All posts tagged: given time

Trump’s America Will Lose the Climate Race

Trump’s America Will Lose the Climate Race

Published by skeptic

If Donald Trump wins a second term, and his administration realizes conservative advocacy groups’ plans to dismantle environmental protections and drill, baby, drill, the United States is in for four years of relentless carbon pollution. In other words, another Trump presidency all but guarantees a complete abnegation of the country’s climate duties from 2025 to 2029. And as climate scientists say, emissions anywhere mean global warming everywhere: The United States’ heat-trapping contributions to the atmosphere during those years will make the world warmer than it would be without them. Already, the warming that humanity has locked in will bring many places to the edge of habitability, and adding to that damage would be an “unmitigated disaster,” the atmospheric-climate scientist Veerabhadran Ramanathan told me. “But if it’s just four years, we can survive it,” he added, to my surprise. “Unless that four years becomes 20 years … But if it is just four years, then you can recover.” A second Trump presidency is the open question looming over climate science. Given that global warming is still …

The Real Cost of Driving Into Manhattan

The Real Cost of Driving Into Manhattan

Published by skeptic

Next year, congestion pricing is coming to New York City. And maybe, just maybe, the toll for motor vehicles entering the lower half of Manhattan should be set at $100. That number comes from Charles Komanoff, an environmental activist, a transit analyst, and a local political fixture. It represents neither the amount that would maximize revenue nor the amount that would minimize traffic. Rather, it is an estimate of how much it really costs for a single vehicle to take a trip into the congestion zone—in economists’ terminology, the unpriced externality associated with driving into one of the most financially productive and eternally gridlocked places on Earth. To be clear, Komanoff does not actually think that the state should charge each car, pickup, and box truck $100. He doesn’t think the toll should be anywhere near that amount. “At heart, I’m very much a radical,” he told me as we sat outside a stylish coffee shop in SoHo, to which Komanoff had brought his own coffee in a thermos. He has been detained numerous times …

The Only Productivity Hack That Works on Me

The Only Productivity Hack That Works on Me

Published by skeptic

Productivity is a sore subject for a lot of people. Philosophically, the concept is a nightmare. Americans invest personal productivity with moral weight, as though human worth can be divined through careful examination of work product, both professional and personal. The more practical questions of productivity are no less freighted with anxiety. Are you doing enough to hold on to your job? To improve your marriage? To raise well-adjusted kids? To maintain your health? What can you change in order to do more? Anxiety breeds products, and the tech industry’s obsession with personal optimization in particular has yielded a bounty of them in the past decade or two: digital calendars that send you push notifications about your daily schedule. Platforms that reimagine your life as a series of project-management issues. Planners as thick as encyclopedias that encourage you to set daily intentions and monthly priorities. Self-help books that cobble together specious principles of behavioral psychology to teach you the secrets of actually using all of the stuff you’ve bought in order to optimize your waking …