The other major reason for the poor, and declining, understanding of those fundamental processes that deliver energy (as food or as fuels) and durable materials (whether metals, non-metallic minerals, or concrete) is that they have come to be seen as old-fashioned—if not outdated—and distinctly unexciting compared to the world of information, data, and images. The proverbial best minds do not go into soil science and do not try their hand at making better cement; instead they are attracted to dealing with disembodied information, now just streams of electrons in myriads of microdevices. From lawyers and economists to code writers and money managers, their disproportionately high rewards are for work completely removed from the material realities of life on earth.
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none of us will live in a dematerialized world that has no use for such irreplaceable natural services as evaporating water or pollinating plants. But delivering these existential necessities will be an increasingly challenging task, because a large share of humanity lives in conditions that the affluent minority left behind generations ago, and because the growing demand for energy and materials has been stressing the biosphere so much and so fast that we have imperiled its capability to keep its flows and stores within the boundaries compatible with its long-term functioning.
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To give just a single key comparison, in 2020 the average annual per capita energy supply of about 40 percent of the world’s population (3.1 billion people, which includes nearly all people in sub-Saharan Africa) was no higher than the rate achieved in both Germany and France in 1860! In order to approach the threshold of a dignified standard of living, those 3.1 billion people will need at least to double—but preferably triple—their per capita energy use, and in doing so multiply their electricity supply, boost their food production, and build essential urban, industrial, and transportation infrastructures. Inevitably, these demands will subject the biosphere to further degradation.
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(highlight:: those who prefer mantras of green solutions to understanding how we have come to this point, the prescription is easy: just decarbonize—switch from burning fossil carbon to converting inexhaustible flows of renewable energies. The real wrench in the works: we are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years.
Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat, or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near-miraculous technical advances.)
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Rather than resorting to an ancient comparison of foxes and hedgehogs (a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing), I tend to think about modern scientists as either the drillers of ever-deeper holes (now the dominant route to fame) or scanners of wide horizons (now a much-diminished group.
Drilling the deepest possible hole and being an unsurpassed master of a tiny sliver of the sky visible from its bottom has never appealed to me.)
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- [note::Love the phrasing of this]

Between 1950 and 2020 the United States roughly doubled the per capita useful energy provided by fossil fuels and primary electricity (to about 150 gigajoules); in Japan the rate had more than quintupled (to nearly 80 GJ/capita), and China saw an astounding, more than 120-fold, increase (to nearly 50 GJ/capita).[18|18]
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Tracing the trajectory of useful energy deployment is so revealing because energy is not just another component in the complex structures of the biosphere, human societies, and their economies, nor just another variable in intricate equations determining the evolution of these interacting systems. Energy conversions are the very basis of life and evolution. Modern history can be seen as an unusually rapid sequence of transitions to new energy sources, and the modern world is the cumulative result of their conversions.
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more recently, physicist Robert Ayres has repeatedly stressed in his writings the central notion of energy in all economies: “the economic system is essentially a system for extracting, processing and transforming energy as resources into energy embodied in products and services.”[23|23] Simply put, energy is the only truly universal currency, and nothing (from galactic rotations to ephemeral insect lives) can take place without its transformations.[24|24]
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Given all of these readily verifiable realities, it is hard to understand why modern economics, that body of explanations and precepts whose practitioners exercise more influence on public policy than any other experts, has largely ignored energy. As Ayres noted, economics does not only lack any systematic awareness of energy’s importance for the physical process of production, but it assumes “that energy doesn’t matter (much) because the cost share of energy in the economy is so small that it can be ignored . . . as if output could be produced by labor and capital alone—or as if energy is merely a form of man-made capital that can be produced (as opposed to extracted) by labor and capital.”[25|25]
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The first law of thermodynamics states that no energy is ever lost during conversions: be that chemical to chemical when digesting food; chemical to mechanical when moving muscles; chemical to thermal when burning natural gas; thermal to mechanical when rotating a turbine; mechanical to electrical in a generator; or electrical to electromagnetic as light illuminates the page you are reading. However, all energy conversions eventually result in dissipated low-temperature heat: no energy has been lost, but its utility, its ability to perform useful work, is gone (the second law of thermodynamics).[31|31]
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(highlight:: There are many choices available when it comes to energy conversions, some far better than others. The high densities of chemical energy in kerosene and diesel fuel are great for intercontinental flying and shipping, but if you want your submarine to stay submerged while crossing the Pacific Ocean then the best choice is to fission enriched uranium in a small reactor in order to produce electricity.[32|32] And back on land, large nuclear reactors are the most reliable producers of electricity: some of them now generate it 90–95 percent of the time, compared to about 45 percent for the best offshore wind turbines and 25 percent for photovoltaic cells in even the sunniest of climates—while Germany’s solar panels produce electricity only about 12 percent of the time.[33|33]
This is simple physics or electrical engineering, but it is remarkable how often these realities are ignored)
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Most recently, a poor understanding of energy has the proponents of a new green world naively calling for a near-instant shift from abominable, polluting, and finite fossil fuels to superior, green and ever-renewable solar electricity. But liquid hydrocarbons refined from crude oil (gasoline, aviation kerosene, diesel fuel, residual heavy oil) have the highest energy densities of all commonly available fuels, and hence they are eminently suitable for energizing all modes of transportation. Here is a density ladder (all rates in gigajoules per ton): air-dried wood, 16; bituminous coal (depending on quality), 24–30; kerosene and diesel fuels, about 46. In volume terms (all rates in gigajoules per cubic meter), energy densities are only about 10 for wood, 26 for good coal, 38 for kerosene. Natural gas (methane) contains only 35 MJ/m3—or less than 1/1,000 of kerosene’s density.[36|36]
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the advantages of liquid fuels go far beyond high energy density. Unlike coal, crude oil is much easier to produce (no need to send miners underground or scar landscapes with large open pits), store (in tanks or underground—because of oil’s much higher energy density, any enclosed space can typically store 75 percent more energy as a liquid fuel than as coal), and distribute (intercontinentally by tankers and by pipelines, the safest mode of long-distance mass transfer), and hence it is readily available on demand.[37|37]
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(highlight:: Crude oil needs refining to separate the complex mixture of hydrocarbons into specific fuels—gasoline being the lightest; residual fuel oil the heaviest—but this process yields more valuable fuels for specific uses, and it also produces indispensable non-fuel products such as lubricants.
Lubricants are needed to minimize friction in everything from the massive turbofan engines in wide-body jetliners to miniature bearings.[38|38] Globally, the automotive sector, now with more than 1.4 billion vehicles on the road, is the largest consumer, followed by use in industry—with the largest markets being textiles, energy, chemicals, and food processing—and in ocean-going vessels. Annual use of these compounds now surpasses 120 megatons (for comparison, global output of all edible oils, from olive to soybean, is now about 200 megatons a year), and because the available alternatives—synthetic lubricants made from simpler, but still often oil-based, compounds rather than those derived directly from crude oil—are more expensive, this demand will grow further as these industries expand around the world.)
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Another product derived from crude oil is asphalt. Global output of this black and sticky material is now on the order of 100 megatons, with 85 percent of it going to paving (hot and warm asphalt mixes) and most of the rest to roofing.[39|39] And hydrocarbons have yet another indispensable non-fuel use: as feedstocks for many different chemical syntheses (dominated by ethane, propane, and butane from natural gas liquids) producing a variety of synthetic fibers, resins, adhesives, dyes, paints and coatings, detergents, and pesticides, all vital in myriad ways to our modern world.[40|40] Given these advantages and benefits, it was predictable—indeed unavoidable—that our dependence on crude oil would grow once the product became more affordable and once it could be reliably delivered on a global scale.
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And even in this era of high-tech electronic miracles, it is still impossible to store electricity affordably in quantities sufficient to meet the demand of a medium-sized city (500,000 people) for only a week or two, or to supply a megacity (more than 10 million people) for just half a day.[51|51]
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If the COVID-19 pandemic brought disruption, anguish, and unavoidable deaths, those effects would be minor compared to having just a few days of a severely reduced electricity supply in any densely populated region, and if prolonged for weeks nationwide it would be a catastrophic event with unprecedented consequences.[70|70]
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There is no shortage of fossil fuel resources in the Earth’s crust, no danger of imminently running out of coal and hydrocarbons: at the 2020 level of production, coal reserves would last for about 120 years, oil and gas reserves for about 50 years, and continued exploration would transfer more of them from the resource to the reserve (technically and economically viable) category.
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even the European Union now recognizes that it could not come close to its extraordinarily ambitious decarbonization target without nuclear reactors. Its 2050 net-zero emissions scenarios set aside the decades-long stagnation and neglect of the nuclear industry, and envisage up to 20 percent of all energy consumption coming from nuclear fission.[78|78] Notice that this refers to total primary energy consumption, not just to electricity. Electricity is only 18 percent of total final global energy consumption, and the decarbonization of more than 80 percent of final energy uses—by industries, households, commerce, and transportation—will be even more challenging than the decarbonization of electricity generation. Expanded electricity generation can be used for space heating and by many industrial processes now relying on fossil fuels, but the course of decarbonizing modern long-distance transportation remains unclear.
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Turbofan engines powering jetliners burn fuel whose energy density is 46 megajoules per kilogram (that’s nearly 12,000 watt-hours per kilogram), converting chemical to thermal and kinetic energy—while today’s best Li-ion batteries supply less than 300 Wh/kg, more than a 40-fold difference.[79|79] Admittedly, electric motors are roughly twice as efficient energy converters as gas turbines, and hence the effective density gap is “only” about 20-fold. But during the past 30 years the maximum energy density of batteries has roughly tripled, and even if we were to triple that again densities would still be well below 3,000 Wh/kg in 2050—falling far short of taking a wide-body plane from New York to Tokyo or from Paris to Singapore, something we have been doing daily for decades with kerosene-fueled Boeings and Airbuses.[80|80]
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we have no readily deployable commercial-scale alternatives for energizing the production of the four material pillars of modern civilization solely by electricity. This means that even with an abundant and reliable renewable electricity supply, we would have to develop new large-scale processes to produce steel, ammonia, cement, and plastics.
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Annual global demand for fossil carbon is now just above 10 billion tons a year—a mass nearly five times more than the recent annual harvest of all staple grains feeding humanity, and more than twice the total mass of water drunk annually by the world’s nearly 8 billion inhabitants—and it should be obvious that displacing and replacing such a mass is not something best handled by government targets for years ending in zero or five. Both the high relative share and the scale of our dependence on fossil carbon make any rapid substitutions impossible: this is not a biased personal impression stemming from a poor understanding of the global energy system – but a realistic conclusion based on engineering and economic realities.
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Certainly, the affluent world—given its wealth, technical capabilities, high level of per capita consumption and the concomitant level of waste—can take some impressive and relatively rapid decarbonization steps (to put it bluntly, it should do with using less energy of any kind). But that is not the case with the more than 5 billion people whose energy consumption is a fraction of those affluent levels, who need much more ammonia to raise their crop yields to feed their increasing populations, and much more steel and cement and plastics to build their essential infrastructures. What we need is to pursue a steady reduction of our dependence on the energies that made the modern world. We still do not know most of the particulars of this coming transition, but one thing remains certain: it will not be (it cannot be) a sudden abandonment of fossil carbon, nor even its rapid demise—but rather its gradual decline.[85|85]
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The United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates that the worldwide share of undernourished people decreased from about 65 percent in 1950 to 25 percent by 1970, and to about 15 percent by the year 2000. Continued improvements (with fluctuations caused by temporary national or regional setbacks due to natural disasters or armed conflicts) lowered the rate to 8.9 percent by 2019—which means that rising food production reduced the malnutrition rate from 2 in 3 people in 1950 to 1 in 11 by 2019.[4|4]
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People everywhere will point out the combustion of liquid fuels that power most of our transportation but the modern world’s most important—and fundamentally existential—dependence on fossil fuels is their direct and indirect use in the production of our food. Direct use includes fuels to power all field machinery (mostly tractors, combines, and other harvesters), the transportation of harvests from fields to storage and processing sites, and irrigation pumps. Indirect use is much broader, taking into account the fuels and electricity used to produce agricultural machinery, fertilizers, and agrochemicals (herbicides, insecticides, fungicides), and other inputs ranging from glass and plastic sheets for greenhouses, to global positioning devices that enable precision farming.
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Many people nowadays admiringly quote the performance gains of modern computing (“so much data”) or telecommunication (“so much cheaper”)—but what about harvests? In two centuries, the human labor to produce a kilogram of American wheat was reduced from 10 minutes to less than two seconds. This is how our modern world really works. And as mentioned, I could have done similarly stunning reconstructions of falling labor inputs, rising yields, and soaring productivity for Chinese or Indian rice. The time frames would be different but the relative gains would be similar.
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(highlight:: Today, as ever, no harvests would be possible without Sun-driven photosynthesis, but the high yields produced with minimal labor inputs and hence with unprecedented low costs would be impossible without direct and indirect infusions of fossil energies. Some of these anthropogenic energy inputs are coming from electricity, which can be generated from coal or natural gas or renewables, but most of them are liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons supplied as machine fuels and raw materials.
Machines consume fossil energies directly as diesel or gasoline for field operations including the pumping of irrigation water from wells, for crop processing and drying, for transporting the harvests within the country by trucks, trains, and barges, and for overseas exports in the holds of large bulk carriers. Indirect energy use in making those machines is far more complex, as fossil fuels and electricity go into making not only the steel, rubber, plastics, glass, and electronics but also assembling these inputs to make tractors, implements, combines, trucks, grain dryers, and silos.[13|13])
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But the energy required to make and to power farm machinery is dwarfed by the energy requirements of producing agrochemicals. Modern farming requires fungicides and insecticides to minimize crop losses, and herbicides to prevent weeds from competing for the available plant nutrients and water. All of these are highly energy-intensive products but they are applied in relatively small quantities (just fractions of a kilogram per hectare.[14|14] In contrast, fertilizers that supply the three essential plant macronutrients—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—require less energy per unit of the final product but are needed in large quantities to ensure high crop yields.[15|15]
Potassium is the least costly to produce, as all it takes is potash (KCl) from surface or underground mines. Phosphatic fertilizers begin with the excavation of phosphates, followed by their processing to yield synthetic superphosphate compounds. Ammonia is the starting compound for making all synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers. Every crop of high-yielding wheat and rice, as well as of many vegetables, requires more than 100 (sometimes as much as 200) kilograms of nitrogen per hectare, and these high needs make the synthesis of nitrogenous fertilizers the most important indirect energy input in modern farming.[16|16])
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As a result, leguminous food crops, including soybeans, beans, peas, lentils, and peanuts, are able to provide (fix) their own nitrogen supply, as can such leguminous cover crops as alfalfa, clovers, and vetches. But no staple grains, no oil crops (except for soybeans and peanuts), and no tubers can do that. The only way for them to benefit from the nitrogen-fixing abilities of legumes is to rotate them with alfalfa, clovers, or vetches, grow these nitrogen fixers for a few months, and then plow them under so the soils are replenished with reactive nitrogen to be picked up by the succeeding wheat, rice, or potatoes.[18|18] In traditional agricultures, the only other option to enrich soil nitrogen stores was to collect and apply human and animal wastes. But this is an inherently laborious and inefficient way to supply the nutrient. These wastes have very low nitrogen content and they are subject to volatilization losses (the conversion of liquids to gases—the ammonia smell from manure can be overpowering).
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The minima of 300–350 mL/kg is a remarkably efficient performance compared to the rates of 210–250 mL/kg for bread, and this is reflected in the comparably affordable prices of chicken: in US cities, the average price of a kilogram of white bread is only about 5 percent lower than the average price per kilogram of whole chicken (and wholewheat bread is 35 percent more expensive!), while in France a kilogram of standard whole chicken costs only about 25 percent more than the average price of bread.[34|34] This helps to explain the rapid rise of chicken to become the dominant meat in all Western countries (globally, pork still leads, thanks to China’s enormous demand).
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This means that when bought in a Scandinavian supermarket, tomatoes from Almería’s heated plastic greenhouses have a stunningly high embedded production and transportation energy cost. Its total is equivalent to about 650 mL/kg, or more than five tablespoons (each containing 14.8 milliliters) of diesel fuel per medium-sized (125 gram) tomato!
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Capturing such plentiful pelagic (living near the surface) species as anchovies and sardines or mackerel can be done with a relatively small energy investment—indirectly in constructing ships and making large nets, directly in the diesel fuel used for ship engines. The best accounts show energy expenditures as low as 100 mL/kg for their capture, an equivalent of less than half a cup of diesel fuel.[42|42]
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If you want to eat wild fish with the lowest-possible fossil carbon footprint, stick to sardines. The mean for all seafood is stunningly high—700 mL/kg (nearly a full wine bottle of diesel fuel)—and the maxima for some wild shrimp and lobsters are, incredibly, more than 10 L/kg (and that includes a great deal of inedible shells!).[43|43] This means that just two skewers of medium-sized wild shrimp (total weight of 100 grams) may require 0.5–1 liters of diesel fuel to catch—the equivalent of 2–4 cups of fuel.
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Expanding aquaculture—whose total global output, freshwater and marine, is now closing in on the worldwide wild catch (in 2018 it was 82 million tons compared to 96 million tons of wild-caught species)—has eased the pressure on some overfished wild stocks of preferred carnivorous fishes, but it has intensified the exploitation of smaller herbivorous species whose growing harvests are needed to feed expanding aquaculture.[44|44] As a result, the energy costs of growing Mediterranean sea bass in cages (Greece and Turkey are its leading producers) are commonly equivalent to as much as 2–2.5 liters of diesel fuel per kilogram (a volume about the same as three bottles of wine)—that is, of the same order of magnitude as the energy costs of capturing similarly sized wild species.
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As expected, only aquacultured herbivorous fish that grow well consuming plant-based feed—most notably, different species of Chinese carp (bighead, silver, black, and grass carp are the most common)—have a low energy cost, typically less than 300 mL/kg. But, traditional Christmas Eve dinners in Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, and Poland aside, carp is quite an unpopular culinary choice in Europe and it is barely eaten in North America, while demand for tuna, some species of which are now among the most endangered top marine carnivores, has been soaring thanks to the rapid worldwide adoption of sushi.
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Our best data are available for the US, where, thanks to the prevalence of modern techniques and widespread economies of scale, the direct energy use in food production is now on the order of 1 percent of the total national supply.[47|47] But after adding the energy requirements of food processing and marketing, packaging, transportation, wholesale and retail services, household food storage and preparation, and away-from-home food and marketing services, the grand total in the US reached nearly 16 percent of the nation’s energy supply in 2007 and now it is approaching 20 percent.[48|48] The factors driving these rising energy needs range from further consolidation of production—and hence growing transportation needs—and growing food import dependency, to more meals eaten away from home and more prepared (convenience) foods consumed at home.[49|49]
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(highlight:: Can the world of soon-to-be 8 billion people feed itself—while maintaining a variety of crop and animal products and the quality of prevailing diets—without synthetic fertilizers and without other agrochemicals? Could we return to purely organic cropping, relying on recycled organic wastes and natural pest controls, and could we do without engine-powered irrigation and without field machinery by bringing back draft animals? We could, but purely organic farming would require most of us to abandon cities, resettle villages, dismantle central animal feeding operations, and bring all animals back to farms to use them for labor and as sources of manure.
Every day we would have to feed and water our animals, regularly remove their manure, ferment it and then spread it on fields, and tend the herds and flocks on pasture. As seasonal labor demands rose and ebbed, men would guide the plows harnessed to teams of horses; women and children would plant and weed vegetable plots; and everybody would be pitching in during harvest and slaughter time, stooking sheaves of wheat, digging up potatoes, helping to turn freshly slaughtered pigs and geese into food. I do not foresee the organic green online commentariat embracing these options anytime soon. And even if they were willing to empty the cities and embrace organic earthiness, they could still produce only enough food to sustain less than half of today’s global population.)
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- [note::Welp. This is unsettling.]

