There’s a great study out related to letting people eat processed foods, as much as they want, verses giving people healthy food… as much as they want. Personally, I wonder if the salt alone is not part of the problem. Those people who eat processed foods for the required 15 days, eat more and gained more weight. This seemed like an exceptionally well designed study. One group did the 15 days healthy first, then junk-y…
Imagine a great idea that is entirely possible with new technology coming down the pipeline from various sources. That is what an article in Scientific American by Richard Conniff envisions based on a paper published in the Nature Communications which proposes a partial remedy based on A/C units: Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (or HVAC) systems move a lot of air. Dittmeyer, Klumpp, Kant and Ozin (2019) describe the idea of using renewable energy from…
Here is an article in ARS Technica about an article in Nature Geoscience (2019) that talks about microplastics in the French The Pyrenees Mountains, a pristine place, except for, well, plastic! The researchers made extremely controlled efforts to assure that they were not contaminating the samples gathered. But the plastics are coming in on the wind, and coming down (mainly, it seems) in perpetration. If microplastics are everywhere, then our impacts on the planet are…
The world’s out of control human population growth is something that few people want to talk about loudly because it sounds so very insensitive. But the increase in world population at nearly exponential levels is non-sustainable and multiplies all issues of sustainability: exhausting natural resources, pollution, etc. Estimates are that world population will grow to between 9m and 11m by mid century and then slowly decline. Source: OurWorldInData The problem with increased population is a…
By now you probably knew it was happening, but you probably didn’t realize how much and how fast. If you figure subsidies, Solar and Wind are a slam-dunk powerful option. Wind prices have been dropping fast and solar has been dripping like lead… Solar prices have dropped about 86% over the last 8 years. Check out the latest 2018 report by Lazard. Note that they also analyze renewables with storage (batteries). The Solar incentives make the…
We at SustainZine look for things that are abnormal, things that are so inefficient and clearly irresponsible that they should be categorized as non-sustainable. We think the Criminal Justice system in the USA qualifies and non-sustainable. Question, what is a “normal” rate of incarceration for you citizens? And if you are a way out-of-control outlier to the other developed countries, does this represent non-sustainability. That is, if you don’t put anyone in jail, are you…
