The Ministry for the Future

Jevons Paradox proposes that increases in efficiency in the use of a resource lead to an overall increase in the use of that resource, not a decrease.

Another chart graphed individual happiness in relation to personal wealth, and as so often that week, and in life generally, it was another damn bell curve. This one showed that poverty made for unhappiness, duh, then people got quickly happier once adequacy was reached; then, at a high middle class income, the very income that scientists usually demanded for themselves— having studied their own graphs maybe, the guy next to me muttered darkly, as if to imply they were rigging either their study or the system of compensation, or both— you got the highest happiness; then, as wealth rose, happiness decreased— not to the level of the poorest people, but far below the happiness of the middle peak.

Constipation is a bitch. Sometimes you just have to sit on the box and push harder.

And really, if these projects didn’t succeed, what would follow was so dire to contemplate that the efforts were judged worth making, miniscule or not.

Arctic permafrost contained as much stored methane as all the Earth’s cattle would create and emit over six centuries, and this giant burp, if released, would almost certainly push Earth over an irreversible tipping point into jungle planet mode, completely ice-free; at which point sea level would be 110 meters higher than at present, with global average temperatures at least 5 or 6 degrees Celsius higher and probably more, rendering great stretches of the Earth uninhabitable by humans

If at first you don’t succeed—
You’ll never get funded again.

I think the principle was set at Nuremberg— you’re wrong to obey orders that are wrong.”

“We are the Ministry for the Future,” Estevan insisted to her, “not the ministry to solve all possible problems that can be solved now. We have to pick our battles or else it becomes just an everything.”

had become a glaciologist to indulge his introverted personality while still holding down a job

The three richest people in the world possess more financial assets than all the people in the forty-eight poorest countries added togethe