The decline of human labor required to produce American wheat outlined earlier in this chapter is an excellent proxy for the overall impact that mechanization and agrochemicals have had on the size of the country’s agricultural labor force. Between 1800 and 2020, we reduced the labor needed to produce a kilogram of grain by more than 98 percent—and we reduced the share of the country’s population engaged in agriculture by the same large margin.[50|50] This provides a useful guide to the profound economic transformations that would have to take place with any retreat of agricultural mechanization and reduction in the use of synthetic agrochemicals.
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Synthetic fertilizers supply 110 megatons of nitrogen per year, or slightly more than half of the 210–220 megatons used in total. This means that at least half of recent global crop harvests have been produced thanks to the application of synthetic nitrogenous compounds, and without them it would be impossible to produce the prevailing diets for even half of today’s nearly 8 billion people. While we could reduce our dependence on synthetic ammonia by eating less meat and wasting less food, replacing the global input of about 110 megatons of nitrogen in synthetic compounds by organic sources could be done only in theory.
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Multiple constraints limit the recycling of manure produced by animals in confinement.[54|54] In traditional mixed farming, cattle, pig, and poultry manure from relatively small numbers of animals was directly recycled on adjacent fields. Producing meat and eggs in central animal feeding operations reduced this option: these enterprises generate such large quantities of waste that its application to fields would overload soils with nutrients within the radius where it would be profitable to spread it; presence of heavy metals and drug residues (from feed additives) is another problem.[55|55] Similar constraints apply to the expanded use of sewage sludge (biosolids from modern human waste treatment plants. Waste’s pathogens must be destroyed by fermentation and by high-heat sterilization, but such treatments do not kill all antibiotic-resistant bacteria and do not remove all heavy metals.
Grazing animals produce three times as much manure as do mammals and birds kept in confinement: the FAO estimates that they leave annually about 90 megatons of nitrogen in waste—but exploiting this large source is impractical.[56|56] Accessibility would limit any gathering of animal urine and excrement to a fraction of the hundreds of millions of hectares of pastures where these wastes are expelled by grazing cattle, sheep, and goats. Gathering it would be as prohibitively costly as its transportation to treatment points and then to crop fields. Moreover, intervening nitrogen losses would further reduce the already very low nitrogen content of such wastes before the nutrient could reach the fields.[57|57])
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Another choice is to expand the cultivation of leguminous crops to produce 50–60 megatons of nitrogen per year, rather than about 30 megatons as they currently do—but only at a considerable opportunity cost. Planting more leguminous cover crops such as alfalfa and clover would boost nitrogen supply but would also reduce the ability to use one field to produce two crops in a year, a vital option for the still-expanding populations of low-income countries.[58|58] Growing more leguminous grains (beans, lentils, peas) would lower the overall food energy yields, because they yield far less than cereal crops and, obviously, this would reduce the number of people that could be supported by a unit of cultivated land.[59|59] Moreover, the nitrogen left behind by a soybean crop—commonly 40–50 kilograms of nitrogen per hectare—would be less than the typical American applications of nitrogenous fertilizers, which are now about 75 kg N/ha for wheat and 150 kg N/ha for grain corn.
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In contrast, China’s most productive double-cropping depends on applications of synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers averaging more than 400 kg N/ha, and it can produce enough to feed 20–22 people whose diets contain about 40 percent animal and 60 percent plant protein.[62|62] Global crop cultivation supported solely by the laborious recycling of organic wastes and by more common rotations is conceivable for a global population of 3 billion people consuming largely plant-based diets, but not for nearly 8 billion people on mixed diets: recall that synthetic fertilizers now supply more than twice as much nitrogen as all recycled crop residues and manures (and given the higher losses from organic applications, the effective multiple is actually closer to three!).
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- agricultural productivity, global food security, global carrying capacity,

daily average per capita requirements of adults in largely sedentary affluent populations are no more than 2,000–2,100 kilocalories, far below the actual supplies of 3,200–4,000 kilocalories.[63|63] According to the FAO, the world loses almost half of all root crops, fruits, and vegetables, about a third of all fish, 30 percent of cereals, and a fifth of all oilseeds, meat, and dairy products—or at least one-third of the overall food supply.[64|64] And the UK’s Waste and Resources Action Programme ascertained that inedible household food waste (including fruit and vegetable peelings, and bones) is only 30 percent of the total, meaning that 70 percent of wasted food was perfectly edible and was not consumed either because it spoiled or because too much of it was served.[65|65]
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In well-off societies, a better way to reduce agriculture’s dependence on fossil fuel subsidies is to make appeals for adopting healthy and satisfactory alternatives to today’s excessively rich and meaty diets—the easiest choices being moderate meat consumption, and favoring meat that can be grown with lower environmental impact. The quest for mass-scale veganism is doomed to fail. Eating meat has been as significant a component of our evolutionary heritage as our large brains (which evolved partly because of meat eating), bipedalism, and symbolic language.[69|69] All our hominin ancestors were omnivorous, as are both species of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus), the hominins closest to us in their genetic makeup; they supplement their plant diet by hunting (and sharing small monkeys, wild pigs, and tortoises.[70|70]
Full expression of human growth potential on a population basis can take place only when diets in childhood and adolescence contain sufficient quantities of animal protein, first in milk and later in other dairy products, eggs, and meat: rising post-1950 body heights in Japan, South Korea, and China, as a result of increased intake of animal products, are unmistakable testimonies to this reality.[71|71] Conversely, most people who become vegetarians or vegans do not remain so for the remainder of their lives. The idea that billions of humans—across the world, not only in affluent Western cities—would willfully not eat any animal products, or that there’d be enough support for governments to enforce that anytime soon, is ridiculous.
But none of this means that we could not eat much less meat than affluent countries have averaged during the past two generations.[72|72])
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- [note::Though I am highly skeptical we'll see mass scale adoption of veg*n diets this century, this argument "our ancestors were omnivorous" doesn't seem very compelling.]

Meat consumption in Japan, the country with the world’s highest longevity, has recently been below 30 kilograms per year; and a much less appreciated fact is that similarly low consumption rates have become fairly common in France, traditionally a nation of high meat intake. By 2013, nearly 40 percent of adult French were petits consommateurs, eating meat only in small amounts adding up to less than 39 kg/year, while the heavy meat consumers, averaging about 80 kg/year, made up less than 30 percent of French adults.[74|74]
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- [note::This is an interesting finding - perhaps the primary finding of the "Blue Zones" research is not that people should actually become vegetarian/vegan, but instead people should adopt a primarily plant-based diet and consume relatively low quantities of meat.]

Additional opportunities to reduce the dependence on synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers come on the production side—for example, improving the efficiency of nitrogen uptake by plants. But again, these opportunities are circumscribed. Between 1961 and 1980 there was a substantial decline in the share of applied nitrogen actually incorporated by crops (from 68 percent to 45 percent), then came a levelling off at around 47 percent.[77|77] And in China, the world’s largest consumer of nitrogen fertilizer, only a third of the applied nitrogen is actually used by rice; the rest is lost to the atmosphere and to ground and stream waters.[78|78] Given that we are expecting at least 2 billion more people by 2050, and that more than twice as many people in the low-income countries of Asia and Africa should see further gains—both in quantity and quality—in their food supply, there is no near-term prospect for substantially reducing the global dependence on synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers.
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(highlight:: Half a century ago, Howard Odum—in his systematic examination of energy and the environment—noted that modern societies “did not understand the energetics involved and the various means by which the energies entering a complex system are fed back as subsidies indirectly into all parts of the network . . . industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy; now he eats potatoes partly made of oil.”[81|81]
Fifty years later, this existential dependence is still insufficiently appreciated—but the readers of this book now understand that our food is partly made not just of oil, but also of coal that was used to produce the coke required for smelting the iron needed for field, transportation, and food processing machinery; of natural gas that serves as both feedstock and fuel for the synthesis of nitrogenous fertilizers; and of the electricity generated by the combustion of fossil fuels that is indispensable for crop processing, taking care of animals, and food and feed storage and preparation.)
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First things first. We could have an accomplished and reasonably affluent civilization that provides plenty of food, material comforts, and access to education and health care, without any semiconductors, microchips, or personal computers: we had one until, respectively, the mid-1950s (first commercial applications of transistors), the early 1970s (Intel’s first microprocessors), and the early 1980s (first larger-scale ownership of PCs).[1|1] And we managed, until the 1990s, to integrate economies, mobilize necessary investments, build requisite infrastructures, and connect the world by wide-body jetliners without any smartphones, social media, and puerile apps. But none of these advances in electronics and telecommunications could have taken place without the assured provision of energies and materials required to embody the inventions in myriads of electricity-consuming components, devices, assemblies, and systems ranging from tiny microprocessors to massive data centers.
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Silicon (Si) made into thin wafers (the basic substrate of microchips) is the signature material of the electronic age, but billions of people could live prosperously without it; it is not an existential constraint on modern civilization. Producing large, high-purity (99.999999999 percent pure) silicon crystals that are cut into wafers is a complex, multi-step, and highly energy-intensive process: it costs two orders of magnitude more primary energy than making aluminum from bauxite, and three orders of magnitude more than smelting iron and making steel.[2|2]
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- silicon, energy consumption, material consumption, conspicuous consumption, energy intensive,

Another key commonality between these four materials is particularly noteworthy as we contemplate the future without fossil carbon: the mass-scale production of all of them depends heavily on the combustion of fossil fuels, and some of these fuels also supply feedstocks for the synthesis of ammonia and for the production of plastics.[6|6] Iron ore smelting in blast furnaces requires coke made from coal (and also natural gas); energy for cement production comes mostly from coal dust, petroleum coke, and heavy fuel oil. The vast majority of simple molecules that are bonded in long chains or branches to make plastics are derived from crude oils and natural gases. And in the modern synthesis of ammonia, natural gas is both the source of hydrogen and processing energy.
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Maturing agronomic science made it clear that the only way to secure adequate food for the larger populations of the 20th century was to raise yields by increasing the supply of nitrogen and phosphorus, two key plant macronutrients. The mining of phosphates (first in North Carolina and then in Florida) and their treatment by acids opened the way to a reliable supply of phosphatic fertilizers.[13|13] But, there was no comparably assured source of nitrogen. The mining of guano (accumulated bird droppings, moderately rich in nitrogen) on dry tropical islands had quickly exhausted the richest deposits, and the rising imports of Chilean nitrates (the country has extensive sodium nitrate layers in its arid northern regions were insufficient to meet future global demand.[14|14]
The challenge was to ensure that humanity could secure enough nitrogen to sustain its expanding numbers. The need was explained in 1898 in the clearest possible manner by William Crookes, chemist and physicist, to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in his presidential address dedicated to the so-called wheat problem. He warned that “all civilized nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat,” but he saw the way out: science coming to the rescue, tapping the practically unlimited mass of nitrogen in the atmosphere (present as the unreactive molecule N2) and converting it into compounds assimilable by plants. He rightly concluded that this challenge “differs materially from other chemical discoveries which are in the air, so to speak, but are not yet matured. The fixation of nitrogen is vital to the progress of civilized humanity.)
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I hasten to add that the 50 percent of humanity dependent on ammonia is not an immutable approximation. Given prevailing diets and farming practices, synthetic nitrogen feeds half of humanity—or, everything else being equal, half of the world’s population could not be sustained without synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers. But the share would be lower if the affluent world converted to the largely meatless Indian diet, and it would be higher if the entire world ate as well as the Chinese do today, to say nothing about the universal adoption of the American diet.[25|25] We could also reduce our dependence on nitrogenous fertilizers by cutting our food waste (as we saw earlier and by using the fertilizers more efficiently.
About 80 percent of global ammonia production is used to fertilize crops; the rest is used to make nitric acid, explosives, rocket propellants, dyes, fibers, and window and floor cleaners.[26|26] With proper precautions and special equipment, ammonia can be applied directly to fields;[27|27] but the compound is mostly used as the indispensable feedstock for producing solid and liquid nitrogenous fertilizers.)
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There are now only two effective direct solutions to field losses of nitrogen: the spreading of expensive slow-release compounds; and, more practically, turning to precision farming and applying fertilizers only as needed based on analyses of the soil.[31|31] As already noted, indirect measures—including higher food prices and reduced meat consumption—could be effective but are not highly popular. As a result, it is unlikely that any realistically conceivable combination of these solutions can bring about a radical change to the global consumption of nitrogenous fertilizers.
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But Africa, the continent with the fastest-growing population, remains deprived of the nutrient and is a substantial food importer. Any hope for its greater food self-sufficiency rests on the increased use of nitrogen: after all, the continent’s recent usage of ammonia has been less than a third of the European mean.[33|33] The best (and long-sought) solution to boost nitrogen supply would be to endow non-leguminous plants with nitrogen-fixing capabilities, a promise genetic engineering is yet to deliver on, while a less radical option—inoculating seeds with a nitrogen-fixing bacterium—is a recent innovation whose eventual commercial extent is still unclear.
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Moreover, steel is readily recycled by melting it in an electric arc furnace (EAF)—a massive cylindrical heat-resistant container made of heavy steel plates (lined with magnesium bricks), with a removable dome-like water-cooled lid through which three massive carbon electrodes are inserted. After loading the steel scrap, the electrodes are lowered into it, and electric current passing through them forms an arc whose high temperature (1,800°C) easily melts the charged metal.[68|68] However, their electricity demand is enormous: even a highly efficient modern EAF needs as much electricity every day as an American city of about 150,000 people.[69|69]
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Affluent economies now recycle nearly all of their automotive scrap, have a similarly high rate (>90 percent for reusing structural steel beams and plates, and only a slightly lower rate for recycling household appliances, and the US has recently recycled more than 65 percent of reinforcement bars in concrete, a rate similar to the recycling of beverage and food steel cans.[71|71] Steel scrap has become one of the world’s most valuable export commodities, as countries with a long history of steel production and with plenty of accumulated scrap sell the material to expanding producers. The EU is the largest exporter, followed by Japan, Russia, and Canada; and China, India, and Turkey are the top buyers.[72|72] Recycled steel accounts for almost 30 percent of the metal’s total annual output, with national shares ranging from 100 percent for several small steel producers to almost 70 percent in the US, about 40 percent in the EU, and to less than 12 percent in China.[73|73]
This means that primary steelmaking still dominates, producing more than twice as much hot metal every year as is recycled—almost 1.3 billion tons in 2019.)
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Ironmaking is highly energy-intensive, with about 75 percent of the total demand claimed by blast furnaces. Today’s best practices have a combined demand of just 17–20 gigajoules per ton of finished product; less efficient operations require 25–30 GJ/t.[76|76] Obviously, the energy cost of secondary steel made in EAFs is much lower than the cost of integrated production: today’s best performance is just above 2 GJ/t. To this must be added the energy costs of rolling the metal (mostly 1.5–2 GJ/t), and hence the representative global rates for the overall energy cost may be about 25 GJ/t for integrated steelmaking and 5 GJ/t for recycled steel.[77|77] The total energy requirement of global steel production in 2019 was about 34 exajoules, or about 6 percent of the world’s primary energy supply.
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Given the industry’s dependence on coking coal and natural gas, steelmaking has been also a major contributor to the anthropogenic generation of greenhouse gases. The World Steel Association puts the average global rate at 500 kilograms of carbon per ton, with recent primary steelmaking emitting about 900 megatons of carbon a year, or 7–9 percent of direct emissions from the global combustion of fossil fuels.[78|78]
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The durability of concrete structures varies widely: while it is impossible to offer an average longevity figure, many will deteriorate badly after just two or three decades while others will do well for 60–100 years. This means that during the 21st century we will face unprecedented burdens of concrete deterioration, renewal, and removal (with, obviously, a particularly acute problem in China), as structures will have to be torn down—in order to be replaced or destroyed—or abandoned. Concrete structures can be slowly demolished, reinforcing steel can be separated, and both materials can be recycled: not cheap, but perfectly possible. After crushing and sieving, the aggregate can be incorporated in new concrete, and reinforcing steel can be recycled.[101|101] Even now, replacement concrete and new concrete are needed everywhere.
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In affluent countries with low population growth, the main need is to fix decaying infrastructures. The latest report card for the US awards nothing but poor to very poor grades to all sectors where concrete dominates, with dams, roads, and aviation getting Ds and the overall average grade just D+.[102|102] This appraisal gives an inkling of what China might face (mass- and money-wise) by 2050. In contrast, the poorest countries need essential infrastructures and the most basic need in many homes in Africa and Asia is to replace mud floors with concrete floors in order to improve overall hygiene and to reduce the incidence of parasitic diseases by nearly 80 percent.[103|103]
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Replicating the post-1990 Chinese experience in those countries would amount to a 15-fold increase of steel output, a more than 10-fold boost for cement production, a more than doubling of ammonia synthesis, and a more than 30-fold increase of plastic syntheses.[105|105] Obviously, even if other modernizing countries accomplish only half or even just a quarter of China’s recent material advances, these countries would still see multiplications of their current uses. Requirements for fossil carbon have been—and for decades will continue to be—the price we pay for the multitude of benefits arising from our reliance on steel, cement, ammonia, and plastics. And as we continue to expand renewable energy conversions, we will require larger masses of old materials as well as unprecedented quantities of materials that were previously needed in only modest amounts.[106|106]
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No structures are more obvious symbols of “green” electricity generation than large wind turbines—but these enormous accumulations of steel, cement, and plastics are also embodiments of fossil fuels.[107|107] Their foundations are reinforced concrete, their towers, nacelles, and rotors are steel (altogether nearly 200 tons of it for every megawatt of installed generating capacity), and their massive blades are energy-intensive—and difficult to recycle—plastic resins (about 15 tons of them for a midsize turbine). All of these giant parts must be brought to the installation sites by outsized trucks and erected by large steel cranes, and turbine gearboxes must be repeatedly lubricated with oil. Multiplying these requirements by the millions of turbines that would be needed to eliminate electricity generated from fossil fuels shows how misleading any talks are about the coming dematerialization of green economies.
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- wind energy, energy transition, dematerialization,

