Life on digikar's microblog

A World without Climate Change is one that promotes Freedom

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 09:53:54 +0200

What would a life without climate change look like? In this world,

Carbon emissions would be down to the pre-industrial levels,
White reflective Arctic and Greenland ice cover would be intact,
AMOC would persist,
Forest covers would be up to their preindustrial level. The land used for farming would be much less.

As side effects,

Seasons would be predictable,
Loss of crops would be less due to unpredicted weather events,
People would need to endure less heat and less cold and less rain and less storms,
Healthcare system would be less affected by cumulative effects of climate change on health,
Less pressure on societal systems would render insurance easier.

But what would day to day life look like? Without fossil fuels, private yachts, flights, and even large scale ocean and atmospheric modes of commute are difficult to imagine. Even the manufacture of semiconductors depends on fossil fuels. Perhaps, many industries that have been historically dependent on fossil fuels including the printing press might have stagnated.

The question “What would the world look like without X?” can be interpreted in two ways. One, we can go back in time and intervene and then try to imagine what life would have been like. Two, one can imagine an intervention at the current moment and try to imagine what life would be like. The latter feels extremely disruptive until we already have a world with renewable energy powering every aspect of our lives. So to speak, this world where fossil fuels suddenly return to their grave and there is no energy to fuel our day to day activities is unimaginable. But even in the first case, where we go back in time and intervene, it is still unimaginable what life would be like without an equally-early discovery of renewable energy to power the printing, semiconductor and transport industry. In other words, this world too is unthinkable.

Imagining negation is tricky. One does not negate wills and desires and possibilities. The mind does not seem to like negations. Instead, one creates positive ones that serve as alternatives to the ones we do not want. Thus, to imagine what would a world without climate change look like, we should perhaps ask, what is the kind of world we want to look at.

Now, we have already broadened our thinking horizons a bit by travelling back 4-5 centuries in trying to imagine the alternative world where printing press did not take off due to a lack of energy. We can continue further and look into the far past to envision the possibilities for the far future. Is it useful to look this far? Aren’t things always transient and in a constant flux of change? Apparantly, that is not always the case! Rather, it seems that, for many things, there is a period of time in which things are more “flexible”, so to speak. But after a period of time, things become “rigid”. To give a few examples -

Around sixth century BC in China, there were several dozen distinct schools of philosophical and cultural experimentation. But later on, only four schools remained. Of these, only one thrived until the start of the 20th century and still continues to influence East Asian cultures.
Despite twenty (or fifteen) centuries, many cultures remain deeply entrenched in Abrahamic religions. Bible was the most sold book in 2025. And that’s ignoring the even higher number of copies that are simply distributed without being bought. Indeed, from AD 40 to AD 350, Christianity grew by about 43 percent per decade, from a population of about 1,000 to 34,000,000. A similar story holds for Islam and Quran.
Consider the English language itself as another example
Or the use of Javascript in browsers
The prominence of vegeterianism in India was apparantly not before two or three millenia (It’s difficult to find sources for these that are not just verbal anecdotes or chatgpt/claude generated conversations.)
Constitutions of countries, including long lived ones such as the United States

MacAskill, in his What we owe the future, calls this “lock-in”.. Initially, some state of affairs is rather flexible or mutable or easily changeable. But as time passes, these become harder and harder to change. The causal pathways by which this happens seems underdiscussed. (Hint: It’s often not merit that determines what becomes popular or what persists through time.)

With reference to the world we are looking for, the recommendation is this: We must strive against a lock-in of state of affairs that are harmful for the long run. At least until we find the most optimal state of affairs, and perhaps even after we do, we must allow a plurality of approaches. Let time do its weeding. Try to avoid weeding out ideas prematurely. The hard to digest implication of this is the tolerance of intolerance. I myself have a hard time accepting it. But even if you reject tolerating intolerance, the central idea remains: allow plurality and diversity, since they keep a civilization flexible.

Thus, an alternative to the current world with climate change is a world that values freedom.

Enter Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom.

