sustainability

A clean cut between what moves the numbers and what moves the conscience.

🌿 budding tended 2026-05-07 sustainability load-bearing theatre

flowchart LR
  claim[a sustainability claim] --> q{moves the numbers?}
  q -->|yes| lb[load-bearing: keep]
  q -->|no| th[theatre: drop]

Read next

• economics — when does cooperation pay
• world — the load-bearing systems
• commons — alternatives that don't extract
• stigmergy — the cow-chain reads as a trail

Ported from godding-classic. Receipts inside, in numbers.

the receipts, briefly

• plastic recycling. roughly 9% of plastic is actually recycled in the US. the rest is landfill or incineration.
• plastic and climate. ~1.8 billion tonnes of greenhouse-gas emissions in 2019 (~3.4% of global), set to roughly triple by 2060.
• energy mix. electricity and heat is the single biggest chunk of human emissions. decarbonising the grid is the dominant lever.
• diet. beef and lamb are an order of magnitude more carbon-intensive per gram of protein than chicken, fish, eggs, beans or tofu.
• flying. a single long-haul flight can equal a typical person's annual footprint from everything else combined.

theatre vs. load-bearing

the smallest list that actually matters

1. back the largest decarbonisation lever in your jurisdiction (vote, fund, build).
2. electrify what you can — heat, car, cooking — when replacing it anyway.
3. shift food toward plants. you don't have to be a vegan; halving beef alone is huge.
4. fly less. not zero. less.
5. buy fewer things, keep them longer, fix them.

that's it. the rest is taste.

every reasonable adult, asked privately, can describe the climate situation roughly correctly. very few of them vote, eat, fly, or buy as if they believed their own description. that gap is the issue. not denial. discount rate.