Throwing rubbish in a landfill is (usually) better for the environment than recycling it. With few exceptions, recycling ends up emitting more CO2 and costing more money, while landfills are cheap and secure. - Recycling mid-tier plastics (like plastic bottles or butter tubs) costs thousands of dollars per ton of CO2 saved. It's cheaper to do direct air CO2 capture than that! And there is no shortage of plastic, nor any problem with sequestering it in the ground once we're done with it. - Modern landfills are extraordinarily secure and are *much* more than just big piles of trash. They capture 75%–95% of methane gas. Groundwater contamination is doesn't really happen with landfills built since 1990. A study of 31 landfills built since 1988 in NY found no adverse effect at all on local groundwater quality. - The crusade against single-use plastics has driven us to products that use far more materials and energy and would need to be used an absurd number of times to actually be an improvement. A steel straw needs to be used 150 times to be worth using. A ceramic mug needs to be used 1,000 times to beat a polystyrene cup. A cotton bag needs to be reused 173 times to beat single-use. - Some things ARE worth recycling. Recycling metal saves a huge amount of energy and material – recycling aluminium saves 95% of the energy spent on making fresh stuff. So we do a lot of it already: about 30% of steel worldwide is recycled. Modern, well-run landfills cause minimal environmental damage. We have plenty of space for them – less than 0.01% of the US is used for landfill and only about 0.02% of Germany. We can even build on top of old landfills, so the land area is not spent permanently. New in @WorksInProgMag, @robertwiblin and @chalmermagne on why it's usually best to just bury your trash.

American mass transit tries to do everything except attract riders with a reliable and efficient service. Bikeshare services are charged with reducing emissions and improving local air quality. Subway stations need to be architecturally striking. Buses are made to add union jobs. This drives up costs and reduces frequency, which makes buses significantly less attractive to use. It also fails at achieving its goals. California’s programmes to reduce carbon emissions by mandating electric buses actually RAISED them compared to a counterfactual of buses running on gas, because the electric buses were more expensive and less reliable, and made for services that were less frequent and dependable, so people just drove instead. Focusing on increasing the efficiency and reliability of transit would reduce emissions more, by switching people away from driving to using public transport. This has parallels with other policy areas. Trying to make electricity as green as possible has made electrification slower and more expensive, when moving people to heat pumps and electric vehicles would be a huge improvement in CO2 terms even if the electricity had been 100% generated by fossil fuels. Again and again, optimising for one core thing produces better outcomes across the board than trying to do everything all at once. New at Works in Progress, the everything theory of transportation.

Almost the entire world was colonised by European powers in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Siam (now Thailand) was one of the only countries that resisted successfully. It did so in one of history’s biggest PR victories and state capacity-building efforts: the ‘siwilai’ modernisation campaign – its equivalent of the Meiji Restoration – in which the trappings of European civilization were adopted to turn the imperial ‘civilizing mission’ on its head: - Siam hired Belgian lawyers to redesign its laws and royal court along European lines, which worked to stop European powers from claiming that their subjects should be exempt from Siamese laws, a common tactic for creating pretexts for invasion. - They brought in German military advisors and replaced traditional noble levies with a standing army and a professional officer corps designed on Prussian lines. - The state adopted the Gregorian calendar, 24-hour days, censuses, fixed borders, railways, and discouraged betel-nut chewing and promoted wearing Western dress. - Siam’s king Mongkut spoke English and Latin, was a student of Western science and technology, and maintained a library containing everything from scientific works to Sir Walter Scott novels. - The royal heirs were sent to Eton and European military colleges. The king negotiated with British diplomats in English over wine and cigars, in a library filled with scientific texts and Walter Scott novels. By 1907, Le Figaro was comparing Siam with post-Meiji Japan and telling its readers that Siam’s king had the dignity of a European king. The story has been made famous in The King and I, but how it actually happened is not well understood in the West. From the new issue of Works in Progress, how Siam Europeanised itself in just a few decades, divided the coalitions that drove imperialism in Europe, and managed to stand against some of history’s most fearsome imperial powers and win.

One of the things I really like about Americans is how often they'll strike up conversation with you as a stranger. It's usually about something pretty substantive as well, like their favourite thing to order at the restaurant you're queuing for or what they've been doing that day. It just makes daily life much more interesting and varied over there.

Would you rather drink one beer every evening for a year, or drink 365 beers in one evening? All of nuclear power 'safety' regulation is built on the idea that, when the same question comes to radiation, there's no difference. But the empirical evidence is overwhelming that the body repairs small amounts of damage caused by ionising radiation in the same way it repairs damage from other small harms. If this is correct it would mean that the "unsafe at any dose" philosophy that has underpinned the regulation of nuclear energy since the 1970s is wrong. It is premature to conclude that yet: we need more evidence. But if that further research does confirm what the existing evidence suggests, then nuclear power is much, much more expensive than it needs to be, even in places like South Korea that build cheaply, and nuclear power could be cheaper than any other form of electricity. We could go much further than, say, the Fingleton Review or the mainstream proposals for reform that are on the table in the United States. We could have a new atomic age in which the "too cheap to meter" dream was realised.

Almost every single person on Earth lives with rats. Only 5 million people out of 8 billion live rat free. They are the Albertans. Alberta is the only significantly human-inhabited place on Earth that is rat free. It achieved this in the 1950s as rats invaded from the East, by introducing a rodent surveillance state, obliging every citizen of the province to report them and terminating any sightings with extreme prejudice. They laid 63,000 kg of arsenic across a 600-kilometre-long, 29-kilometre-wide Rat Control Zone along the province's Eastern border. Back then, rats were so unfamiliar in Alberta that officials distributed preserved rat corpses to teach people what the enemy looked like. One pest-control officer held public meetings at which he ate warfarin-soaked oatmeal to show it was safe. And it worked! They held rats off and numbers remained so low that the surveillance and eradication system could keep numbers at essentially zero for years, at extremely low costs – Alberta spends about 11 cents per resident on rat control measures, much less than neighbouring provinces that are infested. Today, Albertans have grown so unfamiliar with rats that they frequently mistake squirrels, gophers, and other small animals for them: of 875 reported sightings in 2025, only 47 turned out to be actual rats. Pet rats are banned, vehicles entering Alberta are checked, and sightings are responded to with overwhelming force. Could the rest of the world manage it? Probably not. The secret was to stop them before they could establish themselves. For the rest of us, we probably need gene drives. Read the story of how Alberta won the war on rats at Works in Progress now.