If the goal of life is to live and thrive, the best way to achieve that is by giving each individual the freedom to experiment and influence others in their own ways. Now, this is a claim at the population level. It makes no claim for individual choices: whether one should choose a life that “keeps their options open” or another that lets them “walk or run in peace with their chosen option even if it closes other options” is not something I have an answer to. The mere claim is we should work towards a society that allows individuals to choose differently at least in principle across different lives. Of course, we only have one life and we only live once, but that we can imagine a different life. If the society you live in permits that, that is a good society. In contrast, if merely imagining a different life seems impossible, that is not the kind of society you (or at least I) want to lock humanity in.

Caveat, I haven’t read Development as Freedom yet. So far, I touched some chapters of What we owe the future - particularly, 1, 2, 4. My own thoughts on the book are that it has some insights, but it seems to get carried away. Particularly, I disagree that a life choice that enhances humanity’s survival by 0.0001% as being better than another life choice that enhances the life of a million or even a few thousand. Because, by enhancing the life of a thousand others, especially in significant ways and endowing them with freedom, you raise the chances that someone (perhaps many) amongst these would go on to make choices that ultimately enhance humanity’s survival by not 0.0001% but by 10% even! And there are other critics.

For the more technical minded there, you cannot make optimal worldly interventions basing them on probability distributions formed out of observational data. For, the act of intervention changes the distribution and you will need to resample again! A potential alternative is to build a causal model of the world, but that seems an open topic for research!

India contributed insignificantly to climate change but has a significant dependence on fossil fuels

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:32:45 +0100

India is now estimated to have a population of over 1.45 billion humans. That’s over 17% of the 8.3 billion humans inhabiting the Earth. (Estimated, because the last census was in 2011(!)). However, historically, India has contributed only about 3% to the climate crisis. This is in contrast to the 20% by USA and 11% by China.

Even today, in terms of climate change contribution per person, India ranks a distant 124th, compared to USA which ranks 16th, China 25th, and Qatar 2nd.

In other words, if climate change is to be prevented from getting worse (let alone reverse), there is a huge burden of responsibility on countries other than India. And while India should not reach USA-esque per-capita-emissions, there are more pressing problems (health and sanitation, education and employment, work-life balance, and more) India needs to deal with. If anything, the 99.2% electrification by Indian railways exceeds that of China and Japan, while US stands at a measly 1%. India also added 48GW of renewable energy generation infrastructure in 2025 alone. Despite all the popular news coverage of USA moving towards coal, USA still added a comparable 53GW. China added a whopping 430GW in 2025 alone. (That’s indeed more than rest of the world combined(!))

So, India seems like a reasonably green country. Not to mention its 30% vegetarian population that vastly exceeds even the 2.5% of Netherlands. USA stands at 4.2%.

Unfortunately, however, as the ongoing Iran war shows, India has lots of hidden dependencies on fossil fuels.

Let’s start with food, the importance of which does not require any justification at all. But wait a second, fossil fuels and food? What’s the connection even? That too in a country that is largely vegetarian? This is a nice article.

A first dependence is on diesel irrigation pumps. Roughly 30% of the irrigation pumps are diesel pumps.
A second on fertilizers.. Consider the plant macronutrients nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. (See first half of the video by Zerodha.)
- Nitrogen comes from urea, which comes from ammonia, which comes from natural gas.
- Phosphorus comes from urea, and sulfuric acid, which too is obtained from oil and gas.
- Potassium reserves are lacking in India.
Indeed, these can be manufactured in a greener manner, besides the shift to organic fertilizers.
Besides farming itself, cooking too depends on fossil fuels. Less than 10% households own any form of electric cooking appliance. About 70% rely on liquid petroleum gas (LPG) or petroleum natural gas (PNG). The rest even use stoves known to emit harmful particulates such as PM2.5 and PM10.

On a sidenote, PM2.5 and PM10 are significant contributors of the winter smog over north India. Apparantly, winter smog was not a problem for north India up until the 1970s. Since the 1970s, agriculture picked up pace in India in an effort to make India self-sufficient in terms of food. However, as a side-effect, stubble burning was used as a means to get rid of the residue. Since then, industry and vehicular emissions have added to the problem. (The Great Smog of India seems like a nice book that dives into it.)
Finally but not the least, not limited to farming, freight transport by road accounts for 71% of the total, in contrast to 19% by railway. In fact, freight transport by trucks accounts for more than 50% of the petrol and diesel consumption in the country (see preface).

