiming that AI could help cut global greenhouse gas emissions by between 5 and 10% by 2030. This claim was quoted across the press and in some academic papers.
“Joshi, an energy researcher, was shocked by the massive numbers Google was touting — especially AI’s purported ability to effectively cut the equivalent of what the European Union emits each year. ‘There’s very few things that can do that’, he says.
“Tech companies are locked in a battle to develop AI as fast as possible – with potentially massive implications for climate change. Tech executives have said over and over again that this energy and data centre build out will be worth it, given the possibilities that AI presents for the planet. But a lot of these claims, it turns out, have very little — if any — actual proof behind them.
“Joshi is the author of a new report, released Monday with support from several environmental organisations, that looks at more than 150 claims made by tech companies, energy associations and others about how ‘AI will serve as a net climate benefit’. Joshi’s analysis finds that just a quarter of those claims were backed up by academic research, while more than a third did not publicly cite any evidence at all.
“Many of the claims made by big tech conflate the climate benefits of ‘traditional’ AI — machine learning tools designed to streamline specific tasks, like email spam filters, which have relatively low carbon emissions — and ‘generative’ AI chatbots — AKA large language models (LLM).
“The latter, including platforms such as ChatGPT, are a huge driver of increased emissions, mainly through the construction and operation of new fossil fuel-powered data centres, which deliver the massive computing capacity needed to service generative AI. A query in ChatGPT requires about 10 times the computing power of a standard web search.
“Says AI and sustainability researcher Sasha Luccioni. ‘There are so many different, smaller and more efficient models that can be deployed. The only companies that can compete in this bigger-is-better AI race are the ones with the deepest pockets, who have hoovered up our data, consensually or not. Now they are selling this data back to us by convincing us that we need these mammoth models, the planet be damned’.”
Pushback is quick against EPA Endangerment Finding rescission
“More than three dozen Democratic senators have begun an independent inquiry into the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) following a huge change in how the agency measures the health benefits of reducing air pollution. The 2009 endangerment finding determined that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare and should therefore be controlled by the EPA. By revoking it on Thursday, officials eliminated the legal foundation enabling the government to control planet-heating pollution.
“The senators said the repeal ‘destroys that framework and results in a failure to faithfully execute EPA’s statutory mandate to protect human health’. The lawmakers have asked the EPA to provide documents and details explaining how it reached its decision by 26 February. Whitehouse wrote ‘Their nonsense has never been real, but part of a fraudulent propaganda campaign, designed by fossil fuel to protect its free-to-pollute business model’.
“More than a dozen health and environmental justice non-profits have sued the EPA over its revocation of the ‘endangerment finding’, which states that the buildup of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere endangers public health and welfare and has allowed the EPA to limit those emissions since 2009.
“‘EPA’s repeal of the endangerment finding and safeguards to limit vehicle emissions marks a complete dereliction of the agency’s mission to protect people’s health and its legal obligation under the Clean Air Act’, said Gretchen Goldman, president and CEO at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“Early on Thursday, 18 young people, aged 1 to 22, from across the US filed a separate petition challenging the rescission of the endangerment finding. They were represented by non-profit legal organizations Our Children’s Trust.”
2026 Earth Overshoot Day, country by country
“A country’s overshoot day marks the date when Earth Overshoot Day would fall if all of humanity consumed at the same level as the people in that country. In other words, it is the day when the planet’s annual biocapacity budget would be used up if everyone on Earth consumed as much as the residents of that particular country.
“Country Overshoot Days for 2026 are based on the accounts’ 2025 edition. For example, Switzerland’s 2026 Overshoot Day is based on data from the 2025 edition of the National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts:
- Switzerland’s Ecological Footprint: 4.15 global hectares (gha) per person in 2024
- Global biocapacity: 1.48 gha per person in 2024
“Thus, in 2024, humanity would need (4.15/ 1.48) = 2.8 Earths to support itself if everyone lived like the Swiss. Since 2026 contains 365 days, we can determine Swiss Overshoot Day: 365 [days in 2026] (1.48/4.15) = 130.1 [days]. This means humanity would have exhausted the annual regenerative resource budget the day after the 130th day of 2026, which is May 11th. Country Overshoot Day for the United States of America is Saturday, March 14, 2026.”
Urban pavement — limits trees — fosters heat island effect
“Los Angeles is often described as a concrete jungle, a city shaped by asphalt, parking lots, and other hardscape. Now for the first time, researchers have mapped that concrete in detail, and they claim a lot of it doesn’t need to be there.
“The groundbreaking report reveals that Los Angeles County contains more than 312,000 acres (488 square miles) of pavement, an area so big it would form California’s largest city. Nearly half of this pavement may not be functionally necessary.
“Excess pavement worsens heat, flooding, and ecological decline. Depave LA presents a data-driven framework for removing unnecessary paved surfaces and creating more healthy and resilient landscapes. Nearly 70% of non-core pavement lies on private parcels, not in the public right-of-way, highlighting the need to engage property owners in depaving efforts.