(highlight:: Electric cars provide perhaps the best example of new, and enormous, material dependencies. A typical lithium car battery weighing about 450 kilograms contains about 11 kilograms of lithium, nearly 14 kilograms of cobalt, 27 kilograms of nickel, more than 40 kilograms of copper, and 50 kilograms of graphite—as well as about 181 kilograms of steel, aluminum, and plastics. Supplying these materials for a single vehicle requires processing about 40 tons of ores, and given the low concentration of many elements in their ores it necessitates extracting and processing about 225 tons of raw materials.[108|108] Again, we would have to multiply this by close to 100 million units, which is the annual worldwide production of internal-combustion vehicles that would have to be replaced by electric drive.
Uncertainties about the future rates of electric vehicle adoption are large, but a detailed assessment of material needs, based on two scenarios (assuming that 25 percent or 50 percent of the global fleet in 2050 would be electric vehicles), found the following: from 2020 to 2050 demand for lithium would grow by factors of 18–20, for cobalt by 17–19, for nickel by 28–31, and factors of 15–20 would apply for most other materials from 2020.[109|109] Obviously, this would require not only a drastic expansion of lithium, cobalt (a large share of it now coming from Congo’s perilously hand-dug deep shafts and from widespread child labor), and nickel extraction and processing, but also an extensive search for new resources. And these, in turn, could not take place without large additional conversions of fossil fuels and electricity. Generating smoothly rising forecasts of future electric vehicle ownership is one thing; creating these new material supplies on a mass global scale is quite another.)
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this multifaceted process which entails (according to what I think is perhaps the best concise definition) “the growing interdependence of the world’s economies, cultures, and populations, brought about by cross-border trade in goods and services, technology, and flows of investment, people, and information.”[7|7] Contrary to widely held beliefs, the process is not new; moving jobs to countries with low labor costs (labor arbitrage) is just one of its several requisite drivers; and there is nothing inevitable about its future expansion and intensification. Perhaps the greatest misconception about globalization is that it is a historical inevitability preordained by economic and social evolution. Not so—globalization is not, as a former US president claimed, “the economic equivalent of a force of nature, like wind or water”; it is just another human construct, and there is now a growing consensus that, in some ways, it has already gone too far and needs to be readjusted.[8|8]
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Globalization’s multiples
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the setting up and subsequent expansion and improvement of global positioning systems (GPS): the first (American) system was fully operational in 1993, and three other systems (Russia’s GLONASS, EU’s Galileo, China’s BeiDou) followed.[85|85] As a result, everybody with a computer or a mobile phone can now see worldwide shipping and aviation activities in real time, just by clicking on the MarineTraffic website and watching cargo vessels (green icons) converging on Shanghai and Hong Kong, lining up to pass between Bali and Lombok, or going up the English Channel; to see tankers (red) debouching from the Persian Gulf, tugs and special craft (turquoise) serving the oil and gas production rigs in the North Sea, and fishing vessels (light brown) roaming the central Pacific
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- 1action,

A great deal of accreted globalization, especially many changes that unfolded during the past two generations, is here to stay. Too many countries now rely on food imports, and self-sufficiency in all raw materials is impossible even for the largest countries because no country possesses sufficient reserves of all minerals needed by its economy. The UK and Japan import more food than they produce, China does not have all the iron ore it needs for its blast furnaces, the US buys many rare earth metals (from lanthanum to yttrium, and India is chronically short of crude oil.[91|91] The inherent advantages of mass-scale manufacturing preclude companies from assembling mobile phones in every city in which they are purchased. And millions of people will still try to see iconic distant places before they die.[92|92] Moreover, instant reversals are not practical, and rapid disruptions could come only with high costs attached. For example, the global supply of consumer electronics would suffer enormously if Shenzhen suddenly ceased to function as the world’s most important manufacturing hub of portable devices.
But history reminds us that the recent state of things is unlikely to last for generations. British and American industries were the global leaders as recently as the early 1970s. But where are Birmingham’s metal-working factories or Baltimore’s steel furnaces now? Where are the great cotton mills of Manchester or of South Carolina? By 1965, Detroit’s big three still had 90 percent of the US car market; now they do not have even 45 percent. Until 1980, Shenzhen was a small fishing village, when it became China’s first special economic zone, and now it is a megacity with more than 12 million people: what role will it play in 2050? A mass-scale, rapid retreat from the current state is impossible, but the pro-globalization sentiment has been weakening for some time.)
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the COVID-19 pandemic provided additional powerful arguments based on irrefutable concerns about the state’s fundamental role in protecting the lives of its citizens. That role is hard to play when 70 percent of the world’s rubber gloves are made in a single factory, and when similar or even higher shares of not just other pieces of personal protective equipment but also of principal drug components and common medications (antibiotics, antihypertensive drugs) come from a very small number of suppliers in China and India.[100|100] Such dependence might fulfill an economist’s dream of mass output at the lowest possible unit cost, but it makes for extremely irresponsible—if not criminal—governance when doctors and nurses have to face a pandemic without adequate PPE, when states dependent on foreign production engage in dismaying competition for limited supplies, and when patients around the world cannot renew their prescriptions because of the slowdowns or closures in Asian factories.
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In his pioneering 1969 analysis of risks, Chauncey Starr—at that time the dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of California in Los Angeles—stressed the major difference in risk tolerance between voluntary and involuntary activities.[20|20] When people think that they are in control (a perception that may be incorrect but that is based on previous experiences and hence on the belief that they can assess the likely outcome), they engage in activities—climbing vertical rock faces without ropes, skydiving, bullfighting—whose risks of serious injury or fatality may be a thousand-fold higher than the risk associated with such dreaded involuntary exposure as a terrorist attack in a large Western city.
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(highlight:: it is not only the German Greens who believe that nuclear power is an infernal invention that must be eliminated as fast as possible, but much larger portions of society too.[26|26]
This is why many researchers have argued that there is no “objective risk” waiting to be measured because our risk perceptions are inherently subjective, dependent on our understanding of specific dangers (familiar vs. new risks) and on cultural circumstances.[27|27] Their psychometric studies showed that specific hazards have their unique patterns of highly correlated qualities: involuntary risks are often associated with the dread of new, uncontrollable, and unknown hazards; voluntary hazards are more likely to be perceived as controllable and known to science. Nuclear electricity generation is widely perceived as unsafe, x-rays as tolerably risky.)
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A more insightful metric then is to use the time during which people are affected by a given risk as the common denominator, and do the comparisons in terms of fatalities per person per hour of exposure—that is, the time when an individual is subject, involuntarily or voluntarily, to a specific risk. This approach was introduced in 1969 by Chauncey Starr in his evaluation of social benefits and technological risks and I still find it preferable to another general metric—that of micromorts.[40|40] These units define a micro probability, a one-in-a-million chance of death per specific exposure, and express it per year, per day, per surgery, per flight, or per distance traveled—and these non-uniform denominators do not make for easy across-the-board comparisons.
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The largest known coronal mass ejection began on the morning of September 1, 1859, while Richard Carrington, a British astronomer, was observing and drawing a large solar sunspot that emitted a sizable, kidney-shaped white flare.[74|74] That was nearly two decades before the first telephones (1877) and more than two decades before the first centralized commercial generation of electricity (1882, and hence the notable effects were only intense auroras and disruptions of the newly expanding telegraph network whose laying began in the 1840s: wires were sparking, messaging was interrupted or continued in bizarrely truncated ways, operators got electric shocks, some fires started accidentally.
Some of the subsequent strongest events took place on October 31–November 1, 1903 and May 13–15, 1921, when the extent of both wired telephone links and electricity grids was still fairly limited even in Europe and North America, and very sparse elsewhere. But we got a preview of what a substantial coronal mass ejection could do today in March 1989 when a much smaller (a non-Carrington) event knocked out Quebec’s entire power grid, serving 6 million people, for nine hours.[75|75] More than three decades later we have become much more vulnerable: just think of everything electronic, from mobile phones to e-mail to international banking, and about GPS-guided navigation on every vessel and airplane and now also on tens of millions of cars.)
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our constant surveyance of the Sun’s activity would instantly detect any mass ejection and provide at least 12–15 hours of prestrike warning. But only when the ejection reaches the point where we have stationed the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), about 1.5 million kilometers away from the Earth, could we gauge its intensity; and by then the time to react would be reduced to less than an hour, perhaps even to just 15 minutes.[76|76] Even limited damage would mean hours or days of disrupted communications and grid operations, and a massive geomagnetic storm would sever all of these links on a global scale, leaving us without electricity, without information, without transportation, without the ability to make credit card payments or to withdraw money from banks.
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A 2012 study estimated a 12 percent probability of another Carrington Event during the coming ten years—or a one-in-eight chance, and it emphasized that the rarity of these extreme events makes their rate occurrence difficult to estimate “and prediction of a specific future event is virtually impossible.”[78|78] Given this uncertainty, it is not surprising that in 2019 a group of scientists in Barcelona calculated the risk to be no greater than 0.46–1.88 percent during the 2020s, and hence even the highest rate would mean odds of 1 in 53, a considerably more comforting probability.[79|79] And in 2020 a Carnegie Mellon group offered an even lower estimate, putting a decadal (10-year) probability of between 1 percent and 9 percent for an event of at least the size of the large 2012 event, and between 0.02 percent and 1.6 percent for the size of the 1859 Carrington Event.[80|80] While many experts are well aware of these odds and of the enormity of the potential consequences, this is clearly one of those risks (much like a pandemic) for which we cannot ever be adequately prepared: we just have to hope that the next massive coronal ejection event will not equal or surpass the Carrington Event.
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the best way to assess the recurrent pandemic burden is to compare it to global seasonal influenza-associated respiratory mortality. The most detailed assessment for the years 2002–2011 found a mean of 389,000 deaths (ranging between 294,000 and 518,000) after excluding the 2009 pandemic season.[85|85] This means that seasonal influenza accounts for about 2 percent of all annual respiratory deaths, and that its mortality rate averages 6/100,000—or 15–20 percent of the death rates recorded in the two late 20th-century pandemics (1957–1959, 1968–1970. Inversely stated, the first pandemic exacted a more than six times higher and the second one a nearly five times higher relative death toll than seasonal influenza.
Moreover, there is an important difference in age-specific mortality. Seasonal flu mortality is, almost without exception, highly skewed toward old age, with 67 percent of all deaths among people over 65. In contrast, the infamous second wave of the 1918 pandemic disproportionately targeted people in their 30s; the 1957–1959 pandemic had a U-shaped mortality frequency, disproportionately affecting ages 0–4 and 60+; while COVID-19 mortality has been, much like seasonal influenza, highly concentrated in the 65+ cohort, especially among those with significant comorbidities, and it has left children remarkably unaffected.[86|86])
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- [note::Two factors for quantifying pandemic impact:

1. Scale of impact (death counts relative to seasonal flu)
2. Distribution (counterfactual impact on different populations)]

Another set of truisms applies to our risk assessment. We habitually underestimate voluntary, familiar risks while we repeatedly exaggerate involuntary, unfamiliar exposures. We constantly overestimate the risks stemming from recent shocking experiences and underestimate the risk of events once they recede in our collective and institutional memory.[94|94] As I already noted, about a billion people have lived through three pandemics, but when COVID-19 struck references were made overwhelmingly to the 1918 episode, as the three more recent (but less deadly) pandemics—unlike the widely remembered fear of polio during the 1950s or AIDS in the 1980s—have left no or only the most superficial impressions.[95|95]
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the lessons we derive in the aftermath of major catastrophic events are decidedly not rational. We exaggerate the probability of their recurrence, and we resent any reminders that (setting the shock aside their actual human and economic impact has been comparable to the consequences of many risks whose cumulative toll does not raise any extraordinary concerns. As a result, fear of another spectacular terrorist attack led the US to take extraordinary steps to prevent it. These included multitrillion-dollar wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, fulfilling Osama bin Laden’s wish to draw the country into stunningly asymmetrical conflicts that would erode its strength in the long run.[99|99]
Public reaction to risks is guided more by a dread of what is unfamiliar, unknown, or poorly understood than by any comparative appraisal of actual consequences. When these strong emotional reactions are involved, people focus excessively on the possibility of a dreaded outcome (death by a terrorist attack or by a viral pandemic) rather than trying to keep in mind the probability of such an outcome taking place.[100|100] Terrorists have always exploited this reality, forcing governments to take extraordinarily costly steps to prevent further attacks while repeatedly neglecting to take measures that could have saved more lives at a much lower cost per averted fatality.)
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There is no better illustration of neglected low-cost measures to save lives than the American attitude to gun violence: not even the most shocking iterations of familiar, all-too-well-known mass murders (I always think first of the 26 people, including 20 six- and seven-year-old children, shot in 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut) have been able to change the laws, and during the second decade of the 21st century about 125,000 Americans were killed by guns (the total for homicides, excluding suicides): that is the equivalent of the population of Topeka, Kansas or Athens, Georgia or Simi Valley, California—or of Göttingen in Germany.[101|101] In contrast, 170 Americans died in all terrorist attacks in the US during the second decade of the 21st century, a difference of nearly three orders of magnitude.[102|102] When we compare this to motor vehicle accidents, the toll is even more unevenly distributed: as we saw earlier, compared to Asian American females, Native American men are about five times more likely to die in their cars, but African American males are about 30 times more likely to be killed by firearms.[103|103]
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The list of these critical biospheric boundaries includes nine categories: climate change (now interchangeably, albeit inaccurately, called simply global warming), ocean acidification (endangering marine organisms that build structures of calcium carbonate), depletion of stratospheric ozone (shielding the Earth from excessive ultraviolet radiation and threatened by releases of chlorofluorocarbons), atmospheric aerosols (pollutants reducing visibility and causing lung impairment), interference in nitrogen and phosphorus cycles (above all, the release of these nutrients into fresh and coastal waters), freshwater use (excessive withdrawals of underground, stream, and lake waters), land use changes (due to deforestation, farming, and urban and industrial expansion), biodiversity loss, and various forms of chemical pollution
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As well as there being absolutely no danger of people or animals appreciably reducing this level through breathing, there is also no danger of too much oxygen being consumed by even the greatest conceivable burning (rapid oxidation of the Earth’s plants.
The Earth’s terrestrial plant mass contains on the order of 500 billion tons of carbon and even if all of it (all forests, grasslands, and crops) were burned at once, such a mega-conflagration would consume only about 0.1 percent of the atmosphere’s oxygen.[9|9])
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In the process, lungs (as any other organ must consume oxygen, but it is not easy to measure how much of it they need—that is, to separate their requirement from the overall intake. The best way to find out is during a total cardiopulmonary bypass, when lung circulation is temporarily separated from systemic blood flow: this shows that lungs consume about 5 percent of the total oxygen we inhale.[11|11] And while Amazonian trees, as any terrestrial plants, produce O2 during diurnal photosynthesis, they—again, much as any other photosynthesizing organism—consume virtually all of this oxygen during nocturnal respiration, the process that uses photosynthate to produce energy and compounds for plant growth.[12|12]
Every year, at least 300 billion tons of oxygen are absorbed and a similar amount is released by terrestrial and marine photosynthesis.[13|13] These flows, as well as much smaller flows resulting from the burial and oxidation of organic matter, are not perfectly balanced on a daily or seasonal basis, but over the long run they cannot be too far off, otherwise we would have substantial net gains or losses of the element. Instead, oxygen’s atmospheric presence has been remarkably stable. Images of burning Amazonian forest, Australian scrubland, Californian hillsides, or Siberian taiga are not ominous harbingers of an atmosphere deprived of the gas we need to inhale at least a dozen times a minute.[14|14] Massive forest fires are destructive and harmful in many ways, but they are not going to suffocate us because of a lack of oxygen.)
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Different sectors of water use (agriculture, thermal electricity generation, heavy industries, light manufacturing, services, household) and different categories of water complicate intranational and international comparisons. Blue water includes rainfall entering rivers, water bodies, and groundwater storage that gets incorporated into products or evaporates; the green water footprint accounts for water from precipitation that is stored in soil and subsequently evaporated, transpired, or incorporated by plants; grey water includes all the freshwater required to dilute pollutants in order to meet specific water-quality standards.
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In conjunction with phosphorus, soluble nitrogen compounds contaminate waters and support excessive algal growth. Decomposing algae consume oxygen dissolved in seawater and create oxygen-less (anoxic) waters where fish and crustaceans cannot survive. These oxygen-depleted zones are prominent along the eastern and southern coasts of the United States and along coasts in Europe, China, and Japan.[34|34] There are no easy, inexpensive, and rapid solutions to these environmental impacts. Better agronomic management (crop rotations, split applications of fertilizers to minimize their losses) is essential, and reduced meat consumption would be the single-most important adjustment as it would lower the need for producing feed grains—but sub-Saharan Africa will need much more nitrogen and phosphorus if it is to avoid chronic dependence on food imports.
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These gases absorb the outgoing radiation to different degrees: when their impacts are compared over a 100-year period, releasing a unit of CH4 has the same effect as releasing 28–36 units of CO2; for N2O, the multiplier is between 265 and 298. A handful of new man-made industrial gases—above all chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs, in the past used in refrigeration) and SF6 (an excellent insulator used in electrical equipment)—exert a far stronger effect, but fortunately they are present only in minuscule concentrations and the production of CFCs was gradually outlawed by the 1987 Montreal Protocol.[39|39]
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- [note::When people say "CO2 equivalent", does that mean the statistic accounts for methane emissions (multiplier by 16 due to its increased warming potential)?
I'd be valuable to look at a visualization that compares different emission sources based on the kinds of gases emitted and their warming potential.]