Overall, then, one expects food prices to rise if the Iran war continues, along with other commodities that need to be transported. Shifting to electric cooking appliances and electric vehicles would seem like a reasonable solution.

However, even with the current demand, 74% of the electricity is generated using fossil fuels. In other words, India needs to quadruple its renewable energy even ignoring any rise in electricity demand. But electricity is only one form of energy. As the Energy Statistics 2025 highlights (chapter 6), only 3% of the energy consumed in India is from renewable sources of electricity. The rest 97%(!) is from various forms of fossil fuels, including coal, crude oil, natural gas, and lignite. Some of the fossil fuels are used for further electricity production, and the rest are used for other activities which are too many to list.

To summarize, even if India (i) shares a minimal responsibility in reducing climate emissions (ii) is already doing a lot of work towards renewable energy, there is still a mindbogglingly huge infrastructure related to energy generation, use, and sustainable manufacturing (including products as basic as fertilizers) that needs to be set up before India can become fully self-sufficient and sustainable.

Why Climate Action needs to focus on Corporate Production and not just Individual Consumption?

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 18:01:24 +0100

What can I do to reduce climate change?

If you are a resident of the 21st century, still under 60, rich enough that you do not need to worry about the cost of your next meal, and have any sense of obligation towards the society at large, that question might have crossed your mind. Perhaps, it even keeps you awake at night. Climate anxiety is a thing. (I wrote about it before – here’s something that may help.)

Perhaps, you have even been successful in converting your worries into concrete actions. You consume less meat, avoid flights, buy products that say that are environment-friendly, or even better, avoid buying anything unnecessary at all. Perhaps you converted your house into solar. You try to cut down your carbon footprint as much as possible. And even motivate others to do the same. You hope that some day, majority of humanity will follow suit and opt for an environment friendly lifestyle. And, perhaps then, the climate crisis will be averted, right? Right?

Right?

R.I.G.H.T.?!

In 2005, fossil fuel company BP hired the large advertising campaign Ogilvy to popularize the idea of a carbon footprint for individuals. The campaign instructed people to calculate their personal footprints and provided ways for people to “go on a low-carbon diet”.

- source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint#History

A person from the richest 0.1% produces more carbon pollution in a day than someone in the bottom 50% produces all year.

- source: https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/person-richest-01-produces-more-carbon-pollution-day-someone-bottom-50-produces-all

Questions:

Why would a fossil fuel company popularize carbon footprint?
Let’s assume majority of humans follow suit towards a environment-friendly lifestyle, may be 50%, or even 90%. But if carbon inequality remains, does that mean, just the tiny non-environmentally-compliant 1% (or even 0.1%) humans produce enough emissions to not only cause but also accelerate the climate crisis?

The answer to the second question is a short “unfortunately, yes”.

About the first. Why would a fossil fuel company popularize carbon footprint?

Perhaps the company is ethical? The most ethical thing a fossil fuel company can do to mitigate the climate crisis is to stop being a fossil fuel company. Just change the business. Is money more important than life? A short read at BP’s wikipedia page, including sections of ‘Polical Influence’, reveals that for BP, money indeed is more important than life.

BP is not alone. Half of world’s CO2 emissions come from just 32 fossil fuel firms.

But.

But, these companies exist because we all consume their goods and services, right? If we just stop consuming their goods and opt for better companies, individual actions can avert the climate crisis, right? Look at the bottom 50% of humans. The average income of the bottom 50% of humans was about $3920 per year. That’s about INR 4,26,000 or 32,300 Yuan annually. If you factor in regional disparities, the picture should be sharper. The poorest 50% simply do not consume enough to have any significant impact on the climate. Honestly, having grown up in India, if I did not need to factor in retirement funds, the ever-rising housing prices, and (future) children’s college fees, INR 4,00,000 is actually a sufficient income for a comfortable life in an Indian town. So, what exactly do the rich consume that throws their carbon pollution off the charts compared to the rest of us?

