I just feel like making things solar-powered and wind-powered should be as easy as using an iPad.
Even if Bill McKibben were to become dictator, future generations would suffer because of the carbon we had already emitted.
[This approach] displays the characteristic philosophical lust to vanquish the skeptic by arguing him out of his skepticism, without appeal to moral and political considerations or to the facts of everyday life. [. . . ] But more often than not, if you give the skeptic everything he wants, then he will be successful in repulsing your attacks and terrorizing your position.
I grew up as an only child of two parents who had dropped out of high school. They had enormous respect for education and encouraged me as a child when I had strong interests in both math and science, but we really didn't have much by way of educational role modeling in our family.
The density of human population combined with the development of powerful and largely unconstrained technology has given us the problems of the anthropocene and the serious possibility of self-caused extinction.
Aristotle thought that humans are rational animals and Hobbes thought that we act on the basis of rational self-interest. If only! It's not that we never do these things, it's that they are hardly constituative of who and what we are.
The Enlightenment is not a nightmare, nor is it something that comes easily to us. It is an aspiration - and a good one!
Before it incarnates, each soul enters into a sacred contract with the Universe to accomplish certain things. It enters into this commitment in the fullness of its being. Whatever the task that your soul has agreed to, all of the experiences of your life serve to awaken within you the memory of that contract, and to prepare you to fulfill it.
My meaning is, that no man can expect his children to respect what he degrades.
Then I did the simplest thing in the world. I leaned down. . . and kissed him. And the world cracked open.
Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them.