CO2 (mostly emitted from fossil fuel combustion, with deforestation being another major source) accounts for about 75 percent of the anthropogenic warming effect, CH4 for about 15 percent, and the rest is mostly N2O.[40|40]
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In 1957, three decades before the sudden surge of interest in global warming, Roger Revelle, an American oceanographer, and Hans Suess, a physical chemist, appraised the process of mass-scale fossil fuel combustion in its correct evolutionary terms: “Thus human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.”[47|47]
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- [note::Wow, 3 decades before the IPCC was established]

The late-1980s “discovery” of carbon dioxide–induced global warming thus came more than a century after Foote and Tyndall made the link clear, nearly four generations after Arrhenius published a good quantitative estimate of the possible global warming effect, more than a generation after Revelle and Suess warned about an unprecedented and unrepeatable planet-wide geophysical experiment, and a decade after modern confirmation of climate sensitivity. Clearly, we did not have to wait for new computer models or for the establishment of an international bureaucracy to be aware of this change and to think about our responses.
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Many regional, national, and global models have examined future water availability. They assume different degrees of global warming, and while the worst-case scenarios offer a generally deteriorating outlook, there are substantial uncertainties depending on necessary assumptions about population growth and therefore water demand. With a warming of up to 2°C, populations exposed to increased, climate change–induced water scarcity may be as low as 500 million and as high as 3.1 billion.[61|61] Per capita water supply will be decreasing worldwide, but some major river basins (including La Plata, the Mississippi, Danube, and Ganges) will remain well above the scarcity level, while some already water-scarce river basins will see further deterioration (perhaps most notably Turkey and Iraq’s Tigris-Euphrates and China’s Huang He.[62|62]
But most studies concur that demand-driven freshwater scarcity will have a much greater impact than the shortages induced by climate change.)
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Global warming will, inevitably, intensify the water cycle because higher temperatures will increase evaporation. As a result, there will be, overall, more precipitation and hence more water available for capture, storage, and use.[66|66] But more precipitation in general will not mean more precipitation everywhere, nor—a no less important consideration—more precipitation when it is most needed. As with many other changes associated with a warmer climate, enhanced precipitation will be unevenly distributed. Some regions will be receiving less than today; others (including the Yangtze basin, home to most of China’s large population) significantly more, and this increase is expected to bring a slight reduction in the number of people residing in highly water-stressed environments.[67|67] But many places with more precipitation will get it in a more irregular manner, in the form of less frequent but heavier—even catastrophic—rain or snow events.
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To believe that our understanding of these dynamic, multifactorial realities has reached the state of perfection is to mistake the science of global warming for the religion of climate change. At the same time, we do not need an endless stream of new models in order to take effective actions. There are enormous opportunities for reducing energy use in buildings, transportation, industry, and agriculture, and we should have initiated some of these energy-saving and emissions-reducing measures decades ago, regardless of any concerns about global warming. Quests to avoid unnecessary energy use, to reduce air pollution and water, and to provide more comfortable living conditions should be perennial imperatives, not sudden desperate actions aimed at preventing a catastrophe.
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- climate mitigation, climate change, emissions reduction, anti-perfectionism, climate emissions, climate modeling, pragmatism,

SUV ownership began to rise in the US during the late 1980s, it eventually diffused globally, and by 2020 the average SUV emitted annually about 25 percent more CO2 than a standard car.[76|76] Multiply that by the 250 million SUVs on the road in 2020, and you will see how the worldwide embrace of these machines has wiped out, several times over, any decarbonization gains resulting from the slowly spreading ownership (just 10 million in 2020) of electric vehicles. During the 2010s, SUVs became the second-highest cause of rising CO2 emissions, behind electricity generation and ahead of heavy industry, trucking, and aviation. If their mass public embrace continues, they have the potential to offset any carbon savings from the more than 100 million electric vehicles that might be on the road by 2040!
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The combination of our inaction and of the extraordinarily difficult nature of the global warming challenge is best illustrated by the fact that three decades of large-scale international climate conferences have had no effect on the course of global CO2 emissions. The UN’s first conference on climate change took place in 1992; annual climate change conferences began in 1995 (in Berlin) and included much publicized gatherings in Kyoto (1997, with its completely ineffective agreement), Marrakech (2001), Bali (2007), Cancún (2010), Lima (2014), and Paris (2015.[78|78] Clearly, the delegates love to travel to scenic destinations with hardly any thought of the dreaded carbon footprint generated by this global jetting.[79|79]
In 2015, when about 50,000 people flew to Paris in order to attend yet another conference of the parties at which they were to strike, we were assured, a “landmark”—and also “ambitious” and “unprecedented”—agreement, and yet the Paris accord did not (could not) codify any specific reduction targets by the world’s largest emitters, and it would, even if all voluntary non-binding pledges were honored (something utterly improbable), result in a 50 percent increase of emissions by 2050.[80|80] Some landmark.
These meetings could never have stopped either the expansion of China’s coal extraction (it more than tripled between 1995 and 2019, to nearly as much as the rest of the world combined) or the just-noted worldwide preference for massive SUVs, and they could not have dissuaded millions of families from purchasing—as soon as their rising incomes allowed—new air conditioners that will work through the hot humid nights of monsoonal Asia and hence will not be energized by solar electricity anytime soon.[81|81] The combined effect of these demands: between 1992 and 2019, the global emissions of CO2 rose by about 65 percent; those of CH4 by about 25 percent.[82|82])
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The IPCC report on 1.5°C warming offers a scenario based on such a sudden and persistent reversal of our reliance on fossil fuels that the global emissions of CO2 would be halved by 2030 and eliminated by 2050[85|85]—and other scenario-builders are now offering detailed suggestions on how to achieve a rapid end to the fossil carbon era. Computers make it easy to construct many scenarios of rapid carbon elimination—but those who chart their preferred paths to a zero-carbon future owe us realistic explanations, not just sets of more or less arbitrary and highly improbable assumptions detached from technical and economic realities and ignoring the embedded nature, massive scale, and enormous complexity of our energy and material systems.
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More importantly, the proponents of this unrealistic scenario allow merely a factor-of-two increase across all modes of mobility during the next three decades in what they call the Global South (a common but highly inaccurate designation of low-income nations, mostly in Asia and Africa), and a factor-of-three increase in the ownership of consumer goods. But in the China of the past generation, growth has been on an entirely different scale: in 1999 the country had just 0.34 cars per 100 urban households, in 2019 the number surpassed 40. That is a more than 100-fold relative increase in only two decades.[88|88] In 1990, 1 out of every 300 urban households had an air-conditioning window unit; by 2018 there were 142.2 units per 100 households: a more than 400-fold rise in less than three decades. Consequently, even if those countries whose standard of living is today where China’s was in 1999 were to achieve only a tenth of China’s recent growth, they would experience a 10-fold increase of car ownership and a 40-fold increase in air conditioners. Why do the prescribers of the low-energy-demand scenario think that today’s Indians and Nigerians do not want to narrow the gap that separates them from China’s material ownership?
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Not surprisingly, the latest global production gap report—an annual publication highlighting the discrepancy between fossil fuel production planned by individual countries and the global emission levels necessary to limit warming to 1.5°C or 2°C—does not show any commitments to plunging trend lines; just the opposite, in fact.[89|89] In 2019, the major consumers of fossil energies were aiming to produce 120 percent more fuels by 2030 than would be consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5°C, and whatever the eventual effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, the resulting decline of consumption will be both temporary and too small to reverse the general trend.
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(highlight:: If true, these claims and their enthusiastic endorsements raise the obvious question: why should we worry about global warming? Why be frightened by the idea of early planetary demise, why feel compelled to join Extinction Rebellion? Who could be against solutions that are both cheap and nearly instantly effective, that will create countless well-paying jobs and ensure care-free futures for coming generations? Let us all just sing from these green hymnals, let us follow all-renewable prescriptions and a new global nirvana will arrive in just a decade—or, if things get a bit delayed, by 2035.[94|94]
Alas, a close reading reveals that these magic prescriptions give no explanation for how the four material pillars of modern civilization (cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia) will be produced solely with renewable electricity, nor do they convincingly explain how flying, shipping, and trucking (to which we owe our modern economic globalization) could become 80 percent carbon-free by 2030; they merely assert that it could be so. Attentive readers will remember (see chapter 1) that during the first two decades of the 21st century Germany’s unprecedented quest for decarbonization (based on wind and solar) succeeded in boosting the shares of wind- and solar-generated electricity to more than 40 percent, but it lowered the share of fossil fuels in the country’s primary energy use only from about 84 percent to 78 percent.)
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What miraculous options will be available to African nations now relying on fossil fuels to supply 90 percent of their primary energy, in order to drive their dependence to 20 percent within a decade while also saving enormous sums of monies? And how will China and India (both countries are still expanding their coal extraction and coal-fired generation) suddenly become coal-free? But these specific critiques of published rapid-speed transformation narratives are really beside the point: it makes no sense to argue with the details of what are essentially the academic equivalents of science fiction. They start with arbitrarily set goals (zero by 2030 or by 2050) and work backwards to plug in assumed actions to fit those achievements, with actual socioeconomic needs and technical imperatives being of little, or no, concern.
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But we can make a great deal of difference, not by pretending to follow unrealistic and arbitrary goals: all too obviously, history does not unfold as a computerized academic exercise with major achievements falling on years ending with zero or five; it is full of discontinuities, reversals, and unpredictable departures. We can proceed fairly fast with the displacement of coal-fired electricity by natural gas (when produced and transported without significant methane leakage, it has a substantially lower carbon intensity than coal) and by expanding solar and wind electricity generation. We can move away from SUVs and accelerate mass-scale deployment of electric cars, and we still have large inefficiencies in construction, household, and commercial energy use that can be profitably reduced or eliminated. But we cannot instantly change the course of a complex system consisting of more than 10 billion tons of fossil carbon and converting energies at a rate of more than 17 terawatts, just because somebody decides that the global consumption curve will suddenly reverse its centuries-long ascent and go immediately into a sustained and relatively fast decline.
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When looking ahead, we must regain a critical perspective when dealing with all models exploring environmental, technical, and social complexities. There are no limits to assembling such models or, as fashionable lingo has it, constructing narratives. Their authors can choose, as so many recent climate models have done recently, excessive assumptions about future energy use, and they can end up with very high rates of warming that generate news headlines about hellish futures.[98|98] Taking the opposite approach, other modelers can posit 100 percent inexpensive thermonuclear electricity or cold fusion by 2050, or, alternatively, they can allow for the unlimited expansion of fossil fuel combustion, because their model deploys miraculous techniques that will not only remove any volume of CO2 from the atmosphere but recycle it as a feedstock for synthesizing liquid fuel—all at a steadily declining cost.
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Here is how a green energy CEO put it in 2020: “Do you remember how we transformed telephony from fixed-line phones to mobile phones, television from watching whatever was on TV to whatever we fancied, from buying newspapers to customising our news feeds? The people-led, tech-powered energy revolution is going to be just the same.”[99|99] How could changing a device (landline to mobile) whose reliable use depends on a massive, complex, and highly reliable system of electricity generation (dominated by thousands of large fossil-fueled, hydro, and nuclear power plants), transformation, and transmission (encompassing hundreds of thousands of kilometers of national and even continental-scale grids be the same as changing the entire underlying system?
Much of this unmoored thinking comes out as intended—ranging from scary to wonderful—and I can see why many people are taken in either by these threats or by unrealistic suggestions. Only the imagination limits these assumptions: they range from fairly plausible to patently delusionary.)
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(highlight:: This is a new scientific genre where heavy doses of wishful thinking are commingled with a few solid facts. All of these models should be seen mainly as heuristic exercises, as bases for thinking about options and approaches, never to be mistaken for prescient descriptions of our future. I wish this admonition would be as obvious, as trivial, and as superfluous as it seems!
Regardless of the perceived (or modeled) severity of global environmental challenges, there are no swift, universal, and widely affordable solutions to tropical deforestation or biodiversity loss, to soil erosion or to global warming. But global warming presents an uncommonly difficult challenge precisely because it is a truly global phenomenon, and because its largest anthropogenic cause is the combustion of fuels that constitute the massive energetic foundations of modern civilization. As a result, non-carbon energies could completely displace fossil carbon in a matter of one to three decades ONLY if we were willing to take substantial cuts to the standard of living in all affluent countries and deny the modernizing nations of Asia and Africa improvements in their collective lots by even a fraction of what China has done since 1980.)
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(highlight:: Was there a single climate modeler who predicted in 1980 the most important anthropogenic factor driving global warming over the past 30 years: the economic rise of China? At that time even the best models, all being direct descendants of global atmospheric circulation models developed during the 1960s, had no way of reflecting unpredictable shifts in national fortunes, and they also ignored the interactions between the atmosphere and the biosphere. That did not make these models useless: they assumed the continued global growth of greenhouse gas emissions and, in general, they were fairly accurate in predicting the rate of global warming.[100|100]
But a good estimate of the overall rate is only the beginning. To use, once again, the COVID-19 analogy, this is akin to making a forecast in 2010 that—based on the last three pandemics and adjusted for a larger population—global deaths during the first year of the next global pandemic would be about 2 million.[101|101] That would be very close to the actual total—but would that forecast (correctly assuming, based on many precedents, that the pandemic would start in China) also assign only 0.24 percent of those deaths (in absolute terms, less than in Greece or Austria) to China, a country with nearly 20 percent of the global population—and nearly 20 percent to the US, a far richer and (it certainly believes this about itself) far more competent country with less than 5 percent of the global population?
And, even more incredibly, would it predict that the highest mortalities would be concentrated in the most affluent Western economies, those that boast about their state-delivered advanced health care?)
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- [note::This reminds me of Morgan Housel's warning to "not assume future results based on past performance" in an investing context.
Understanding the limitations of models and the inherent uncertainty of the future is so important when it comes to decision-making.]

