In the heated jungles of Central America in the early 1900s, thousands of workers toiled in the rain and mud trying to cleave Panama in half in order to join the Pacific Ocean with the Caribbean Sea. The difficult, dirty work involved more than digging and dynamiting, though. Working on the Panama Canal in the early days was about simply surviving.

The COP26 international climate-change negotiations have just begun in Glasgow, Scotland, and the vibes are … ambivalent. The leaders of Russia and China haven’t bothered to attend, but did promise to help end deforestation by 2030—though many observers are skeptical that they will keep their word. In the United States, President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan lost a powerful provision that would have helped convert the nation’s electricity grid to renewable energy, but still includes an unprecedented $555 billion to combat climate change. //

Brian O’Neill, the director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute, a partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Maryland at College Park, has a clearer view of this question than most of us. He was one of the lead architects of the five different futures—called “shared socioeconomic pathways,” or SSPs—developed for the latest IPCC report. //

The path we seem to be on, at least for now, looks closer to SSP 2, which the authors call “Middle of the Road.” This is a world in which “social, economic, and technological trends do not shift markedly from historical patterns.” A world, in other words, in which we do not heroically rise to the occasion to fix things, but in which we also don’t get much worse than we already are. //

One thing he wants to make very clear is that all the paths, even the hottest ones, show improvements in human well-being on average. IPCC scientists expect that average life expectancy will continue to rise, that poverty and hunger rates will continue to decline, and that average incomes will go up in every single plausible future, simply because they always have. “There isn’t, you know, like a Mad Max scenario among the SSPs,” O’Neill said. Climate change will ruin individual lives and kill individual people, and it may even drag down rates of improvement in human well-being, but on average, he said, “we’re generally in the climate-change field not talking about futures that are worse than today.” //

But the world we are heading toward may be one in which the average human is living longer and making more money than ever, but some vulnerable humans and many nonhumans are collateral damage.

This is why many climate activists frame global warming as a problem of justice.

Australian startup Gelion is seeking to commercialize a non-flow zinc-bromide battery based on a stable gel replacing a flowing electrolyte. According to the manufacturer, the device is safe, robust and recyclable. //

but when the company began its deep design studies with an undisclosed global partner during the pandemic, it arrived at the conclusion the smartest way to commercialize the Endure battery would be to switch the design to a parallel plate lead-acid format.

The battery is described as suitable for for irrigation, water purification and desalination systems, remote communities, mining facilities and agriculture.

Two things preceded this decision. The first was the complexity of building new manufacturing capability, and the second was the fact access to capital for such an endeavor is effectively hamstrung in Australia due to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation’s rules.

“If you want to produce something in a factory here, you need to have a factory reference plant the same size or bigger that has been operating for two years and that allows you to have full emissions data of the factory. That means you can never build a new factory here for new technology because you’ve got to prove it somewhere and you can’t prove it here,” said Maschmeyer. “If you can hook onto something that already exists, it’s much better …"

The case comes from New York and is called New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. This is a thumbnail sketch of the issue. For 108 years, the state of New York has severely curtailed the ability of ordinary citizens to carry concealed weapons outside their homes. New York follows what is called a “may issue” standard for obtaining a license to carry your weapon. What that means is that to carry a firearm outside your home, you must convince some state apparatchik that you have a “proper cause” to do so. //

The main arguments of the left seemed to revolve around the fear that New York was much more violent than the 41 “shall issue” states. //

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. pointed out that constitutional rights do not have to be justified, such as the Second Amendment right to bear arms. “The Constitution gives you that right,” Roberts said. “And if someone’s going to take it away from you, they have to justify it.” //

Roberts responded: “I’m not sure that’s right. I mean, regardless of what the right is, it would be surprising to have it depend upon a permit system. You can say that the right is limited in the particular way, just as First Amendment rights are limited. But the idea that you need a license to exercise the right, I think, is unusual in the context of the Bill of Rights.”

Research has found that having children is terrible for quality of life—but the truth about what parenthood means for happiness is a lot more complicated. //

The early research is decisive: Having kids is bad for quality of life. In one study, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues asked about 900 employed women to report, at the end of each day, every one of their activities and how happy they were when they did them. They recalled being with their children as less enjoyable than many other activities, such as watching TV, shopping, or preparing food. Other studies find that when a child is born, parents experience a decrease in happiness that doesn’t go away for a long time, in addition to a drop in marital satisfaction that doesn’t usually recover until the children leave the house. As the Harvard professor Dan Gilbert puts it, “The only symptom of empty nest syndrome is nonstop smiling.” //

The attachment we have to an individual can supersede an overall decrease in our quality of life, and so the love we usually have toward our children means that our choice to bring them into existence has value above and beyond whatever effect they have on our happiness.

This relates to a second point, which is that there’s more to life than happiness. When I say that raising my sons is the best thing I’ve ever done, I’m not saying that they gave me pleasure in any simple day-to-day sense, and I’m not saying that they were good for my marriage. I’m talking about something deeper, having to do with satisfaction, purpose, and meaning. It’s not just me. When you ask people about their life’s meaning and purpose, parents say that their lives have more meaning than those of nonparents. A study by the social psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues found that the more time people spent taking care of children, the more meaningful they said their life was—even though they reported that their life was no happier. //

Raising children, then, has an uncertain connection to pleasure but may connect to other aspects of a life well lived, satisfying our hunger for attachment, and for meaning and purpose. The writer Zadie Smith puts it better than I ever could, describing having a child as a “strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight.” Smith, echoing the thoughts of everyone else who has seriously considered these issues, points out the risk of close attachments: “Isn’t it bad enough that the beloved, with whom you have experienced genuine joy, will eventually be lost to you? Why add to this nightmare the child, whose loss, if it ever happened, would mean nothing less than your total annihilation?” But this annihilation reflects the extraordinary value of such attachments; as the author Julian Barnes writes of grief, quoting a friend, “It hurts just as much as it is worth.”. ///

Seriously?? Something is wrong if this is the case!