Claims

Bioplastics require less fossil fuels to produce than traditional plastics, contain fewer toxic chemicals, and decompose faster, but they require special industrial facilities to properly compost and can contaminate the regular recycling stream.

Floral waste makes up only about 16 percent of pollution that runs into the Ganges, with harmful chemicals, open sewer drainage, and garbage running directly into the river, which is a growing danger for the more than 400 million people that rely on the river for drinking water.

Anaerobic digesters contain bacteria that operate in the absence of oxygen and eat food waste to produce methane and carbon dioxide, allowing the capture of gases that would otherwise be released during landfill decomposition.

Any organic material emits methane and carbon dioxide as it decomposes, and the massive amount of food waste in landfills makes them the third largest source of human-caused methane emissions, just behind fossil fuels and agriculture.

It can take up to 12 years for an embalmed body to fully turn into a skeleton, but soft tissues release toxic chemicals and microbes after only a few months, and traditional coffins contain preservatives, paint, and metal handles that can leach into soil and water.

Environmental problems have been solved historically through technological and policy changes (elimination of CFCs for ozone, unleaded gasoline for lead pollution, sulfur dioxide regulation for acid rain, coal regulation in China for particulate pollution), not through population reduction.

China's particulate air pollution (PM 2.5) fell by approximately 50% in the decade following 2013 (the 'air apocalypse' year) despite the Chinese population growing by 50 million people, demonstrating that population growth and environmental improvement can coincide.

The growing megaslump's runoff has made the river water unsuitable for drinking, affecting the residents in Batagay and clogging the waterway down to the sea it drains into.

Geoengineering (solar radiation management) is a technological approach to combat climate warming by placing reflective particles in the stratosphere, inspired by volcanic eruptions which temporarily cool the planet—Mount Pinatubo in 1991 changed global temperatures by 1-1.8 degrees Fahrenheit for approximately one year before particles fell out.

Ecological/environmental problems are rapidly solved when they are localized in space, localized in time, and responsibility is easy to trace (Love Canal, acid rain, smog in Los Angeles)—but climate change represents the worst case scenario because it is diffuse globally, occurs over decades to centuries, and causation is distributed across all economic actors, making rapid collective action nearly impossible.

Natural gas is worse for climate than coal when accounting for methane leakage in extraction and transport, because methane has 120x the global warming impact of CO2 in the first year after release, and does not require very much leakage to make natural gas worse than coal overall—contradicting the gas industry's claim that burning natural gas produces half the emissions of coal.

Climate physics creates an irreversible lag: even if humans stopped all CO2 emissions immediately on day one, the climate would continue warming for approximately 85-110 years, then take another 145 years to return to baseline temperatures—meaning that by the time society panics about climate change and reduces emissions, centuries of additional warming are already locked in by past emissions.

The mechanism of atmospheric warming is that visible sunlight passes through the atmosphere and heats the Earth's surface, which emits infrared radiation, and CO2 and other greenhouse gases trap some of this infrared radiation in the atmosphere—a tiny effect (roughly 1% of solar energy) but compounding annually, analogous to how ATM fees are small but compound to make banks rich.

Early electric vehicles charged on the Eastern US electrical grid actually increase climate harm rather than reduce it because the grid is primarily powered by fossil fuels, though Washington State EVs have lower climate impact due to nuclear and hydroelectric generation—demonstrating that EV climate benefit is location-dependent on electrical grid composition.

Unlike pandemic or military emergencies where rapid response can immediately stop new harm (new infections, battlefield casualties), climate change has a multi-century lag where stopping emissions today only stops future warming increases, but past warming persists—making climate uniquely intractable to emergency response because action today cannot remedy past emission consequences.

When used as fertilizers, biosolids have been shown to improve soil health, reduce nutrient loss, and increase the amount of water soil can retain.

Ammonia is toxic to small fish and larger fish that live in waterways, and converting it to less toxic forms like nitrate and nitrite allows wildlife to tolerate the discharged water much better.

Industrial ecology and McGilchrist's hemispheric theory are deeply connected because industrial ecology emphasizes systemic, holistic understanding of energy and material flows, which requires the right-hemisphere view McGilchrist advocates.

The visualization of nightlights on Earth taken from space shows the burning of stored energy concentrated in cities, and has grown exponentially since 1840, illustrating both the energy intensity of urban civilization and the inevitability of atmospheric warming from this energy consumption.