Most notably, what remains in doubt is our collective—in this case global—resolve to deal effectively with at least some critical challenges. Solutions, adjustments, and adaptations are available. Affluent countries could reduce their average per capita energy use by large margins and still retain a comfortable quality of life. Widespread diffusion of simple technical fixes ranging from mandated triple windows to designs of more durable vehicles would have significant cumulative effects. The halving of food waste and changing the composition of global meat consumption would reduce carbon emissions without degrading the quality of food supply. Remarkably, these measures are absent, or rank low, in typical recitals of coming low-carbon “revolutions” that rely on as-yet-unavailable mass-scale electricity storage or on the promise of unrealistically massive carbon capture and its permanent storage underground. There is nothing new about these exaggerated expectations.
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we are now promised even more astonishing “disruptive” innovations and AI-driven “solutions.” The reality is that any sufficiently effective steps will be decidedly non-magical, gradual, and costly. We have been transforming the environment on increasing scales and with rising intensity for millennia, and we have derived many benefits from these changes—but, inevitably, the biosphere has suffered. There are ways to reduce those impacts but the resolve to deploy them at required scales has been lacking, and if we start acting in a sufficiently effective manner (and this now requires doing so on a global scale) we will have to pay a considerable economic and social price. Will we, eventually, do so deliberately, with foresight; will we act only when forced by deteriorating conditions; or will we fail to act in a meaningful way?
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(highlight:: What has been so remarkable about modern anticipations of the future is how they have gravitated—despite all of the available evidence—toward one of these two extremes. In the past, this tendency toward dichotomy was often described as the clash of catastrophists and cornucopians, but these labels appear to be too timid to reflect the recent extreme polarization of sentiments.[4|4] And this polarization has been accompanied by a greater propensity for dated quantitative forecasts.
You see them everywhere, from cars (worldwide sales of electric passenger vehicles will reach 56 million by 2040) and carbon (the EU will have net-zero carbon emissions by 2050) to global flying (there will be 8.2 billion travelers by 2037).[5|5] Or so we’re told. In reality, most of these forecasts are no better than simple guesses: any number for 2050 obtained by a computer model primed with dubious assumptions—or, even worse, by a politically expedient decision—has a very brief shelf life. My advice: if you would like a better understanding of what the future may look like, avoid these new-age dated prophecies entirely, or use them primarily as evidence of prevailing expectations and biases.
For generations, businesses and governments were the most common practitioners and consumers of forecasting, then academics joined the game in large numbers from the 1950s, and now anybody can be a forecaster—even without any mathematical skills—simply by using plug-in software or (as has been in vogue lately) by making baseless qualitative predictions. As in so many other cases of newly expanded endeavors (information flows, mass education), the quantity of modern forecasting has become inversely proportional to its quality. Many forecasts are nothing but the simplest extensions of past trajectories; others are the outcome of complicated interactive models which incorporate large numbers of variables and run using different assumptions each time (essentially the numerical equivalent of narrative scenarios); and some have hardly any quantitative component and are just wishful and exceedingly politically correct narratives.)
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Moving from relatively simple pencil-and-paper forecasts to complex computerized scenarios makes it easier to perform the requisite calculations and to produce different scenarios, but it does not eliminate the inevitable perils of making assumptions. Just the opposite—more complex models combining the interactions of economic, social, technical, and environmental factors require more assumptions and open the way for greater errors.
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Such predictably repetitive prophecies (however well-meant and however passionately presented) do not offer any practical advice about the deployment of the best possible technical solutions, about the most effective ways of legally binding global cooperation, or about tackling the difficult challenge of convincing populations of the need for significant expenditures whose benefits will not be seen for decades to come. And they are, of course, quite unnecessary according to those who argue that a “sustainable future is within our grasp,” that the catastrophists have a long history of raising false alarms, who title their writings Apocalypse Not! and Apocalypse Never, and, in the starkest contradistinction to civilization’s supposedly rapidly approaching final curtain, even go as far (as already noted) as seeing a not-too-distant Singularity.[27|27]
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(highlight:: What will happen? An imminent near-infernal perdition, or speed-of-light godlike omnipotence?
Based on the revealed delusions of past prophecies, neither. We do not have a civilization envisioned in the early 1970s—one of worsening planetary hunger or one energized by cost-free nuclear fission—and a generation from now we will not be either at the end of our evolutionary path or have a civilization transformed by Singularity. We will still be around during the 2030s, albeit without the unimaginable benefits of speed-of-light intelligence. And we will still be trying to do the impossible, to make long-range forecasts. That is bound to bring more embarrassments and more ridiculous predictions, as well as more surprises caused by unanticipated events. Extremes are fairly easy to envisage; anticipating realities that will arise from combinations of inertial developments and unpredictable discontinuities remains an elusive quest. No amount of modeling will eliminate that, and our long-range predictions will continue to err.[28|28])
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The
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And in a civilization where production of essential commodities now serves nearly 8 billion people, any departure from established practices also runs repeatedly into the constraints of scale: as we have already seen (in chapter 3), fundamental material requirements are now measured in billions and hundreds of millions of tons per year. This makes it impossible either to substitute such masses for entirely different commodities—what would take the place of more than 4 billion tons of cement or nearly 2 billion tons of steel?—or to make a rapid (years rather than decades transition to entirely new ways of producing these essential inputs.
This inevitable inertia of mass-scale dependencies can eventually be overcome (recall that, before 1920, we had to devote a quarter of American farmland to feed crops for horses and mules), but many past examples of rapid shifts are not good guides for deriving plausible time spans for any future accomplishments.)
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A category mistake—erroneously assigning to something a quality or action that is properly attributable only to things of another category—is behind the frequent, but deeply mistaken, conclusion that in this new, electronically enabled world everything can, and will, move much faster.[36|36] Information and connections do so, and so does the adoption of new personal gadgets—but existential im-peratives do not belong to the category of microprocessors and mobile phones. Securing the sufficient delivery of water, growing and processing crops, feeding and slaughtering animals, producing and converting enormous quantities of primary energies, and extracting and altering raw materials to fit a myriad of uses are endeavors whose scales (required to meet the demand of billions of consumers) and infrastructures (that enable the production and distribution of these irreplaceable needs) belong to categories that are quite distinct from making a new social media profile or buying a more expensive smartphone.
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COVID-19’s impact in rich countries in general, and in the United States in particular, also illustrates how misplaced some of our highly touted (and very expensive) future-forming endeavors have been. Foremost among these have been the renewed steps toward manned space flight, and particularly the sci-fi-type goal of missions to Mars; trying to move toward personalized medicine (diagnosis and treatment tailored to individual patients based on their specific risk or response to a disease), with The Economist running a special report on this topic on March 12, 2020, just as COVID-19 began to sweep through Europe and North America filling urban hospitals with oxygen-deprived people; and being preoccupied with ever-faster connectivity, with endless hype surrounding the benefits of 5G networks.[43|43] How irrelevant are all of these quests while (as the cliché goes) the only remaining superpower could not provide its nurses and doctors with enough simple personal protection equipment, including such low-tech items as gloves, masks, caps, and gowns?
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Persistence is as important as forgetting: despite the promises of new beginnings and bold departures, old patterns and old approaches soon resurface to set the stage for another round of failures. I ask any readers who doubt this to check sentiments during and immediately after the great financial crisis of 2007–2008—and compare them with the post-crisis experience. Who has been found responsible for this systemic near collapse of the financial order? What fundamental departures (besides enormous injections of new monies were taken to reform questionable practices or to reduce economic inequality?[48|48]
Returning to the COVID-19 example, this pattern of persistence means that nobody will ever be found responsible for any of the many strategic lapses that guaranteed the mismanagement of the pandemic even before it began. Undoubtedly, some desultory hearings and a few think-tank papers will produce a list of recommendations, but those will be promptly ignored and will make no difference to deeply ingrained habits. Did the world take any resolute steps after the pandemics of 1918–1919, 1958–1959, 1968–1969, and 2009? Governments will not ensure adequate provisions of needed supplies for a future pandemic, and their response will be as inconsistent—if not as incoherent—as ever. The profits of mass-scale single-source manufacturing will not be changed for less vulnerable but more expensive decentralized production. And people will resume their constant global mingling as they return to intercontinental flights and cruises to nowhere, although it is hard to imagine a better virus incubator than a ship with 3,000 crew, and 5,000 passengers who are often mostly elderly with many pre-existing health conditions.[49|49])
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- [note::Damn. This is extremely pessimistic, but it's not wrong...]

Neither the evolution nor the history of our species is an ever-rising arrow. There are no predictable trajectories, no definite targets. The steadily accumulating mass of our understanding and the ability to control a growing number of variables that affect our lives (ranging from food production that is sufficient to feed the world’s entire population to highly effective inoculation that prevents previously dangerous infectious diseases has lowered the overall risk of living, but it has not made many existential perils either more predictable or more manageable.
In some critical instances, our successes and our abilities to avoid the worst outcomes have been due to being prescient, vigilant, and determined to find effective fixes. Notable examples range from eliminating polio (by developing effective vaccines) to lowering the risks of commercial flying (by building more reliable airplanes and introducing better flight control measures), from reducing food pathogens (by a combination of proper food processing, refrigeration, and personal hygiene) to making childhood leukemia a largely survivable illness (by chemotherapy and stem cell transplants).[53|53] In other cases, we have been undoubtedly lucky: for decades we have avoided nuclear confrontation caused by an error or accident (we have experienced both on several occasions since the 1950s), not only because of built-in safeguards but also thanks to judgments that could have gone either way.[54|54] Again, there are no clear indications that our ability to prevent failures has been uniformly increasing.)
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- [note::Well said, but do we even have the means to measure such a complex metric? Even if we had an idea that are ability to overcome existential problems was increasing, how would we know for sure?]

To conclude that we will be able to achieve decarbonization anytime soon, effectively and on the required scales, runs against all past evidence. The UN’s first climate conference took place in 1992, and in the intervening decades we have had a series of global meetings and countless assessments and studies—but nearly three decades later there is still no binding international agreement to moderate the annual emissions of greenhouse gases and no prospect for its early adoption.
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In order to be effective, this would have to entail nothing less than a global accord. This does not mean that 200 nations must sign on dotted lines: the combined emissions of about 50 small nations add up to less than the likely error in quantifying the emissions of just the top five greenhouse gas producers. No real progress can be achieved until at least these top five countries, now responsible for 80 percent of all emissions, agree to clear and binding commitments. But we are nowhere close to embarking on such a concerted global action.[57|57] Recall that the much-praised Paris accord had no specific emission-reduction targets for the world’s largest emitters, and that its non-binding pledges would not mitigate anything—they would result in 50 percent higher emissions by 2050!
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A commonly used climate-economy model indicates the break-even year (when the optimal policy would begin to produce net economic benefit for mitigation efforts launched in the early 2020s would be only around 2080.
Should average global life expectancy (about 72 years in 2020) remain the same, then the generation born near the middle of the 21st century would be the first to experience cumulative economic net benefit from climate-change mitigation policy.[61|61] Are the young citizens of affluent countries ready to put these distant benefits ahead of their more immediate gains? Are they willing to sustain this course for more than half a century even as the low-income countries with growing populations continue, as a matter of basic survival, to expand their reliance on fossil carbon? And are the people now in their 40s and 50s ready to join them in order to bring about rewards they will never see?)
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- [note::Seems like both a "valuing future generations" problems and a collective action problem]

Being agnostic about the distant future means being honest: we have to admit the limits of our understanding, approach all planetary challenges with humility, and recognize that advances, setbacks, and failures will all continue to be a part of our evolution and that there can be no assurance of (however defined) ultimate success, no arrival at any singularity—but, as long as we use our accumulated understanding with determination and perseverance, there will also not be an early end of days. The future will emerge from our accomplishments and failures, and while we might be clever (and lucky) enough to foresee some of its forms and features, the whole remains elusive even when looking just a generation ahead.
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- futurism, realism, cluelessness, futures thinking,

And the most powerful prime mover (an organism or machine delivering kinetic energy) an individual could commonly control during the preindustrial era was a powerful horse at 750 watts.[4|4] Now hundreds of millions of people drive vehicles whose power ranges between 100 and 300 kilowatts—up to 400 times the power of a strong horse—and the pilot of a wide-body jetliner commands about 100 megawatts (equivalent to more than 130,000 strong horses) in cruising mode. These gains have been too large to be grasped directly or intuitively: understanding the modern world needs a careful attention to orders of magnitude!
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Data for these calculations can be found in the United Nations’ Energy Statistics Yearbook, https://unstats.un.org/unsd/energystats/pubs/yearbook/; and in BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy, https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/downloads.html.
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Detailed statistics on energy production and consumption are available in the United Nations’ Energy Statistics Yearbook and BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy.
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International Atomic Energy Agency, The Database of Nuclear Power Reactors (Vienna: IAEA, 2020).
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Electric Power Research Institute, Metrics for Micro Grid: Reliability and Power Quality (Palo Alto, CA: EPRI, 2016), http://integratedgrid.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/4-Key-Microgrid-Reliability-PQ-metrics.pdf.
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See also the Climate Action Tracker (https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/).
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N. Troja and S. Law, “Let’s get flexible—Pumped storage and the future of power systems,” IHA website (September 2020).
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V. Smil, “What we need to know about the pace of decarbonization,” Substantia 3/2, supplement 1 (2019), pp. 13–28; V. Smil, “Energy (r)evolutions take time,” World Energy 44 (2019), pp. 10–14.
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For a different perspective, see Energy Transitions Commission, Mission Possible: Reaching Net-Zero Carbon Emissions from Harder-to-Abate Sectors by Mid-Century (2018), http://www.energy-transitions.org/sites/default/files/ETC_MissionPossible_FullReport.pdf.
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FAO, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (Rome: FAO, 2020), http://www.fao.org/3/ca9692en/CA9692EN.pdf.
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The other major reason for the poor, and declining, understanding of those fundamental processes that deliver energy (as food or as fuels) and durable materials (whether metals, non-metallic minerals, or concrete) is that they have come to be seen as old-fashioned—if not outdated—and distinctly unexciting compared to the world of information, data, and images. The proverbial best minds do not go into soil science and do not try their hand at making better cement; instead they are attracted to dealing with disembodied information, now just streams of electrons in myriads of microdevices. From lawyers and economists to code writers and money managers, their disproportionately high rewards are for work completely removed from the material realities of life on earth.
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none of us will live in a dematerialized world that has no use for such irreplaceable natural services as evaporating water or pollinating plants. But delivering these existential necessities will be an increasingly challenging task, because a large share of humanity lives in conditions that the affluent minority left behind generations ago, and because the growing demand for energy and materials has been stressing the biosphere so much and so fast that we have imperiled its capability to keep its flows and stores within the boundaries compatible with its long-term functioning.
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To give just a single key comparison, in 2020 the average annual per capita energy supply of about 40 percent of the world’s population (3.1 billion people, which includes nearly all people in sub-Saharan Africa) was no higher than the rate achieved in both Germany and France in 1860! In order to approach the threshold of a dignified standard of living, those 3.1 billion people will need at least to double—but preferably triple—their per capita energy use, and in doing so multiply their electricity supply, boost their food production, and build essential urban, industrial, and transportation infrastructures. Inevitably, these demands will subject the biosphere to further degradation.
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(highlight:: those who prefer mantras of green solutions to understanding how we have come to this point, the prescription is easy: just decarbonize—switch from burning fossil carbon to converting inexhaustible flows of renewable energies. The real wrench in the works: we are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years.
Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat, or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near-miraculous technical advances.)
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Rather than resorting to an ancient comparison of foxes and hedgehogs (a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing), I tend to think about modern scientists as either the drillers of ever-deeper holes (now the dominant route to fame) or scanners of wide horizons (now a much-diminished group.
Drilling the deepest possible hole and being an unsurpassed master of a tiny sliver of the sky visible from its bottom has never appealed to me.)
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- [note::Love the phrasing of this]

