In 2022, the country launched an ambitious strategy to become the world’s first digital nation. This initiative includes 3D scanning its islands to digitally re-create them and preserve their cultural heritage, as well as moving government functions to a virtual environment. In order to protect national identity and sovereignty, the project is also contemplating constitutional reforms to define the country as a virtual state, a concept already recognized by 25 countries, including Australia and New Zealand.

I recently saw this online debate about whether cities are the most sustainable or the least sustainable ways of living.

I could be convinced either way.

However, if you allow that lifestyle choices could be up for grabs, I can't imagine that rural living wouldn't be potentially more sustainable.

If you live in the country but live the way people live in the city with a 5000 mile diet, imported goods, daily commutes, shopping trips etc, then you have a city life with an even worse supply line that takes more resources.

However, living that way inside a city is obligatory. No matter what you are part of a giant factory that moves people and goods and energy and has to constantly bring in water and remove waste and so on, all adding tons of energy.

A country life at least offers the possibility of actually living locally with local resources but city people can never do this.

Of course nobody is really sustainable and we probably don't know what it really looks like.

I once thought about the Amish people in Pennsylvania and wondered if they could be like a model for a way of living. They have an interesting set of choices around technology. Just getting rid of electricity, powered vehicles and making most items by hand you reduce your resources so much. But how many people are going to switch to horses if they aren't forced to for survival?

It's a good list of dangers... but the risk ratings? I don't agree with the assessments much at all.

Also, one should probably rate a risk both for the odds of it happening and also for the odds of it being low or high impact if it happened. Here he seems to use the risk idea in either sense interchangeably.

I believe you shifted the decimal place. You should have 6%, not 0.006%

6% per degree of warming, and it could be 3 or 4 degrees or whatever...I believe they used 3.5° and a total damage of ~20% as one of the projections for the end of the century.

They also call for significant losses to production by 2050.

Nature paper is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09085-w

We estimate that global production declines 5.5 × 1014 kcal annually per 1 °C global mean surface temperature (GMST) rise (120 kcal per person per day or 4.4% of recommended consumption per 1 °C; P < 0.001).

It's a pretty weird and interesting paper. The big idea is that we will have to majorly revamp the agriculture practices to adapt to climate and weather. The climate and the weather would have extreme amounts of damage taken against how we produce food right now. What this paper argues is that we can mitigate some of these losses in many places, and that by shifting what we grow and where we grow it, we can still make farming work to a lesser extent than today...the paper attempts to model what the net future potential would be for a more resilient state.

Anyhow, there will be less food produced even after we adapt.

There is a lot of technology to reduce carbon (renewables etc).

You're only talking about reducing the rate of increases. That's irrelevant. Carbon would still be growing, not shrinking.

As I stated, we need a way to decrease the existing carbon, which is a different, much larger problem, with no technology and nothing waiting in the wings. We have no ideas. Renewable or rebuildable power systems could be useful, but how does that power suck fossil carbon out of the biosphere, what's the tech for that?

Many people have been manipulated into thinking of this whole problem as a "flow" or "rate" problem.

"If we could only slow down carbon..."

The thing is that what we have is a "sink" or "stock" problem where it's how much carbon is already in the system -- it's past actions that are already closed off to further change that are influencing things now

The rate of change in climate isn't from the rate of this year's contribution of 4ppm of CO2, it's from having 423ppm in the system all together forcing a very large shift in energy imbalance.

There is no solution space where slowing down the rate is meaningful. Going to zero or net negative for the ANNUAL rate next year is too small a lever against what work would need to happen to make a meaningful difference.

The TOTAL HISTORICAL carbon that is already there would have to be entirely removed and even that wouldn't put the system all the way back due to inertia and other nonlinearities.

What you're feeling today in the climate is actually geared to the emissions levels that were already achieved no more recently than 15 years ago in the past. What we do today will have effects that will only start in 15 years and take a long time to fully play out with effects still coming into play 100 years from today. This is a very very long lag time that confuses everything in terms of human feedbacks and human proof and human priorities.

A great number of people think we know what to do but we were too greedy and corrupt to do it.

I disagree. I think we have no idea what to even do. Humanity does not have the technology or capability to be sustainable. And so we think and talk about it wrongly because we do not want to accept that we are doomed.

Climate change isn't an on/off switch, it's something that can always be made better or worse by increments.

I'm just speaking to the accuracy of this one sentence. This is completely 100% incorrect.

The climate system is a chaos system that has many areas of stability, rapid transformation and tipping points.

If you think the system is only incrementally changing, that's just because you haven't pushed it hard enough to rapidly shift to a new area of behavior you've never seen before.

Many of these regimes are irreversible and cannot be changed back. You cannot unburn toast, it's a one way deal.

Once the climate changes, EVEN if you reset the conditions, you will not return to the initial state. Not at all. That idea is propaganda.

The fossil carbon and other climate related chemicals we have already dumped into the environment have a very long lag time before we see the effects (at all). These chemicals and their effects are more long living that most nuclear waste, for example. These are not going away while humanity still exists. That's a done deal.

David Brooks:

"Trump is the wrong answer to the right question."

According to the research team, the consequences of this reversal are already becoming visible. The upwelling of deep, warm, CO₂-rich waters is believed to be driving the accelerated melting of sea ice in the Southern Ocean. In the long term, this process could double current atmospheric CO₂ concentrations by releasing carbon that has been stored in the deep ocean for centuries—potentially with catastrophic consequences for the global climate.

Oops. 350% growth, not 350X growth...lost some decimal places there. Thanks for the correction.

A constant 2% economic growth rate implies that we expect the world economy in 2100 to be 350 times as large as the economy of today.

That means it roughly doubles every decade remaining in the century.

Insofar as prices or costs can go up, there seems to be no limit to growth.

Insofar as we have real physical resources and production increasing, I have a hard time imagining we can meaningfully double production one time.

For example, I can't imagine a world with twice the built infrastructure we have now. (Houses, roads, power dams, airports, schools, etc). Seems impossible.

If growth has ended or is ending soon, it makes you wonder how long governments will be able to try to print their way out of stagnation before the whole system becomes irrelevant and comical.