Sometimes, I’m overwhelmed by how much crap is going on:

• Technologically advanced humans not living sustainably. That “undiscovered” tribe in the Amazonas were pretty cool: live to talk and tattoo. Once every fortnight you walk to The Tree a few miles away and cut off some sugary roots. Boring, perhaps, but sustainable.
• We’ve only been splitting atoms for 100 years. It’s very likely we haven’t seen the worst accident or nuclear war yet. Hopefully it doesn’t happen in my lifetime.
• As we increase our nuclear power use, we have to improve mean time betwen failure (MTBF). With more plants and no improvements to MTBF, we’re adding risk. How do you measure MTBF when systems are never allowed to fail, because it’s too devastating if they do?
• The developed world expects the emerging world to be as okay with not using oil as themselves. It’s easy to say “solar” when you’ve had a 100 year headstart on cheap energy use. Provide some carrots, you countries who can.
• There’s not enough accountability in mining. If you put stuff into circulation, you should be responsible for eventually taking it out of circulation. Since we can’t trust you to be around, you should be paying insurance fees. Since we don’t know how much will be needed, they should be high.
• Mars colonization sounds like a cool goal. How much energy are we going to spend developing that? Is it actually nice living on Mars? Isn’t it nicer to make Earth continually inhabitable?
• I want to go on a cruise, but I really don’t want to support this energy waste. Global tourism was probably a really bad idea. And yet, lots of economies are going to die as we wind it down.
• Population stabilization or decline is probably needed if we want to maintain quality of life while stopping cheap energy use. Sadly, many economies are built on ever increasing GDP.

You know, nature doesn’t care if ecosystems live or die. Earth will continue to exist. It doesn’t care if there are a few million years of high temperatures before an ice age and a new stage of evolution sets in. It doesn’t even care about mutual assured destruction. There’s really nothing obvious about caring about climate change. The meteorite that killed the dinosaurs probably didn’t feel bad about its actions. The errupting volcano that covered the sky with soot probably didn’t worry about the effects. The curse is that we humans can measure and reason, and feel bad about our (in)actions. And not just our own, but actions from previous generations.

Yeah, I can rationalize my actions either way. Eventually, it will be absorbed by the sun anyway. What does it really mean to live life the best way I can?