Between 1950 and 2020 the United States roughly doubled the per capita useful energy provided by fossil fuels and primary electricity (to about 150 gigajoules); in Japan the rate had more than quintupled (to nearly 80 GJ/capita), and China saw an astounding, more than 120-fold, increase (to nearly 50 GJ/capita).[18|18]
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Tracing the trajectory of useful energy deployment is so revealing because energy is not just another component in the complex structures of the biosphere, human societies, and their economies, nor just another variable in intricate equations determining the evolution of these interacting systems. Energy conversions are the very basis of life and evolution. Modern history can be seen as an unusually rapid sequence of transitions to new energy sources, and the modern world is the cumulative result of their conversions.
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more recently, physicist Robert Ayres has repeatedly stressed in his writings the central notion of energy in all economies: “the economic system is essentially a system for extracting, processing and transforming energy as resources into energy embodied in products and services.”[23|23] Simply put, energy is the only truly universal currency, and nothing (from galactic rotations to ephemeral insect lives) can take place without its transformations.[24|24]
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Given all of these readily verifiable realities, it is hard to understand why modern economics, that body of explanations and precepts whose practitioners exercise more influence on public policy than any other experts, has largely ignored energy. As Ayres noted, economics does not only lack any systematic awareness of energy’s importance for the physical process of production, but it assumes “that energy doesn’t matter (much) because the cost share of energy in the economy is so small that it can be ignored . . . as if output could be produced by labor and capital alone—or as if energy is merely a form of man-made capital that can be produced (as opposed to extracted) by labor and capital.”[25|25]
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The first law of thermodynamics states that no energy is ever lost during conversions: be that chemical to chemical when digesting food; chemical to mechanical when moving muscles; chemical to thermal when burning natural gas; thermal to mechanical when rotating a turbine; mechanical to electrical in a generator; or electrical to electromagnetic as light illuminates the page you are reading. However, all energy conversions eventually result in dissipated low-temperature heat: no energy has been lost, but its utility, its ability to perform useful work, is gone (the second law of thermodynamics).[31|31]
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(highlight:: There are many choices available when it comes to energy conversions, some far better than others. The high densities of chemical energy in kerosene and diesel fuel are great for intercontinental flying and shipping, but if you want your submarine to stay submerged while crossing the Pacific Ocean then the best choice is to fission enriched uranium in a small reactor in order to produce electricity.[32|32] And back on land, large nuclear reactors are the most reliable producers of electricity: some of them now generate it 90–95 percent of the time, compared to about 45 percent for the best offshore wind turbines and 25 percent for photovoltaic cells in even the sunniest of climates—while Germany’s solar panels produce electricity only about 12 percent of the time.[33|33]
This is simple physics or electrical engineering, but it is remarkable how often these realities are ignored)
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Most recently, a poor understanding of energy has the proponents of a new green world naively calling for a near-instant shift from abominable, polluting, and finite fossil fuels to superior, green and ever-renewable solar electricity. But liquid hydrocarbons refined from crude oil (gasoline, aviation kerosene, diesel fuel, residual heavy oil) have the highest energy densities of all commonly available fuels, and hence they are eminently suitable for energizing all modes of transportation. Here is a density ladder (all rates in gigajoules per ton): air-dried wood, 16; bituminous coal (depending on quality), 24–30; kerosene and diesel fuels, about 46. In volume terms (all rates in gigajoules per cubic meter), energy densities are only about 10 for wood, 26 for good coal, 38 for kerosene. Natural gas (methane) contains only 35 MJ/m3—or less than 1/1,000 of kerosene’s density.[36|36]
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the advantages of liquid fuels go far beyond high energy density. Unlike coal, crude oil is much easier to produce (no need to send miners underground or scar landscapes with large open pits), store (in tanks or underground—because of oil’s much higher energy density, any enclosed space can typically store 75 percent more energy as a liquid fuel than as coal), and distribute (intercontinentally by tankers and by pipelines, the safest mode of long-distance mass transfer), and hence it is readily available on demand.[37|37]
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(highlight:: Crude oil needs refining to separate the complex mixture of hydrocarbons into specific fuels—gasoline being the lightest; residual fuel oil the heaviest—but this process yields more valuable fuels for specific uses, and it also produces indispensable non-fuel products such as lubricants.
Lubricants are needed to minimize friction in everything from the massive turbofan engines in wide-body jetliners to miniature bearings.[38|38] Globally, the automotive sector, now with more than 1.4 billion vehicles on the road, is the largest consumer, followed by use in industry—with the largest markets being textiles, energy, chemicals, and food processing—and in ocean-going vessels. Annual use of these compounds now surpasses 120 megatons (for comparison, global output of all edible oils, from olive to soybean, is now about 200 megatons a year), and because the available alternatives—synthetic lubricants made from simpler, but still often oil-based, compounds rather than those derived directly from crude oil—are more expensive, this demand will grow further as these industries expand around the world.)
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Another product derived from crude oil is asphalt. Global output of this black and sticky material is now on the order of 100 megatons, with 85 percent of it going to paving (hot and warm asphalt mixes) and most of the rest to roofing.[39|39] And hydrocarbons have yet another indispensable non-fuel use: as feedstocks for many different chemical syntheses (dominated by ethane, propane, and butane from natural gas liquids) producing a variety of synthetic fibers, resins, adhesives, dyes, paints and coatings, detergents, and pesticides, all vital in myriad ways to our modern world.[40|40] Given these advantages and benefits, it was predictable—indeed unavoidable—that our dependence on crude oil would grow once the product became more affordable and once it could be reliably delivered on a global scale.
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And even in this era of high-tech electronic miracles, it is still impossible to store electricity affordably in quantities sufficient to meet the demand of a medium-sized city (500,000 people) for only a week or two, or to supply a megacity (more than 10 million people) for just half a day.[51|51]
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If the COVID-19 pandemic brought disruption, anguish, and unavoidable deaths, those effects would be minor compared to having just a few days of a severely reduced electricity supply in any densely populated region, and if prolonged for weeks nationwide it would be a catastrophic event with unprecedented consequences.[70|70]
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There is no shortage of fossil fuel resources in the Earth’s crust, no danger of imminently running out of coal and hydrocarbons: at the 2020 level of production, coal reserves would last for about 120 years, oil and gas reserves for about 50 years, and continued exploration would transfer more of them from the resource to the reserve (technically and economically viable) category.
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even the European Union now recognizes that it could not come close to its extraordinarily ambitious decarbonization target without nuclear reactors. Its 2050 net-zero emissions scenarios set aside the decades-long stagnation and neglect of the nuclear industry, and envisage up to 20 percent of all energy consumption coming from nuclear fission.[78|78] Notice that this refers to total primary energy consumption, not just to electricity. Electricity is only 18 percent of total final global energy consumption, and the decarbonization of more than 80 percent of final energy uses—by industries, households, commerce, and transportation—will be even more challenging than the decarbonization of electricity generation. Expanded electricity generation can be used for space heating and by many industrial processes now relying on fossil fuels, but the course of decarbonizing modern long-distance transportation remains unclear.
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Turbofan engines powering jetliners burn fuel whose energy density is 46 megajoules per kilogram (that’s nearly 12,000 watt-hours per kilogram), converting chemical to thermal and kinetic energy—while today’s best Li-ion batteries supply less than 300 Wh/kg, more than a 40-fold difference.[79|79] Admittedly, electric motors are roughly twice as efficient energy converters as gas turbines, and hence the effective density gap is “only” about 20-fold. But during the past 30 years the maximum energy density of batteries has roughly tripled, and even if we were to triple that again densities would still be well below 3,000 Wh/kg in 2050—falling far short of taking a wide-body plane from New York to Tokyo or from Paris to Singapore, something we have been doing daily for decades with kerosene-fueled Boeings and Airbuses.[80|80]
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we have no readily deployable commercial-scale alternatives for energizing the production of the four material pillars of modern civilization solely by electricity. This means that even with an abundant and reliable renewable electricity supply, we would have to develop new large-scale processes to produce steel, ammonia, cement, and plastics.
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Annual global demand for fossil carbon is now just above 10 billion tons a year—a mass nearly five times more than the recent annual harvest of all staple grains feeding humanity, and more than twice the total mass of water drunk annually by the world’s nearly 8 billion inhabitants—and it should be obvious that displacing and replacing such a mass is not something best handled by government targets for years ending in zero or five. Both the high relative share and the scale of our dependence on fossil carbon make any rapid substitutions impossible: this is not a biased personal impression stemming from a poor understanding of the global energy system – but a realistic conclusion based on engineering and economic realities.
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Certainly, the affluent world—given its wealth, technical capabilities, high level of per capita consumption and the concomitant level of waste—can take some impressive and relatively rapid decarbonization steps (to put it bluntly, it should do with using less energy of any kind). But that is not the case with the more than 5 billion people whose energy consumption is a fraction of those affluent levels, who need much more ammonia to raise their crop yields to feed their increasing populations, and much more steel and cement and plastics to build their essential infrastructures. What we need is to pursue a steady reduction of our dependence on the energies that made the modern world. We still do not know most of the particulars of this coming transition, but one thing remains certain: it will not be (it cannot be) a sudden abandonment of fossil carbon, nor even its rapid demise—but rather its gradual decline.[85|85]
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The United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates that the worldwide share of undernourished people decreased from about 65 percent in 1950 to 25 percent by 1970, and to about 15 percent by the year 2000. Continued improvements (with fluctuations caused by temporary national or regional setbacks due to natural disasters or armed conflicts) lowered the rate to 8.9 percent by 2019—which means that rising food production reduced the malnutrition rate from 2 in 3 people in 1950 to 1 in 11 by 2019.[4|4]
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People everywhere will point out the combustion of liquid fuels that power most of our transportation but the modern world’s most important—and fundamentally existential—dependence on fossil fuels is their direct and indirect use in the production of our food. Direct use includes fuels to power all field machinery (mostly tractors, combines, and other harvesters), the transportation of harvests from fields to storage and processing sites, and irrigation pumps. Indirect use is much broader, taking into account the fuels and electricity used to produce agricultural machinery, fertilizers, and agrochemicals (herbicides, insecticides, fungicides), and other inputs ranging from glass and plastic sheets for greenhouses, to global positioning devices that enable precision farming.
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Many people nowadays admiringly quote the performance gains of modern computing (“so much data”) or telecommunication (“so much cheaper”)—but what about harvests? In two centuries, the human labor to produce a kilogram of American wheat was reduced from 10 minutes to less than two seconds. This is how our modern world really works. And as mentioned, I could have done similarly stunning reconstructions of falling labor inputs, rising yields, and soaring productivity for Chinese or Indian rice. The time frames would be different but the relative gains would be similar.
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(highlight:: Today, as ever, no harvests would be possible without Sun-driven photosynthesis, but the high yields produced with minimal labor inputs and hence with unprecedented low costs would be impossible without direct and indirect infusions of fossil energies. Some of these anthropogenic energy inputs are coming from electricity, which can be generated from coal or natural gas or renewables, but most of them are liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons supplied as machine fuels and raw materials.
Machines consume fossil energies directly as diesel or gasoline for field operations including the pumping of irrigation water from wells, for crop processing and drying, for transporting the harvests within the country by trucks, trains, and barges, and for overseas exports in the holds of large bulk carriers. Indirect energy use in making those machines is far more complex, as fossil fuels and electricity go into making not only the steel, rubber, plastics, glass, and electronics but also assembling these inputs to make tractors, implements, combines, trucks, grain dryers, and silos.[13|13])
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But the energy required to make and to power farm machinery is dwarfed by the energy requirements of producing agrochemicals. Modern farming requires fungicides and insecticides to minimize crop losses, and herbicides to prevent weeds from competing for the available plant nutrients and water. All of these are highly energy-intensive products but they are applied in relatively small quantities (just fractions of a kilogram per hectare.[14|14] In contrast, fertilizers that supply the three essential plant macronutrients—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—require less energy per unit of the final product but are needed in large quantities to ensure high crop yields.[15|15]
Potassium is the least costly to produce, as all it takes is potash (KCl) from surface or underground mines. Phosphatic fertilizers begin with the excavation of phosphates, followed by their processing to yield synthetic superphosphate compounds. Ammonia is the starting compound for making all synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers. Every crop of high-yielding wheat and rice, as well as of many vegetables, requires more than 100 (sometimes as much as 200) kilograms of nitrogen per hectare, and these high needs make the synthesis of nitrogenous fertilizers the most important indirect energy input in modern farming.[16|16])
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As a result, leguminous food crops, including soybeans, beans, peas, lentils, and peanuts, are able to provide (fix) their own nitrogen supply, as can such leguminous cover crops as alfalfa, clovers, and vetches. But no staple grains, no oil crops (except for soybeans and peanuts), and no tubers can do that. The only way for them to benefit from the nitrogen-fixing abilities of legumes is to rotate them with alfalfa, clovers, or vetches, grow these nitrogen fixers for a few months, and then plow them under so the soils are replenished with reactive nitrogen to be picked up by the succeeding wheat, rice, or potatoes.[18|18] In traditional agricultures, the only other option to enrich soil nitrogen stores was to collect and apply human and animal wastes. But this is an inherently laborious and inefficient way to supply the nutrient. These wastes have very low nitrogen content and they are subject to volatilization losses (the conversion of liquids to gases—the ammonia smell from manure can be overpowering).
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The minima of 300–350 mL/kg is a remarkably efficient performance compared to the rates of 210–250 mL/kg for bread, and this is reflected in the comparably affordable prices of chicken: in US cities, the average price of a kilogram of white bread is only about 5 percent lower than the average price per kilogram of whole chicken (and wholewheat bread is 35 percent more expensive!), while in France a kilogram of standard whole chicken costs only about 25 percent more than the average price of bread.[34|34] This helps to explain the rapid rise of chicken to become the dominant meat in all Western countries (globally, pork still leads, thanks to China’s enormous demand).
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This means that when bought in a Scandinavian supermarket, tomatoes from Almería’s heated plastic greenhouses have a stunningly high embedded production and transportation energy cost. Its total is equivalent to about 650 mL/kg, or more than five tablespoons (each containing 14.8 milliliters) of diesel fuel per medium-sized (125 gram) tomato!
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Capturing such plentiful pelagic (living near the surface) species as anchovies and sardines or mackerel can be done with a relatively small energy investment—indirectly in constructing ships and making large nets, directly in the diesel fuel used for ship engines. The best accounts show energy expenditures as low as 100 mL/kg for their capture, an equivalent of less than half a cup of diesel fuel.[42|42]
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If you want to eat wild fish with the lowest-possible fossil carbon footprint, stick to sardines. The mean for all seafood is stunningly high—700 mL/kg (nearly a full wine bottle of diesel fuel)—and the maxima for some wild shrimp and lobsters are, incredibly, more than 10 L/kg (and that includes a great deal of inedible shells!).[43|43] This means that just two skewers of medium-sized wild shrimp (total weight of 100 grams) may require 0.5–1 liters of diesel fuel to catch—the equivalent of 2–4 cups of fuel.
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Expanding aquaculture—whose total global output, freshwater and marine, is now closing in on the worldwide wild catch (in 2018 it was 82 million tons compared to 96 million tons of wild-caught species)—has eased the pressure on some overfished wild stocks of preferred carnivorous fishes, but it has intensified the exploitation of smaller herbivorous species whose growing harvests are needed to feed expanding aquaculture.[44|44] As a result, the energy costs of growing Mediterranean sea bass in cages (Greece and Turkey are its leading producers) are commonly equivalent to as much as 2–2.5 liters of diesel fuel per kilogram (a volume about the same as three bottles of wine)—that is, of the same order of magnitude as the energy costs of capturing similarly sized wild species.
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As expected, only aquacultured herbivorous fish that grow well consuming plant-based feed—most notably, different species of Chinese carp (bighead, silver, black, and grass carp are the most common)—have a low energy cost, typically less than 300 mL/kg. But, traditional Christmas Eve dinners in Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, and Poland aside, carp is quite an unpopular culinary choice in Europe and it is barely eaten in North America, while demand for tuna, some species of which are now among the most endangered top marine carnivores, has been soaring thanks to the rapid worldwide adoption of sushi.
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Our best data are available for the US, where, thanks to the prevalence of modern techniques and widespread economies of scale, the direct energy use in food production is now on the order of 1 percent of the total national supply.[47|47] But after adding the energy requirements of food processing and marketing, packaging, transportation, wholesale and retail services, household food storage and preparation, and away-from-home food and marketing services, the grand total in the US reached nearly 16 percent of the nation’s energy supply in 2007 and now it is approaching 20 percent.[48|48] The factors driving these rising energy needs range from further consolidation of production—and hence growing transportation needs—and growing food import dependency, to more meals eaten away from home and more prepared (convenience) foods consumed at home.[49|49]
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(highlight:: Can the world of soon-to-be 8 billion people feed itself—while maintaining a variety of crop and animal products and the quality of prevailing diets—without synthetic fertilizers and without other agrochemicals? Could we return to purely organic cropping, relying on recycled organic wastes and natural pest controls, and could we do without engine-powered irrigation and without field machinery by bringing back draft animals? We could, but purely organic farming would require most of us to abandon cities, resettle villages, dismantle central animal feeding operations, and bring all animals back to farms to use them for labor and as sources of manure.
Every day we would have to feed and water our animals, regularly remove their manure, ferment it and then spread it on fields, and tend the herds and flocks on pasture. As seasonal labor demands rose and ebbed, men would guide the plows harnessed to teams of horses; women and children would plant and weed vegetable plots; and everybody would be pitching in during harvest and slaughter time, stooking sheaves of wheat, digging up potatoes, helping to turn freshly slaughtered pigs and geese into food. I do not foresee the organic green online commentariat embracing these options anytime soon. And even if they were willing to empty the cities and embrace organic earthiness, they could still produce only enough food to sustain less than half of today’s global population.)
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- [note::Welp. This is unsettling.]

The decline of human labor required to produce American wheat outlined earlier in this chapter is an excellent proxy for the overall impact that mechanization and agrochemicals have had on the size of the country’s agricultural labor force. Between 1800 and 2020, we reduced the labor needed to produce a kilogram of grain by more than 98 percent—and we reduced the share of the country’s population engaged in agriculture by the same large margin.[50|50] This provides a useful guide to the profound economic transformations that would have to take place with any retreat of agricultural mechanization and reduction in the use of synthetic agrochemicals.
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Synthetic fertilizers supply 110 megatons of nitrogen per year, or slightly more than half of the 210–220 megatons used in total. This means that at least half of recent global crop harvests have been produced thanks to the application of synthetic nitrogenous compounds, and without them it would be impossible to produce the prevailing diets for even half of today’s nearly 8 billion people. While we could reduce our dependence on synthetic ammonia by eating less meat and wasting less food, replacing the global input of about 110 megatons of nitrogen in synthetic compounds by organic sources could be done only in theory.
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Multiple constraints limit the recycling of manure produced by animals in confinement.[54|54] In traditional mixed farming, cattle, pig, and poultry manure from relatively small numbers of animals was directly recycled on adjacent fields. Producing meat and eggs in central animal feeding operations reduced this option: these enterprises generate such large quantities of waste that its application to fields would overload soils with nutrients within the radius where it would be profitable to spread it; presence of heavy metals and drug residues (from feed additives) is another problem.[55|55] Similar constraints apply to the expanded use of sewage sludge (biosolids from modern human waste treatment plants. Waste’s pathogens must be destroyed by fermentation and by high-heat sterilization, but such treatments do not kill all antibiotic-resistant bacteria and do not remove all heavy metals.
Grazing animals produce three times as much manure as do mammals and birds kept in confinement: the FAO estimates that they leave annually about 90 megatons of nitrogen in waste—but exploiting this large source is impractical.[56|56] Accessibility would limit any gathering of animal urine and excrement to a fraction of the hundreds of millions of hectares of pastures where these wastes are expelled by grazing cattle, sheep, and goats. Gathering it would be as prohibitively costly as its transportation to treatment points and then to crop fields. Moreover, intervening nitrogen losses would further reduce the already very low nitrogen content of such wastes before the nutrient could reach the fields.[57|57])
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Another choice is to expand the cultivation of leguminous crops to produce 50–60 megatons of nitrogen per year, rather than about 30 megatons as they currently do—but only at a considerable opportunity cost. Planting more leguminous cover crops such as alfalfa and clover would boost nitrogen supply but would also reduce the ability to use one field to produce two crops in a year, a vital option for the still-expanding populations of low-income countries.[58|58] Growing more leguminous grains (beans, lentils, peas) would lower the overall food energy yields, because they yield far less than cereal crops and, obviously, this would reduce the number of people that could be supported by a unit of cultivated land.[59|59] Moreover, the nitrogen left behind by a soybean crop—commonly 40–50 kilograms of nitrogen per hectare—would be less than the typical American applications of nitrogenous fertilizers, which are now about 75 kg N/ha for wheat and 150 kg N/ha for grain corn.
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In contrast, China’s most productive double-cropping depends on applications of synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers averaging more than 400 kg N/ha, and it can produce enough to feed 20–22 people whose diets contain about 40 percent animal and 60 percent plant protein.[62|62] Global crop cultivation supported solely by the laborious recycling of organic wastes and by more common rotations is conceivable for a global population of 3 billion people consuming largely plant-based diets, but not for nearly 8 billion people on mixed diets: recall that synthetic fertilizers now supply more than twice as much nitrogen as all recycled crop residues and manures (and given the higher losses from organic applications, the effective multiple is actually closer to three!).
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- agricultural productivity, global food security, global carrying capacity,

daily average per capita requirements of adults in largely sedentary affluent populations are no more than 2,000–2,100 kilocalories, far below the actual supplies of 3,200–4,000 kilocalories.[63|63] According to the FAO, the world loses almost half of all root crops, fruits, and vegetables, about a third of all fish, 30 percent of cereals, and a fifth of all oilseeds, meat, and dairy products—or at least one-third of the overall food supply.[64|64] And the UK’s Waste and Resources Action Programme ascertained that inedible household food waste (including fruit and vegetable peelings, and bones) is only 30 percent of the total, meaning that 70 percent of wasted food was perfectly edible and was not consumed either because it spoiled or because too much of it was served.[65|65]
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In well-off societies, a better way to reduce agriculture’s dependence on fossil fuel subsidies is to make appeals for adopting healthy and satisfactory alternatives to today’s excessively rich and meaty diets—the easiest choices being moderate meat consumption, and favoring meat that can be grown with lower environmental impact. The quest for mass-scale veganism is doomed to fail. Eating meat has been as significant a component of our evolutionary heritage as our large brains (which evolved partly because of meat eating), bipedalism, and symbolic language.[69|69] All our hominin ancestors were omnivorous, as are both species of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus), the hominins closest to us in their genetic makeup; they supplement their plant diet by hunting (and sharing small monkeys, wild pigs, and tortoises.[70|70]
Full expression of human growth potential on a population basis can take place only when diets in childhood and adolescence contain sufficient quantities of animal protein, first in milk and later in other dairy products, eggs, and meat: rising post-1950 body heights in Japan, South Korea, and China, as a result of increased intake of animal products, are unmistakable testimonies to this reality.[71|71] Conversely, most people who become vegetarians or vegans do not remain so for the remainder of their lives. The idea that billions of humans—across the world, not only in affluent Western cities—would willfully not eat any animal products, or that there’d be enough support for governments to enforce that anytime soon, is ridiculous.
But none of this means that we could not eat much less meat than affluent countries have averaged during the past two generations.[72|72])
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- [note::Though I am highly skeptical we'll see mass scale adoption of veg*n diets this century, this argument "our ancestors were omnivorous" doesn't seem very compelling.]