Before that, just remember that carbon footprint as popularized in the media was a tool used by fossil fuel companies to divert attention from their own misdeeds. That’s not to say, individual actions do not matter. But solely focusing on them would completely miss the climate goals, given the carbon (and income) inequality highlighted above.

The best illustration of how the rich consume is perhaps made not by text, but by videos:

At 20 minutes, it is several times longer than the average instagram or youtube shorts, but hopefully, it is a nice watch down the subway, or during your dinner or lunch break!

The standard guess is that the rich use private jets and yachts that pollute. And that is certainly true. The rich certainly consume more. 1000s of times more than the poorest. But when we say that 12 billionaires pollute more than 2.1 million homes, we are looking at a million-fold disparity. The difference in consumption habits only accounts for a thousand-fold inequality.

In terms of consumption alone, Taylor Swift emits more than the CEO of Exxonmobil! However, persons like the latter are also in charge of highly polluting means of production, such as fossil fuel and cement. Holcim’s cement production in 2020 alone produced about 19,000 times the carbon emissions of Taylor Swift’s private jets! In general, the cement industry is owned by roughly 7,000 individuals (< 1/1,000,000 of humans) and emits about 8% (about 1/12) of the global carbon emissions. The worse case holds for the fossil-fuel industry with 100 companies (their owners and the board) accountable for 70% of global emissions. It is also not the case that there are no solutions. There exist alternative means of production that can still drive profits. But perhaps, this is lesser profit than what can change the rich owner’s minds.

Besides controlling the means of production, the rich owners also engage in political lobbying influencing legal policies and public opinions. Remember the carbon footprint debacle?

Essentially, if you are rich, I commend you for reading this far. If you invest, you can choose to invest in environment friendly firms.

For the others, perhaps our actions need to be more thoughtful in terms of the impact they produce. They need to consider not only our individual consumption, but the means of production themselves, that are the final source of all the crisis. What concrete actions should we take? That’s a good question I don’t have the answer to.

The role of Open Source and Data Privacy for Security

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 18:08:32 +0100

Internet has been amazing. You send a message. And it reaches the other end of the Earth in seconds. Even more, you can communicate with live video and audio! It seems magical.

Yet it is not. All communication is transmission of energy. Energy travels through space – which may be occupied by matter or may not. Most space through which communications travel is openly available to everyone. The same space is used by multiple communicators. Does that mean everyone can access the messages I send over the internet?

That’s a scary thought. All your bank account details, passwords, private messages, your voice, your tone, your looks*, all travel over the internet. Are these all available to the public at large? (*You know now with generative AI, your voice and looks are sufficient to prepare videos as if you had done or said things you hadn’t!)

Unfortunately, in an unencrypted world, it would be true that everyone can see everyone’s messages. You can read malicious users’ messages, and they can read yours. Furthermore, what even determines that a message your messaging app says was sent by your friend was really sent by your friend? And not someone else disguised as your friend?

Humans, some of them, are smart. These problems have been known since the dawn of the internet in the 20th century, possibly before. Solutions have been devised against them. Today, for most communication problems in the general, we know that

If communications satisfy certain assumptions, then certain particular security benefits are guaranteed.

In other words,

If we build communication softwares that satisfy certain assumptions, then we get certain particular security benefits.

These benefits include:

Knowing that the message your messaging app says was sent by a friend was really sent by your friend’s device.
Ensuring that only you and your friend can read messages sent to each other. That is, your messages are inaccessible to anyone else.
… and many more …

In general, the “friend” may be any other communication end-point, such as your bank, where security is just as important if not more. However,

How do we know that communication softwares actually satisfy the assumptions required for security?

Three methods:

We trust the word of the person or institute who developed the software and make profits from the software. In general, the greater motive here is making monetary profits, since that is a very essential aspect of livelihood of the person or institute.
We trust the word of the person or institute who is motivated to study and develop the software and ensure the software satisfies the assumptions required for security. In general, monetary profit as a motive is either absent or very much secondary.
We study the workings of the software ourselves.

