Claims

Battery metals face gridlock: environmental advocates want green energy transition but also oppose mining, creating competing pressures that make it costly, time-consuming, and uncertain whether new battery metal projects will come online in workable timeframes, unlike copper which has universal demand.

Deep sea mining is underrated in terms of potential mineral endowment, but overrated as investment because environmental movement political power will block development, making it unwise to fight that battle when terrestrial alternatives exist.

A forest naturally self-organizes to criticality: if domains become too large, one fire burns them out and restores balance; if no fires occur, forest becomes too thick and becomes ripe for massive fires; this feedback mechanism drives the system toward the critical state without external tuning.

The 1988 Yellowstone fire was not caused by special conditions; it merged with other small fires to create megafires covering 1.4 million acres (70x larger than previous record, 50x larger than all fires in previous 15 years combined)—demonstrating that catastrophic events can emerge from typical conditions in critical systems.

The 1995 Kobe earthquake (January 17) released stress along 40 km of the Nojima fault line, shifted ground by up to 2 meters, released energy equivalent of numerous atomic bombs, destroyed thousands of homes and major infrastructure, killed over 6,000 people, and forced 300,000 from their homes.

In domains with fat-tail distributions or high uncertainty, the precautionary principle should guide action: avoid actions with unbounded downside even if you don't fully understand the mechanism; the variance of climate model predictions is more informative than their means.

Troilus is re-routing an existing diversion channel (straightened arrow) in a way that creates a more naturalistic, restored channel with migrations and spawning areas, done in collaboration with Cree partners and approved by them, actually improving on the original channel rather than degrading it.

Although environmental crisis and climate change pose serious challenges to liberalism's dependence on economic growth, authoritarian regimes also need growth and will emit as much carbon as liberal ones—China is the major carbon emitter between now and 2050 despite being authoritarian, so regime type doesn't solve the environmental challenge.

There is more forest in the northern hemisphere now than there was 100 years ago, and the ecological news is less dismal than catastrophists suggest, though there are real problems (like ocean degradation) that require attention.