Meat consumption in Japan, the country with the world’s highest longevity, has recently been below 30 kilograms per year; and a much less appreciated fact is that similarly low consumption rates have become fairly common in France, traditionally a nation of high meat intake. By 2013, nearly 40 percent of adult French were petits consommateurs, eating meat only in small amounts adding up to less than 39 kg/year, while the heavy meat consumers, averaging about 80 kg/year, made up less than 30 percent of French adults.[74|74]
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- [note::This is an interesting finding - perhaps the primary finding of the "Blue Zones" research is not that people should actually become vegetarian/vegan, but instead people should adopt a primarily plant-based diet and consume relatively low quantities of meat.]

Additional opportunities to reduce the dependence on synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers come on the production side—for example, improving the efficiency of nitrogen uptake by plants. But again, these opportunities are circumscribed. Between 1961 and 1980 there was a substantial decline in the share of applied nitrogen actually incorporated by crops (from 68 percent to 45 percent), then came a levelling off at around 47 percent.[77|77] And in China, the world’s largest consumer of nitrogen fertilizer, only a third of the applied nitrogen is actually used by rice; the rest is lost to the atmosphere and to ground and stream waters.[78|78] Given that we are expecting at least 2 billion more people by 2050, and that more than twice as many people in the low-income countries of Asia and Africa should see further gains—both in quantity and quality—in their food supply, there is no near-term prospect for substantially reducing the global dependence on synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers.
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(highlight:: Half a century ago, Howard Odum—in his systematic examination of energy and the environment—noted that modern societies “did not understand the energetics involved and the various means by which the energies entering a complex system are fed back as subsidies indirectly into all parts of the network . . . industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy; now he eats potatoes partly made of oil.”[81|81]
Fifty years later, this existential dependence is still insufficiently appreciated—but the readers of this book now understand that our food is partly made not just of oil, but also of coal that was used to produce the coke required for smelting the iron needed for field, transportation, and food processing machinery; of natural gas that serves as both feedstock and fuel for the synthesis of nitrogenous fertilizers; and of the electricity generated by the combustion of fossil fuels that is indispensable for crop processing, taking care of animals, and food and feed storage and preparation.)
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First things first. We could have an accomplished and reasonably affluent civilization that provides plenty of food, material comforts, and access to education and health care, without any semiconductors, microchips, or personal computers: we had one until, respectively, the mid-1950s (first commercial applications of transistors), the early 1970s (Intel’s first microprocessors), and the early 1980s (first larger-scale ownership of PCs).[1|1] And we managed, until the 1990s, to integrate economies, mobilize necessary investments, build requisite infrastructures, and connect the world by wide-body jetliners without any smartphones, social media, and puerile apps. But none of these advances in electronics and telecommunications could have taken place without the assured provision of energies and materials required to embody the inventions in myriads of electricity-consuming components, devices, assemblies, and systems ranging from tiny microprocessors to massive data centers.
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Silicon (Si) made into thin wafers (the basic substrate of microchips) is the signature material of the electronic age, but billions of people could live prosperously without it; it is not an existential constraint on modern civilization. Producing large, high-purity (99.999999999 percent pure) silicon crystals that are cut into wafers is a complex, multi-step, and highly energy-intensive process: it costs two orders of magnitude more primary energy than making aluminum from bauxite, and three orders of magnitude more than smelting iron and making steel.[2|2]
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- silicon, energy consumption, material consumption, conspicuous consumption, energy intensive,

Another key commonality between these four materials is particularly noteworthy as we contemplate the future without fossil carbon: the mass-scale production of all of them depends heavily on the combustion of fossil fuels, and some of these fuels also supply feedstocks for the synthesis of ammonia and for the production of plastics.[6|6] Iron ore smelting in blast furnaces requires coke made from coal (and also natural gas); energy for cement production comes mostly from coal dust, petroleum coke, and heavy fuel oil. The vast majority of simple molecules that are bonded in long chains or branches to make plastics are derived from crude oils and natural gases. And in the modern synthesis of ammonia, natural gas is both the source of hydrogen and processing energy.
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Maturing agronomic science made it clear that the only way to secure adequate food for the larger populations of the 20th century was to raise yields by increasing the supply of nitrogen and phosphorus, two key plant macronutrients. The mining of phosphates (first in North Carolina and then in Florida) and their treatment by acids opened the way to a reliable supply of phosphatic fertilizers.[13|13] But, there was no comparably assured source of nitrogen. The mining of guano (accumulated bird droppings, moderately rich in nitrogen) on dry tropical islands had quickly exhausted the richest deposits, and the rising imports of Chilean nitrates (the country has extensive sodium nitrate layers in its arid northern regions were insufficient to meet future global demand.[14|14]
The challenge was to ensure that humanity could secure enough nitrogen to sustain its expanding numbers. The need was explained in 1898 in the clearest possible manner by William Crookes, chemist and physicist, to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in his presidential address dedicated to the so-called wheat problem. He warned that “all civilized nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat,” but he saw the way out: science coming to the rescue, tapping the practically unlimited mass of nitrogen in the atmosphere (present as the unreactive molecule N2) and converting it into compounds assimilable by plants. He rightly concluded that this challenge “differs materially from other chemical discoveries which are in the air, so to speak, but are not yet matured. The fixation of nitrogen is vital to the progress of civilized humanity.)
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I hasten to add that the 50 percent of humanity dependent on ammonia is not an immutable approximation. Given prevailing diets and farming practices, synthetic nitrogen feeds half of humanity—or, everything else being equal, half of the world’s population could not be sustained without synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers. But the share would be lower if the affluent world converted to the largely meatless Indian diet, and it would be higher if the entire world ate as well as the Chinese do today, to say nothing about the universal adoption of the American diet.[25|25] We could also reduce our dependence on nitrogenous fertilizers by cutting our food waste (as we saw earlier and by using the fertilizers more efficiently.
About 80 percent of global ammonia production is used to fertilize crops; the rest is used to make nitric acid, explosives, rocket propellants, dyes, fibers, and window and floor cleaners.[26|26] With proper precautions and special equipment, ammonia can be applied directly to fields;[27|27] but the compound is mostly used as the indispensable feedstock for producing solid and liquid nitrogenous fertilizers.)
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There are now only two effective direct solutions to field losses of nitrogen: the spreading of expensive slow-release compounds; and, more practically, turning to precision farming and applying fertilizers only as needed based on analyses of the soil.[31|31] As already noted, indirect measures—including higher food prices and reduced meat consumption—could be effective but are not highly popular. As a result, it is unlikely that any realistically conceivable combination of these solutions can bring about a radical change to the global consumption of nitrogenous fertilizers.
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But Africa, the continent with the fastest-growing population, remains deprived of the nutrient and is a substantial food importer. Any hope for its greater food self-sufficiency rests on the increased use of nitrogen: after all, the continent’s recent usage of ammonia has been less than a third of the European mean.[33|33] The best (and long-sought) solution to boost nitrogen supply would be to endow non-leguminous plants with nitrogen-fixing capabilities, a promise genetic engineering is yet to deliver on, while a less radical option—inoculating seeds with a nitrogen-fixing bacterium—is a recent innovation whose eventual commercial extent is still unclear.
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Moreover, steel is readily recycled by melting it in an electric arc furnace (EAF)—a massive cylindrical heat-resistant container made of heavy steel plates (lined with magnesium bricks), with a removable dome-like water-cooled lid through which three massive carbon electrodes are inserted. After loading the steel scrap, the electrodes are lowered into it, and electric current passing through them forms an arc whose high temperature (1,800°C) easily melts the charged metal.[68|68] However, their electricity demand is enormous: even a highly efficient modern EAF needs as much electricity every day as an American city of about 150,000 people.[69|69]
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Affluent economies now recycle nearly all of their automotive scrap, have a similarly high rate (>90 percent for reusing structural steel beams and plates, and only a slightly lower rate for recycling household appliances, and the US has recently recycled more than 65 percent of reinforcement bars in concrete, a rate similar to the recycling of beverage and food steel cans.[71|71] Steel scrap has become one of the world’s most valuable export commodities, as countries with a long history of steel production and with plenty of accumulated scrap sell the material to expanding producers. The EU is the largest exporter, followed by Japan, Russia, and Canada; and China, India, and Turkey are the top buyers.[72|72] Recycled steel accounts for almost 30 percent of the metal’s total annual output, with national shares ranging from 100 percent for several small steel producers to almost 70 percent in the US, about 40 percent in the EU, and to less than 12 percent in China.[73|73]
This means that primary steelmaking still dominates, producing more than twice as much hot metal every year as is recycled—almost 1.3 billion tons in 2019.)
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Ironmaking is highly energy-intensive, with about 75 percent of the total demand claimed by blast furnaces. Today’s best practices have a combined demand of just 17–20 gigajoules per ton of finished product; less efficient operations require 25–30 GJ/t.[76|76] Obviously, the energy cost of secondary steel made in EAFs is much lower than the cost of integrated production: today’s best performance is just above 2 GJ/t. To this must be added the energy costs of rolling the metal (mostly 1.5–2 GJ/t), and hence the representative global rates for the overall energy cost may be about 25 GJ/t for integrated steelmaking and 5 GJ/t for recycled steel.[77|77] The total energy requirement of global steel production in 2019 was about 34 exajoules, or about 6 percent of the world’s primary energy supply.
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Given the industry’s dependence on coking coal and natural gas, steelmaking has been also a major contributor to the anthropogenic generation of greenhouse gases. The World Steel Association puts the average global rate at 500 kilograms of carbon per ton, with recent primary steelmaking emitting about 900 megatons of carbon a year, or 7–9 percent of direct emissions from the global combustion of fossil fuels.[78|78]
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The durability of concrete structures varies widely: while it is impossible to offer an average longevity figure, many will deteriorate badly after just two or three decades while others will do well for 60–100 years. This means that during the 21st century we will face unprecedented burdens of concrete deterioration, renewal, and removal (with, obviously, a particularly acute problem in China), as structures will have to be torn down—in order to be replaced or destroyed—or abandoned. Concrete structures can be slowly demolished, reinforcing steel can be separated, and both materials can be recycled: not cheap, but perfectly possible. After crushing and sieving, the aggregate can be incorporated in new concrete, and reinforcing steel can be recycled.[101|101] Even now, replacement concrete and new concrete are needed everywhere.
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In affluent countries with low population growth, the main need is to fix decaying infrastructures. The latest report card for the US awards nothing but poor to very poor grades to all sectors where concrete dominates, with dams, roads, and aviation getting Ds and the overall average grade just D+.[102|102] This appraisal gives an inkling of what China might face (mass- and money-wise) by 2050. In contrast, the poorest countries need essential infrastructures and the most basic need in many homes in Africa and Asia is to replace mud floors with concrete floors in order to improve overall hygiene and to reduce the incidence of parasitic diseases by nearly 80 percent.[103|103]
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Replicating the post-1990 Chinese experience in those countries would amount to a 15-fold increase of steel output, a more than 10-fold boost for cement production, a more than doubling of ammonia synthesis, and a more than 30-fold increase of plastic syntheses.[105|105] Obviously, even if other modernizing countries accomplish only half or even just a quarter of China’s recent material advances, these countries would still see multiplications of their current uses. Requirements for fossil carbon have been—and for decades will continue to be—the price we pay for the multitude of benefits arising from our reliance on steel, cement, ammonia, and plastics. And as we continue to expand renewable energy conversions, we will require larger masses of old materials as well as unprecedented quantities of materials that were previously needed in only modest amounts.[106|106]
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No structures are more obvious symbols of “green” electricity generation than large wind turbines—but these enormous accumulations of steel, cement, and plastics are also embodiments of fossil fuels.[107|107] Their foundations are reinforced concrete, their towers, nacelles, and rotors are steel (altogether nearly 200 tons of it for every megawatt of installed generating capacity), and their massive blades are energy-intensive—and difficult to recycle—plastic resins (about 15 tons of them for a midsize turbine). All of these giant parts must be brought to the installation sites by outsized trucks and erected by large steel cranes, and turbine gearboxes must be repeatedly lubricated with oil. Multiplying these requirements by the millions of turbines that would be needed to eliminate electricity generated from fossil fuels shows how misleading any talks are about the coming dematerialization of green economies.
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- wind energy, energy transition, dematerialization,

(highlight:: Electric cars provide perhaps the best example of new, and enormous, material dependencies. A typical lithium car battery weighing about 450 kilograms contains about 11 kilograms of lithium, nearly 14 kilograms of cobalt, 27 kilograms of nickel, more than 40 kilograms of copper, and 50 kilograms of graphite—as well as about 181 kilograms of steel, aluminum, and plastics. Supplying these materials for a single vehicle requires processing about 40 tons of ores, and given the low concentration of many elements in their ores it necessitates extracting and processing about 225 tons of raw materials.[108|108] Again, we would have to multiply this by close to 100 million units, which is the annual worldwide production of internal-combustion vehicles that would have to be replaced by electric drive.
Uncertainties about the future rates of electric vehicle adoption are large, but a detailed assessment of material needs, based on two scenarios (assuming that 25 percent or 50 percent of the global fleet in 2050 would be electric vehicles), found the following: from 2020 to 2050 demand for lithium would grow by factors of 18–20, for cobalt by 17–19, for nickel by 28–31, and factors of 15–20 would apply for most other materials from 2020.[109|109] Obviously, this would require not only a drastic expansion of lithium, cobalt (a large share of it now coming from Congo’s perilously hand-dug deep shafts and from widespread child labor), and nickel extraction and processing, but also an extensive search for new resources. And these, in turn, could not take place without large additional conversions of fossil fuels and electricity. Generating smoothly rising forecasts of future electric vehicle ownership is one thing; creating these new material supplies on a mass global scale is quite another.)
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this multifaceted process which entails (according to what I think is perhaps the best concise definition) “the growing interdependence of the world’s economies, cultures, and populations, brought about by cross-border trade in goods and services, technology, and flows of investment, people, and information.”[7|7] Contrary to widely held beliefs, the process is not new; moving jobs to countries with low labor costs (labor arbitrage) is just one of its several requisite drivers; and there is nothing inevitable about its future expansion and intensification. Perhaps the greatest misconception about globalization is that it is a historical inevitability preordained by economic and social evolution. Not so—globalization is not, as a former US president claimed, “the economic equivalent of a force of nature, like wind or water”; it is just another human construct, and there is now a growing consensus that, in some ways, it has already gone too far and needs to be readjusted.[8|8]
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Globalization’s multiples
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the setting up and subsequent expansion and improvement of global positioning systems (GPS): the first (American) system was fully operational in 1993, and three other systems (Russia’s GLONASS, EU’s Galileo, China’s BeiDou) followed.[85|85] As a result, everybody with a computer or a mobile phone can now see worldwide shipping and aviation activities in real time, just by clicking on the MarineTraffic website and watching cargo vessels (green icons) converging on Shanghai and Hong Kong, lining up to pass between Bali and Lombok, or going up the English Channel; to see tankers (red) debouching from the Persian Gulf, tugs and special craft (turquoise) serving the oil and gas production rigs in the North Sea, and fishing vessels (light brown) roaming the central Pacific
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- 1action,