Both 2nd and 3rd methods require that how the software works is publicly accessible. This means the source code (but also the infrastructure details) are publicly available. In other words,

Trusting the claim that a particular software is secure becomes easier when the workings of the software are publicly known, that is, it is open source.

How to find open source softwares?

An easy method to find the open source alternative for a software is to simply google "open source alternative to software that interests you". You can also append the search by "site:reddit.com" or "site:stackexchange.com" or you can also consult one of your tech-geek friends or family-members.

It is trivial to see that between two people or institutes:

One who is motivated by monetary profits
Another who is motivated by software security

The second category of people or institutes would end up with more secure softwares in any particular class of softwares in the longer run. In other words, in the longer run, the first category of people or institutes are likely to make mistakes even if, besides making money, they too want to make their softwares secure. This is simply because, for the software developers, motivation for software security drives learning and brings in the time to spend on the software and make changes that may go against the monetary motivation.

That people and software developers can make mistakes brings us to the second point of this blog post. Your data includes - your name, phone numbers, email addresses, passwords, bank account numbers, people or institutes you send messages to or receive messages from, what messages you send, which websites you access, how frequently, at what time, for how long, your phone location, when do you leave your home, office or visit a friend, and much more.

You would WISH that the banks, institutes, and messaging softwares that have access to your data are actually storing them securely, in a manner that does not permit thieves and malicious actors from misusing your data.

This is also called a data breach. In 2025 alone, there were at least 5 data breaches with banking softwares resulting in millions of individuals losing their banking details to malicious hackers. It is not just banking softwares. Data breaches can happen with car companies, education providers, beer companies, sim providers, luxury brands, and pretty much everything that is connected to internet.

If the softwares were open source, it would be easier to ensure security. However, the next best thing to open source might be data privacy. How do you prevent your data from being misused?

To prevent your data from being misused, you restrict your data from being accessible. That is, you keep your data private.

How do you make your data more private? This is a bit like asking How do I make myself more healthy? There’s no simple answer, although one can try some guidelines! See here or here for a detailed guide. Here’s an attempt at some guidelines:

Reduce reliance on closed source softwares for information processing. This includes Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, Excel, as well as Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets, and also Apple. Of course, you may be forced to use these apps because your colleague uses them. In that case, either convince them to shift to open source alternatives or use the open source alternatives for your personal use cases. Simple alternatives include markdown, latex, and open document formats.
Try out Kubuntu on newer laptops or Xubuntu to renew old laptops. Be sure to use the “Long-Term Support (LTS)” versions, currently 24.04. You can also try it as a virtual machine.
Switch to secure open-source messaging softwares:
- Signal or Molly in addition to Whatsapp, Messenger, Instagram.
- Jitsi in addition to Zoom or Google Meet or Teams
Use password managers like Bitwarden.
… You are motivated enough. Read one of those detailed guides now :)

To sum up

Open source aids security. You can find open source alternatives by simply googling “open source alternatives to <app you want>”. Optionally, you can append the search with “site:reddit.com” or “site:stackexchange.com”.
Privacy aids security. Privacy is a bit like moving towards a healthy lifestyle. There are lots of small changes in the way. See this or this for a detailed guide.

The Inevitability of Environmental Collapse with Rapid Resource Extraction

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 11:14:23 +0100

Imagine being stranded on a small island. The island only has a few coconut trees, no fish or other vegetation or other food sources; coconuts are the only source of food. Furthermore, in about two weeks, it will be the full moon. The island is a vanishing one - the island submerges during the full and new moon. In other words, you have two choices:

Keep eating the coconuts from coconut trees, and sink and die as the island submerges during the upcoming full moon.
Cut the coconut trees and make them into a raft. This will cut down your food source. But hopefully, if you know or learn how to make a good raft, you might survive!

The scenario might seem artificial, but turns out to be very real. What do I mean?

Consider that life as we know it is stranded on the planet Earth.

If we do just the bare minimum to keep ourselves surviving, some day, some cosmic event will eventually wipe us out. It happened with dinosaurs, remember?
Alternatively, we could extract resources from our environment. Lacking omniscience, we do not know what the effect of our resource extraction will be. Perhaps, it might trigger events that themselves either harm us or even lead to the very extinction we are trying to avoid!