“Said Brent Buknum, founder of Hyphae Design Lab, ‘Parking lots are one of the clearest examples of how excess pavement has become accepted. Residential property is another place with potential. If each residential parcel removed a 6 foot diameter area of patio for tree planting, it would amount to 1530 acres of pavement removed. The report also identifies schools as places where there could be less concrete or asphalt.”
Regenerative agriculture is multi-faceted
“Rural Watch Africa’s mission extends far beyond the traditional scope of tree planting and ecosystem restoration. The organization serves as a catalyst for transformation because we recognize a fundamental truth – poverty is a primary driver of environmental degradation. When rural populations lack supportive income sources, they are frequently forced into an over-reliance on forest resources, leading to habitat depletion and a cycle of deepening poverty.
“We founded RUWAI as a purpose-built vehicle to break this cycle by providing diversified pathways for peasant farmers, youth, and women. By providing expert training in specialized skills, ranging from apiculture to artisanal crafts like renewable energy technology, knitting, and footwear production, and supplying the necessary starter kits, we are bridging the gap between conservation and commerce.
“Regenerative agriculture has risen to fame and glory. Even large corporations like Unilever, Nestlé and Carlsberg embrace it. There is much in the aspirations, dominant ideas, and methods of regenerative agriculture that are laudable. I ascribe to most of them and practice most of what is considered essential.
“Having said that, I am concerned about the hype around it. For the following main reasons:
- We heard it before and we have done it before.
- The analysis doesn’t go deep enough.
- The lack of coherent definition.
- It is often more about marketing than farming.
“Organic got stuck in extremely detailed prescriptions of what you should do and, even more, what you shouldn’t do. The European Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture (EARA) has created a ‘compass’ with the following statement: Its core purpose is not to ask ‘Are you regenerative?’ but ‘Are you moving towards more wholistic regeneration?’
“Some proponents of regenerative agriculture means that it compares favorably with organic because the focus is on outcomes and not on methods. I would say that this is a very simplistic perspective. To begin with, practices, methods and technologies are never neutral. The distinction between outcomes and methods is not always very clear. To store more carbon in the soil might be considered as an outcome by one, but is a method to combat global warming according to others.”
Determinism as distinct from fate
“One major hangup in subscribing to a physics-based universe of material monism is that it appears to remove human agency as typically conceived in our culture. This disconnect alone is often enough to cause categorical rejection of materialism. This is quite understandable, especially when modern language is constructed around first-person ownership of ‘ourselves’ as subjects.
“Many react to determinism with a ‘then what’s the point, if everything is pre-determined?’ I’ll try to address these issues here. Perhaps I’ve said it all scattered across other posts and comments, but here it is all in one place, with a few new twists and perspectives.
“One might expect that perfect knowledge of an initial condition would allow the turning of a mathematical crank to dictate the future — like clockwork. This is not even close to being true, for a number of reasons:
- Only the universe itself can ‘run’ the calculation, as it’s racing to do, this and every moment, without fault.
- The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle precludes simultaneously knowing both position and velocity, so that the actualized initial conditions cannot be ascertained.
- Even twenty digits of initial precision quickly spirals into complete lack of knowledge. The air molecules in a room undergo something like 1036 collisions per second, the bounce angles of each collision being super-sensitive to position and velocity, so that after about a dozen sequential collisions you’d not even be able to predict which particles collide, let alone exactly how.
- Quantum superposition states allow interactions to follow multiple possible branchings, each having their own probability.
“What this means is that the actual future path is not predictable, even under the ‘determinism’ of physics. In complex systems, determinism does not mean rigid, mechanical, predictable clockwork. Since the future is unknown, the ‘train tracks’ to the future one imagines as ‘already’ laid down do not exist yet. The future is open-ended: not written yet. Determinism does not mean pre-determined.
“But what about agency in the sense we usually mean: expressing some intentionality; executing a plan? Don’t these behaviors indicate that determinism does not apply, if we can plot our own course? It helps me to think on the microbial scale, which is still too complex to connect all the dots from first principles to behavior, but has far fewer layers and moving parts than we do.
“Let’s take a bunch of genetically-diverse amoebas and place a slowly-diffusing novel toxin to the north of them. Maybe none of them pay any heed, and most die. The lucky ones who randomly escaped to the south are no less vulnerable, should it arise again in the future, and don’t pass on genes. If, by random fluke, some fraction are repelled (in the way that some humans dislike cilantro), then the next generation will inherit this aversion.
“A million years later, an amoeba detects this toxin and strongly wants to get away—so it does. Is it free will? What created the want? Who knows, at the molecular level? But some internal protein or sensor or whatever was configured to produce a defensive reaction. Initially it was essentially random, but proved to be useful and now has every appearance of smarts or learning.
“Decisions are made by neural firings, action potentials, electrons jerked this way and that, according to a layout shaped by a billion-year-plus heritage of experience, as well as our own personal experiences, and those of folks we have come to learn from (directly or not).”
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