Paul Will
Paul Will
ocean ideas iron
I kind of like carbon taxes because we already know how to apply them. We already have apparatus in place. When we talk about these other solutions - like a billion tons of iron filings in the ocean or putting sunshades between us and the sun - they're huge. We have no idea if they will work. We have no idea what their nasty consequences might be. And it's unlikely we can do them anyway.
religious war population-problem
Solving the population problem is not going to solve the problems of racism... of sexism... of religious intolerance... of war... of gross economic inequality But if you don't solve the population problem, you're not going to solve any of those problems. Whatever problem you're interested in, you're not going to solve it unless you also solve the population problem. Whatever your cause, it's a lost cause without population control.
recovery people way
I see harm reduction as a way of engaging people as part of that path to recovery.
technology thinking years
Sometimes I think the Congress feels that if you only decided tomorrow to switch to wind power that in two years we'd be getting 80 percent of our electricity from wind power. It's nonsense. Normally it takes 20 to 30 years after a new technology is demonstrated and deployed before it powers even 15 or 20 percent of the grid. There's this long lag time, and we haven't even decided which directions to go.
teaching knowing giving
Stanford may be the best university in the world, but you can get all the way through here without knowing where your food came from, without being able to say where we came from, without being able to give a coherent description of why the climate is changing and why we should be concerned about it. So I started teaching a course in human evolution and the environment that's open to all Stanford students, no prerequisites.
two choices population
There's no question at all that the population explosion will come to an end. The two basic choices are it'll come to an end because we control our reproduction, and in many areas we have started to do so, or we'll end up with a high death rate. You have to take a personal moral stand on this.
views recycling environment
We know that if you have $20 million, it's better to buy a van Gough print than it is buy an executive jet, from the point of view of the environment. But when you start getting down, it's like the recycling question: What are things we can really afford to do, and how much pleasure do we get out of them? We haven't even started to have that discussion, and it's getting awfully late.
technology design reassuring
The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.
asceticism handwriting calligraphy
I never did calligraphy... But handwriting is an entirely different kind of thing. It's part of the syndrome of modernism... It's part of that asceticism.
design-process creative forget
So that is the design process or the creative process. Start with a problem, forget the problem, the problem reveals itself or the solution reveals itself and then you reevaulate it. This is what you are doing all the time.
asking-questions good-questions answers
Good questions outrank easy answers.
greed intriguing materialism
An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.
europe doe united-states
Companies are not charitable enterprises: They hire workers to make profits. In the United States, this logic still works. In Europe, it hardly does.
investing logic wells
Perhaps there really are managers who can outperform the market consistently - logic would suggest that they exist. But they are remarkably well-hidden.