It is not even a case of underdeveloped science. Science provides the how to of reasoning over nature. The over what are the specific scenarios that occur in the particular natural habitat. It doesn’t take rocket science to realize that the release of trapped $CO_2$, methane, or microbes can pose a threat as a mine is excavated. However, no amount of science can tell us that there is trapped $CO_2$, methane or microbes in the mine. That requires exploring or inspecting the environment. Furthermore, can pose a threat does not mean will pose a threat. And again, lacking omniscience, it is not possible to make perfect predictions.

Rapid resource extraction – which does not bother or even denies inspecting the side-effects of the particular resource extraction – will thus eventually lead to environmental collapse. It would merely be luck that a civilization survives any particular length of rapid resource extraction.

How rapid?

Rapid enough that the resulting environmental collapse triggers events on a scale the civilization cannot deal with. Climate change is one example.

The alternative?

Slow down.

How slow?

If the civilization can restructure or metamorphize itself into not requiring any more resources, or at least, only minimally more resources, that would be ideal.

In other words, if the civilization can make do with the resources it already has at hand, it should avoid extracting more resources. At the same time, it should develop its scientific understanding as well as explore its environment to better understand the effects of particular resource extractions. As the knowledge of these effects becomes available, only then, should it extract the resources. However, it will be competing against the cosmic events. But hopefully, “industrialization and modernization” over a span of 40,000 years rather than 400 years can easily be a sweet spot that does both

Develop tools to overcome the cosmic event.
Don’t harm oneself or go extinct by environmental collapse triggered by rapid resource extraction.

Slow down.

Extremely unequal distribution of resources not insufficiency is the root of modern global problems.

the richest 1% of humanity now produce as much carbon as the poorest two-thirds combined. Likewise, the top 10% of emitters account for half of all global $CO_2$

The civilization must optimize the use of its resources to meet the needs of its individuals and develop science and environmental knowledge while trying not to extract further resources. Any growth, development, or betterment that stems from resource extraction instead of optimization is a short-sighted move that can will pose an extinction threat to the civilization.

Note that resource optimization has to be carried out at the scale of civilization, particularly amongst its top resource extractors. Resource optimization amongst the bottom resource extractors without the top is futile. In case this is not obvious, suppose:

Group A comprising 1 billion people consume 90 units of a resource
Group B comprising 9 billion people consume 10 units of a resource

Combined, the two groups consume 100 units of the resource.

What will happen if group B starts consuming 50% less resources? Naively, 90% people consuming 50% less resources sounds like a great win! However -

Group A will still consume 90 units
Group B will consume 5 units

Combined, the two groups still consume 95 units of the resource. The resource saving is a mere 5%, extraordinarily different from the intuition generated by “90% people consuming 50% less resources”.

What will happen if group A starts consuming 50% less resources?

Group A will consume 45 units
Group B will continue to consume 10 units

Combined, the two groups consume 55 units of the resource! A conservation of 45% resources is resulted from merely 10% of the top resource extractors cutting their extractions in half.

Inequality itself is not a problem; extreme inequality of the above kind is. It is not a mere “problem of ethics” we can disagree over but a “survival problem” that will kill everyone. It will lead to extinction.

Here’s a short lunch-time video to convey the concrete effects of what abstract “2C” rise in average temperature means.

Here’s another

Care to be the saviors who cut the resource extraction and consumption in half?

The World in 30 Years

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 21:05:40 +0530

What will happen to our world in 30 years? The past year I have been in acknowledgement of a recurring uneasiness. Earth’s climate is changing rapidly and accelerating. Different areas are warming up, cooling down, drying out, raining down, storming out faster than humans and non-human nature can keep up. It seems only inevitable that there will arise a certain sequence of years later this century that destroy all crops, flood all warehouses, kill all cattle, and bring people to famines.

A part of me wants to accept the transient nature of life and all things and “do nothing at all”. A different part feels saddened, worried, hopeless, powerless at the state of 95% of the 8 billion humans and the trillion non-human animals. In large part, the situation is worsening, acceleratingly worsening, and a tiny fraction of humans are to blame. One can ask if life is possible without suffering and the answer seems no. Why does it even matter if we do anything or not?

