These are the CASSE blog articles on materials use.
In counties across the U.S.—rural and urban, democrat and republican—communities are living up close and personal with data centers. And the new neighbor is a real nightmare.
The number of data centers in the U.S., whether planned, under construction, or operating, is 3,897. This is by far the most anywhere in the world, and the number is increasing weekly.
We are hitting our heads on the ceiling of limits to growth.
In cap-and-trade systems, the government places a “cap,” or limit, typically on pollution or resource extraction. The amount of pollution or extraction is then divided into “allowances,” which are allocated to the polluting or extracting corporations. These corporations can trade their unused allowances in the marketplace.
Cap-and-trade policies promise significant abatement at an optimally low cost. But does experience with cap-and-trade systems vindicate this promise?
The United States and other countries have tested a variety of cap-and-trade systems.
Twenty years ago, visionary economist Herman Daly exhorted the readers of Scientific American to create new ways of thinking towards a sustainable economy:
“The global economy is now so large that society can no longer safely pretend it operates within a limitless ecosystem. Developing an economy that can be sustained within the finite biosphere requires new ways of thinking.”
We live in an age defined by contradiction. On one hand, the climate crisis demands urgent and systemic action. On the other hand, we are more connected to a digital world that profits—at great ecological cost—from our distraction, desires, and deeply human need to belong.
This tension is constant and personal for many Gen Z users, who overwhelmingly identify with sustainability as a lifestyle and a moral imperative.
Apple, Cargill, Walmart, United Airlines, Chevron, BlackRock, Starbucks, Ford Motor Company, Amazon, McDonald’s, Sotheby’s…What do they all have in common? They are among many megacorporations that fund Conservation International, one of the most prominent conservation foundations in the world. World Wildlife Fund and the Conservation Fund, also conservation powerhouses, have similar though less expansive funder profiles.
Walmart and BlackRock are two of the world’s top deforestation perpetrators.
Housing in the United States (and in many other nations) is plagued by many problems and shortcomings. Among the most critical are increasingly unaffordable prices and bewildering geographic cost variations. Connected to these are additional problems associated with forced sprawl, the needless destruction of vital ecosystems, and labor market rigidity.
The residential cost problem is paramount and can no longer be dismissed as a predicament limited to isolated markets.
When I say “gold mining,” what comes to mind? Perhaps you think of the 19th-century gold rush, with prospectors in suspenders swinging pickaxes and panning for gold in rivers. Maybe you envision industrialized mining, with terraced pits and heavy machinery. A visit to the Peruvian Amazon, where gold mining has surged in recent decades, transformed my perception of gold mining and miners.
I have the privilege of advising a team of Notre Dame master’s students—diverse in origins and expertise—as they work alongside a Peruvian NGO,
Is it just our filter bubbles? Or is an understanding of the environmental impact of artificial intelligence (AI) slowly making its way into the mainstream? Recently, a spate of news stories have highlighted the hefty environmental footprint of AI. Take for instance this recent article by the Washington Post on the hidden water footprint of using AI chatbots. Or this article by The Guardian on how the greenhouse gas emissions of data centers may be almost eight times higher than large technology companies like Google or Microsoft will acknowledge.
What is your reaction when you hear the tagline “city with the highest GDP per capita in the United States”? Perhaps you would like to live in that city. Perhaps you think it sets a positive example for other cities. If so, you are not alone. Corporate and political leaders have been prioritizing economic growth for decades, and this mindset has trickled down until it has saturated the public.
The problem is that there is a fundamental conflict between economic growth and environmental protection.
Here’s some bad news for folks who see a circular economy as a way out of the polycrisis: Trends in global materials use, which recently bent modestly in the direction of circular flows, are flattening once again. The Circle Economy Foundation in Amsterdam reported in January that secondary materials amounted to only 7.2 percent of all materials in the global economy in 2023, down from 9.1 percent in 2018.