Is life possible without suffering?

History has known at least one human, the Buddha, trying to grapple with the nature of suffering – rather dukkha. (But there are others.) Dukkha, in Buddhist Philosophy, means something slightly different from the meaning of the english term suffering. Dukkha means unsatisfactoriness, which captures what I have in mind. Unfortunately, Dukkha is one of the three marks of existence.

The Buddhist way is the Middle Way between the two extremes of ascetism and hedonism. It concerns the Noble Eightfold Path that is expected to lead to the cessation of suffering. The eight folds or pillars include: right view (understanding), right resolve (thought), right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right samadhi (concentration). While useful as a general guideline for living, it seems to leave unanswered cases such as: self-defense and climate-change.

Self-defense
Climate-change

Here is a long reddit post on climate-change and buddhism from 2019. The solution to climate anxiety might just be to accept the inevitable worsening and death whenever it happens, while trying to make positive contributions wherever possible.

However, there is a third part of me, who identifies as a puzzle solver. The question it asks is this: Is life possible without suffering? More particularly, is there a way a civilization like that of humans can progress and perhaps reach the space age, without triggering a collapse of the ecosystem and food and water resources? Even if we acknowledge that most humans might fall prey to famines within the next 50-100 years, might there be a way for a new civilization to not repeat the mistakes of our civilization?

If you’ve known me in real-life, you’d have heard me talking about Doughnut Economics this past year. It suggests that humans should use multidimensional metrics instead of GDP to measure well-being. And that human activity should be such that it does not exceed planetary boundaries. While the Doughnut Graphic is helpful to communicate to the general public, it remains deficient in rigor, that’d be necessary for modeling and concrete quantitative recommendations.

It was difficult to imagine that Doughnut Economics was the only alternative economics model ever proposed over the past century and half. Indeed, a bit of searching (you can ask ChatGPT) will list you several. Are any of them useable for the new civilization?

Perhaps, one of the fatal flaws in standard neoclassical economics – both Capitalism and Marxism – when it comes to interfacing with nature, is that it assumes raw materials are limited only by the means of production. This means, if you had enough means of production, you can get an unlimited supply of raw materials from nature. It does not consider that the number of trees might be finite. That clearing land for mining might have downstream effects. And so on and so forth. A second fatal flaw would be that it makes no claims about what happens or should happen to by-products, emissions, and wastes. These assumptions are fine when the human activity were no more than a fraction of what goes on in non-human world. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The scale of collective human activity is large enough to rival or even exceed that of non-human nature.

Has anyone pondered how these different aspects can be integrated into economics?

Enter Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, a mathematician, statistician and an eventual economist. Through his The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Georgescu-Roegen considers entropy from thermodynamics and suggests what it means for our (economic) system. For my purposes, the important point is that, entropy (disorder) of a closed system always increases. This is a fundamental law of the universe; no closed system is immune to this. This means a closed system should naturally evolve towards disorder.

Yet, life seems to disobey thermodynamics. It seems to evolve towards order. What explains this?

Two points may be helpful. Firstly, that life is not a closed system. It exchanges matter as well as energy with its surroundings. Secondly, given a physical (chemical, nuclear, etc) process that emits energy, a part of that energy can be used to perform useful work that can increase the order of a system. This is roughly known as Gibb’s Free Energy. Taken together, life can use free energy to create order and emit waste energy into its environment. Thus, the order can increase locally.

Note, however, that the order-construction processes emit (waste) energy into its surroundings. Earth’s biosphere is remarkable at recycling its material resources – carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and other elements. However, it is limited by physical laws in recycling energy. For Earth to remain habitable at a certain temperature, waste energy must leave the Earth. In the absence of large-scale human activity, one expects that there was a balance between the incoming and outgoing energy on Earth. Any energy received by the sun was either reflected or put to use by geological and biological systems to extract useful work. Eventually, the waste energy was released back into the atmosphere and eventually into space.

The human activities underlying climate change have disturbed these energy exchanges. In particular, the larger amounts of greenhouse gases emitted by human activities have increased the amount of solar energy that remain in the atmosphere. I’d even suspect that harnessing fossil fuels, geothermal energy, as well solar energy from panels more efficient than plant leaves also increases the received energy. Call this latter as man-made energy. This is in contrast to other transformed energy such as hydroelectric or wind-energy. Man-made energy emits more energy, while the other forms of energies are mere conversions. Two possibilities arise:

Man-made energy is miniscule compared to the energy received from the sun. In this case, the civilization’s main concern would only be to keep the greenhouse gases at their pre-civilization levels. The Earth’s systems should take care of the rest. There arises the possibility that transformed energy reduces the amount of energy available to biological and geological systems. Thus, one can even disturb Earth’s systems without climate change. As of the current twenty-first century, that windmills could affect Earth’s biosphere or geosphere seems unrealistic.
Man-made energy is significant compared to the energy received from the sun. To keep temperatures constant, this possibility will require devising ways to transmit the excess (waste heat) energy outside Earth.

In either case, a “natural” equilibrium will be attained as the Earth’s temperature rises. It will rise enough so that the irradiated energy by the Earth equals the unreflected incoming energy and an equilibria is attained. Fortunately, this depends on the fourth power of absolute temperature, and, thus, only involves a small change in (average) temperatures. Unfortunately, the local effects of that small change in average temperature are rather large for the ecological, ocean, wind, rain, and human systems under consideration. This precisely is climate change.

Zooming out, climate change is not going to melt Earth. It is rather a disequilibria in Earth’s energy budget. The Earth will adapt. Life will adapt. That in no way implies that life or civilization as we know it would continue the same. There will be changes. Significant and expensive ones at that.

What about the new economic system? At least ChatGPT says this is an open problem. Following is a brief summary for anyone wanting to delve deeper:

Approach / School	Key Figures	Core Synthesis Idea	How Order Is Created	Main Economic Implication	Degree of Formalization	Main Limitation
Dissipative-Structure Ecological Economics	Prigogine, Ayres, Røpke	Economies as far-from-equilibrium systems exporting entropy	Energy throughput creates local order while increasing global entropy	Sustainability depends on bounded entropy throughput	Medium	Weak institutional detail
Steady-State Bioeconomics	Georgescu-Roegen, Daly	Entropy law + biological regeneration constraints	Qualitative development within fixed material/energy flows	Zero growth in throughput, stable population & capital	Low–Medium	Limited dynamics, normatively heavy
Emergy Economics	Howard & Elisabeth Odum	Unified thermodynamics, biology, and valuation	Energy hierarchy & transformity amplify usable order	Prices and policy reflect embodied energy	Medium	Contested valuation, hard market integration
Thermo-Bioeconomic Growth Models	van den Bergh, Kümmel	Growth possible only if regeneration exceeds entropy	Biological regeneration offsets entropy production	Conditional, constrained growth	High	Abstract, limited policy guidance
Information-Theoretic / Evolutionary Economics	Chaisson, Kauffman, Arthur	Economic order as information accumulation	Information reduces local entropy at energy cost	Innovation bounded by energy dissipation	Medium	Indirect link to policy
Technosphere / Autonomous Systems	Peter Haff	Civilization as self-directing energy system	Order maintained by uncontrollable energy flows	Human control over energy use is limited	Low	Pessimistic, weak prescriptions

Earlier this year or the last, I also had a read at Peter Singer’s How are We to Live?. The claim was that an ethical life is fulfiling in itself. I do not remember if it preached a particular ethics framework; what it did preach is that one should live an ethical life simply because it is more fulfiling. Like with Buddhist philosophy, this works “by and large” as a general framework, without providing us a way to decide our actions from moment-to-moment. That requires a rigorous model of the world, the kind Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen might have aspired for.

Unfortunately, then, there is no solution to How are We to Live?, no answer to Can life exist without suffering?, rigorous enough that one can structure one’s day to day life and local and national policies around them.

It’s sometimes not even clear whether anxiety is adaptive or malfunctioning. Perhaps, we would not even be in this mess if the richest and most-polluting people were more anxious (and foresightful?) in their actions.