A great deal of accreted globalization, especially many changes that unfolded during the past two generations, is here to stay. Too many countries now rely on food imports, and self-sufficiency in all raw materials is impossible even for the largest countries because no country possesses sufficient reserves of all minerals needed by its economy. The UK and Japan import more food than they produce, China does not have all the iron ore it needs for its blast furnaces, the US buys many rare earth metals (from lanthanum to yttrium, and India is chronically short of crude oil.[91|91] The inherent advantages of mass-scale manufacturing preclude companies from assembling mobile phones in every city in which they are purchased. And millions of people will still try to see iconic distant places before they die.[92|92] Moreover, instant reversals are not practical, and rapid disruptions could come only with high costs attached. For example, the global supply of consumer electronics would suffer enormously if Shenzhen suddenly ceased to function as the world’s most important manufacturing hub of portable devices.
But history reminds us that the recent state of things is unlikely to last for generations. British and American industries were the global leaders as recently as the early 1970s. But where are Birmingham’s metal-working factories or Baltimore’s steel furnaces now? Where are the great cotton mills of Manchester or of South Carolina? By 1965, Detroit’s big three still had 90 percent of the US car market; now they do not have even 45 percent. Until 1980, Shenzhen was a small fishing village, when it became China’s first special economic zone, and now it is a megacity with more than 12 million people: what role will it play in 2050? A mass-scale, rapid retreat from the current state is impossible, but the pro-globalization sentiment has been weakening for some time.)
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the COVID-19 pandemic provided additional powerful arguments based on irrefutable concerns about the state’s fundamental role in protecting the lives of its citizens. That role is hard to play when 70 percent of the world’s rubber gloves are made in a single factory, and when similar or even higher shares of not just other pieces of personal protective equipment but also of principal drug components and common medications (antibiotics, antihypertensive drugs) come from a very small number of suppliers in China and India.[100|100] Such dependence might fulfill an economist’s dream of mass output at the lowest possible unit cost, but it makes for extremely irresponsible—if not criminal—governance when doctors and nurses have to face a pandemic without adequate PPE, when states dependent on foreign production engage in dismaying competition for limited supplies, and when patients around the world cannot renew their prescriptions because of the slowdowns or closures in Asian factories.
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In his pioneering 1969 analysis of risks, Chauncey Starr—at that time the dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of California in Los Angeles—stressed the major difference in risk tolerance between voluntary and involuntary activities.[20|20] When people think that they are in control (a perception that may be incorrect but that is based on previous experiences and hence on the belief that they can assess the likely outcome), they engage in activities—climbing vertical rock faces without ropes, skydiving, bullfighting—whose risks of serious injury or fatality may be a thousand-fold higher than the risk associated with such dreaded involuntary exposure as a terrorist attack in a large Western city.
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(highlight:: it is not only the German Greens who believe that nuclear power is an infernal invention that must be eliminated as fast as possible, but much larger portions of society too.[26|26]
This is why many researchers have argued that there is no “objective risk” waiting to be measured because our risk perceptions are inherently subjective, dependent on our understanding of specific dangers (familiar vs. new risks) and on cultural circumstances.[27|27] Their psychometric studies showed that specific hazards have their unique patterns of highly correlated qualities: involuntary risks are often associated with the dread of new, uncontrollable, and unknown hazards; voluntary hazards are more likely to be perceived as controllable and known to science. Nuclear electricity generation is widely perceived as unsafe, x-rays as tolerably risky.)
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A more insightful metric then is to use the time during which people are affected by a given risk as the common denominator, and do the comparisons in terms of fatalities per person per hour of exposure—that is, the time when an individual is subject, involuntarily or voluntarily, to a specific risk. This approach was introduced in 1969 by Chauncey Starr in his evaluation of social benefits and technological risks and I still find it preferable to another general metric—that of micromorts.[40|40] These units define a micro probability, a one-in-a-million chance of death per specific exposure, and express it per year, per day, per surgery, per flight, or per distance traveled—and these non-uniform denominators do not make for easy across-the-board comparisons.
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The largest known coronal mass ejection began on the morning of September 1, 1859, while Richard Carrington, a British astronomer, was observing and drawing a large solar sunspot that emitted a sizable, kidney-shaped white flare.[74|74] That was nearly two decades before the first telephones (1877) and more than two decades before the first centralized commercial generation of electricity (1882, and hence the notable effects were only intense auroras and disruptions of the newly expanding telegraph network whose laying began in the 1840s: wires were sparking, messaging was interrupted or continued in bizarrely truncated ways, operators got electric shocks, some fires started accidentally.
Some of the subsequent strongest events took place on October 31–November 1, 1903 and May 13–15, 1921, when the extent of both wired telephone links and electricity grids was still fairly limited even in Europe and North America, and very sparse elsewhere. But we got a preview of what a substantial coronal mass ejection could do today in March 1989 when a much smaller (a non-Carrington) event knocked out Quebec’s entire power grid, serving 6 million people, for nine hours.[75|75] More than three decades later we have become much more vulnerable: just think of everything electronic, from mobile phones to e-mail to international banking, and about GPS-guided navigation on every vessel and airplane and now also on tens of millions of cars.)
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our constant surveyance of the Sun’s activity would instantly detect any mass ejection and provide at least 12–15 hours of prestrike warning. But only when the ejection reaches the point where we have stationed the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), about 1.5 million kilometers away from the Earth, could we gauge its intensity; and by then the time to react would be reduced to less than an hour, perhaps even to just 15 minutes.[76|76] Even limited damage would mean hours or days of disrupted communications and grid operations, and a massive geomagnetic storm would sever all of these links on a global scale, leaving us without electricity, without information, without transportation, without the ability to make credit card payments or to withdraw money from banks.
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A 2012 study estimated a 12 percent probability of another Carrington Event during the coming ten years—or a one-in-eight chance, and it emphasized that the rarity of these extreme events makes their rate occurrence difficult to estimate “and prediction of a specific future event is virtually impossible.”[78|78] Given this uncertainty, it is not surprising that in 2019 a group of scientists in Barcelona calculated the risk to be no greater than 0.46–1.88 percent during the 2020s, and hence even the highest rate would mean odds of 1 in 53, a considerably more comforting probability.[79|79] And in 2020 a Carnegie Mellon group offered an even lower estimate, putting a decadal (10-year) probability of between 1 percent and 9 percent for an event of at least the size of the large 2012 event, and between 0.02 percent and 1.6 percent for the size of the 1859 Carrington Event.[80|80] While many experts are well aware of these odds and of the enormity of the potential consequences, this is clearly one of those risks (much like a pandemic) for which we cannot ever be adequately prepared: we just have to hope that the next massive coronal ejection event will not equal or surpass the Carrington Event.
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the best way to assess the recurrent pandemic burden is to compare it to global seasonal influenza-associated respiratory mortality. The most detailed assessment for the years 2002–2011 found a mean of 389,000 deaths (ranging between 294,000 and 518,000) after excluding the 2009 pandemic season.[85|85] This means that seasonal influenza accounts for about 2 percent of all annual respiratory deaths, and that its mortality rate averages 6/100,000—or 15–20 percent of the death rates recorded in the two late 20th-century pandemics (1957–1959, 1968–1970. Inversely stated, the first pandemic exacted a more than six times higher and the second one a nearly five times higher relative death toll than seasonal influenza.
Moreover, there is an important difference in age-specific mortality. Seasonal flu mortality is, almost without exception, highly skewed toward old age, with 67 percent of all deaths among people over 65. In contrast, the infamous second wave of the 1918 pandemic disproportionately targeted people in their 30s; the 1957–1959 pandemic had a U-shaped mortality frequency, disproportionately affecting ages 0–4 and 60+; while COVID-19 mortality has been, much like seasonal influenza, highly concentrated in the 65+ cohort, especially among those with significant comorbidities, and it has left children remarkably unaffected.[86|86])
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- [note::Two factors for quantifying pandemic impact:

1. Scale of impact (death counts relative to seasonal flu)
2. Distribution (counterfactual impact on different populations)]

Another set of truisms applies to our risk assessment. We habitually underestimate voluntary, familiar risks while we repeatedly exaggerate involuntary, unfamiliar exposures. We constantly overestimate the risks stemming from recent shocking experiences and underestimate the risk of events once they recede in our collective and institutional memory.[94|94] As I already noted, about a billion people have lived through three pandemics, but when COVID-19 struck references were made overwhelmingly to the 1918 episode, as the three more recent (but less deadly) pandemics—unlike the widely remembered fear of polio during the 1950s or AIDS in the 1980s—have left no or only the most superficial impressions.[95|95]
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the lessons we derive in the aftermath of major catastrophic events are decidedly not rational. We exaggerate the probability of their recurrence, and we resent any reminders that (setting the shock aside their actual human and economic impact has been comparable to the consequences of many risks whose cumulative toll does not raise any extraordinary concerns. As a result, fear of another spectacular terrorist attack led the US to take extraordinary steps to prevent it. These included multitrillion-dollar wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, fulfilling Osama bin Laden’s wish to draw the country into stunningly asymmetrical conflicts that would erode its strength in the long run.[99|99]
Public reaction to risks is guided more by a dread of what is unfamiliar, unknown, or poorly understood than by any comparative appraisal of actual consequences. When these strong emotional reactions are involved, people focus excessively on the possibility of a dreaded outcome (death by a terrorist attack or by a viral pandemic) rather than trying to keep in mind the probability of such an outcome taking place.[100|100] Terrorists have always exploited this reality, forcing governments to take extraordinarily costly steps to prevent further attacks while repeatedly neglecting to take measures that could have saved more lives at a much lower cost per averted fatality.)
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There is no better illustration of neglected low-cost measures to save lives than the American attitude to gun violence: not even the most shocking iterations of familiar, all-too-well-known mass murders (I always think first of the 26 people, including 20 six- and seven-year-old children, shot in 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut) have been able to change the laws, and during the second decade of the 21st century about 125,000 Americans were killed by guns (the total for homicides, excluding suicides): that is the equivalent of the population of Topeka, Kansas or Athens, Georgia or Simi Valley, California—or of Göttingen in Germany.[101|101] In contrast, 170 Americans died in all terrorist attacks in the US during the second decade of the 21st century, a difference of nearly three orders of magnitude.[102|102] When we compare this to motor vehicle accidents, the toll is even more unevenly distributed: as we saw earlier, compared to Asian American females, Native American men are about five times more likely to die in their cars, but African American males are about 30 times more likely to be killed by firearms.[103|103]
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The list of these critical biospheric boundaries includes nine categories: climate change (now interchangeably, albeit inaccurately, called simply global warming), ocean acidification (endangering marine organisms that build structures of calcium carbonate), depletion of stratospheric ozone (shielding the Earth from excessive ultraviolet radiation and threatened by releases of chlorofluorocarbons), atmospheric aerosols (pollutants reducing visibility and causing lung impairment), interference in nitrogen and phosphorus cycles (above all, the release of these nutrients into fresh and coastal waters), freshwater use (excessive withdrawals of underground, stream, and lake waters), land use changes (due to deforestation, farming, and urban and industrial expansion), biodiversity loss, and various forms of chemical pollution
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As well as there being absolutely no danger of people or animals appreciably reducing this level through breathing, there is also no danger of too much oxygen being consumed by even the greatest conceivable burning (rapid oxidation of the Earth’s plants.
The Earth’s terrestrial plant mass contains on the order of 500 billion tons of carbon and even if all of it (all forests, grasslands, and crops) were burned at once, such a mega-conflagration would consume only about 0.1 percent of the atmosphere’s oxygen.[9|9])
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In the process, lungs (as any other organ must consume oxygen, but it is not easy to measure how much of it they need—that is, to separate their requirement from the overall intake. The best way to find out is during a total cardiopulmonary bypass, when lung circulation is temporarily separated from systemic blood flow: this shows that lungs consume about 5 percent of the total oxygen we inhale.[11|11] And while Amazonian trees, as any terrestrial plants, produce O2 during diurnal photosynthesis, they—again, much as any other photosynthesizing organism—consume virtually all of this oxygen during nocturnal respiration, the process that uses photosynthate to produce energy and compounds for plant growth.[12|12]
Every year, at least 300 billion tons of oxygen are absorbed and a similar amount is released by terrestrial and marine photosynthesis.[13|13] These flows, as well as much smaller flows resulting from the burial and oxidation of organic matter, are not perfectly balanced on a daily or seasonal basis, but over the long run they cannot be too far off, otherwise we would have substantial net gains or losses of the element. Instead, oxygen’s atmospheric presence has been remarkably stable. Images of burning Amazonian forest, Australian scrubland, Californian hillsides, or Siberian taiga are not ominous harbingers of an atmosphere deprived of the gas we need to inhale at least a dozen times a minute.[14|14] Massive forest fires are destructive and harmful in many ways, but they are not going to suffocate us because of a lack of oxygen.)
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Different sectors of water use (agriculture, thermal electricity generation, heavy industries, light manufacturing, services, household) and different categories of water complicate intranational and international comparisons. Blue water includes rainfall entering rivers, water bodies, and groundwater storage that gets incorporated into products or evaporates; the green water footprint accounts for water from precipitation that is stored in soil and subsequently evaporated, transpired, or incorporated by plants; grey water includes all the freshwater required to dilute pollutants in order to meet specific water-quality standards.
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In conjunction with phosphorus, soluble nitrogen compounds contaminate waters and support excessive algal growth. Decomposing algae consume oxygen dissolved in seawater and create oxygen-less (anoxic) waters where fish and crustaceans cannot survive. These oxygen-depleted zones are prominent along the eastern and southern coasts of the United States and along coasts in Europe, China, and Japan.[34|34] There are no easy, inexpensive, and rapid solutions to these environmental impacts. Better agronomic management (crop rotations, split applications of fertilizers to minimize their losses) is essential, and reduced meat consumption would be the single-most important adjustment as it would lower the need for producing feed grains—but sub-Saharan Africa will need much more nitrogen and phosphorus if it is to avoid chronic dependence on food imports.
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These gases absorb the outgoing radiation to different degrees: when their impacts are compared over a 100-year period, releasing a unit of CH4 has the same effect as releasing 28–36 units of CO2; for N2O, the multiplier is between 265 and 298. A handful of new man-made industrial gases—above all chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs, in the past used in refrigeration) and SF6 (an excellent insulator used in electrical equipment)—exert a far stronger effect, but fortunately they are present only in minuscule concentrations and the production of CFCs was gradually outlawed by the 1987 Montreal Protocol.[39|39]
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- [note::When people say "CO2 equivalent", does that mean the statistic accounts for methane emissions (multiplier by 16 due to its increased warming potential)?
I'd be valuable to look at a visualization that compares different emission sources based on the kinds of gases emitted and their warming potential.]

CO2 (mostly emitted from fossil fuel combustion, with deforestation being another major source) accounts for about 75 percent of the anthropogenic warming effect, CH4 for about 15 percent, and the rest is mostly N2O.[40|40]
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In 1957, three decades before the sudden surge of interest in global warming, Roger Revelle, an American oceanographer, and Hans Suess, a physical chemist, appraised the process of mass-scale fossil fuel combustion in its correct evolutionary terms: “Thus human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.”[47|47]
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- [note::Wow, 3 decades before the IPCC was established]

The late-1980s “discovery” of carbon dioxide–induced global warming thus came more than a century after Foote and Tyndall made the link clear, nearly four generations after Arrhenius published a good quantitative estimate of the possible global warming effect, more than a generation after Revelle and Suess warned about an unprecedented and unrepeatable planet-wide geophysical experiment, and a decade after modern confirmation of climate sensitivity. Clearly, we did not have to wait for new computer models or for the establishment of an international bureaucracy to be aware of this change and to think about our responses.
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Many regional, national, and global models have examined future water availability. They assume different degrees of global warming, and while the worst-case scenarios offer a generally deteriorating outlook, there are substantial uncertainties depending on necessary assumptions about population growth and therefore water demand. With a warming of up to 2°C, populations exposed to increased, climate change–induced water scarcity may be as low as 500 million and as high as 3.1 billion.[61|61] Per capita water supply will be decreasing worldwide, but some major river basins (including La Plata, the Mississippi, Danube, and Ganges) will remain well above the scarcity level, while some already water-scarce river basins will see further deterioration (perhaps most notably Turkey and Iraq’s Tigris-Euphrates and China’s Huang He.[62|62]
But most studies concur that demand-driven freshwater scarcity will have a much greater impact than the shortages induced by climate change.)
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Global warming will, inevitably, intensify the water cycle because higher temperatures will increase evaporation. As a result, there will be, overall, more precipitation and hence more water available for capture, storage, and use.[66|66] But more precipitation in general will not mean more precipitation everywhere, nor—a no less important consideration—more precipitation when it is most needed. As with many other changes associated with a warmer climate, enhanced precipitation will be unevenly distributed. Some regions will be receiving less than today; others (including the Yangtze basin, home to most of China’s large population) significantly more, and this increase is expected to bring a slight reduction in the number of people residing in highly water-stressed environments.[67|67] But many places with more precipitation will get it in a more irregular manner, in the form of less frequent but heavier—even catastrophic—rain or snow events.
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To believe that our understanding of these dynamic, multifactorial realities has reached the state of perfection is to mistake the science of global warming for the religion of climate change. At the same time, we do not need an endless stream of new models in order to take effective actions. There are enormous opportunities for reducing energy use in buildings, transportation, industry, and agriculture, and we should have initiated some of these energy-saving and emissions-reducing measures decades ago, regardless of any concerns about global warming. Quests to avoid unnecessary energy use, to reduce air pollution and water, and to provide more comfortable living conditions should be perennial imperatives, not sudden desperate actions aimed at preventing a catastrophe.
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- climate mitigation, climate change, emissions reduction, anti-perfectionism, climate emissions, climate modeling, pragmatism,

SUV ownership began to rise in the US during the late 1980s, it eventually diffused globally, and by 2020 the average SUV emitted annually about 25 percent more CO2 than a standard car.[76|76] Multiply that by the 250 million SUVs on the road in 2020, and you will see how the worldwide embrace of these machines has wiped out, several times over, any decarbonization gains resulting from the slowly spreading ownership (just 10 million in 2020) of electric vehicles. During the 2010s, SUVs became the second-highest cause of rising CO2 emissions, behind electricity generation and ahead of heavy industry, trucking, and aviation. If their mass public embrace continues, they have the potential to offset any carbon savings from the more than 100 million electric vehicles that might be on the road by 2040!
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The combination of our inaction and of the extraordinarily difficult nature of the global warming challenge is best illustrated by the fact that three decades of large-scale international climate conferences have had no effect on the course of global CO2 emissions. The UN’s first conference on climate change took place in 1992; annual climate change conferences began in 1995 (in Berlin) and included much publicized gatherings in Kyoto (1997, with its completely ineffective agreement), Marrakech (2001), Bali (2007), Cancún (2010), Lima (2014), and Paris (2015.[78|78] Clearly, the delegates love to travel to scenic destinations with hardly any thought of the dreaded carbon footprint generated by this global jetting.[79|79]
In 2015, when about 50,000 people flew to Paris in order to attend yet another conference of the parties at which they were to strike, we were assured, a “landmark”—and also “ambitious” and “unprecedented”—agreement, and yet the Paris accord did not (could not) codify any specific reduction targets by the world’s largest emitters, and it would, even if all voluntary non-binding pledges were honored (something utterly improbable), result in a 50 percent increase of emissions by 2050.[80|80] Some landmark.
These meetings could never have stopped either the expansion of China’s coal extraction (it more than tripled between 1995 and 2019, to nearly as much as the rest of the world combined) or the just-noted worldwide preference for massive SUVs, and they could not have dissuaded millions of families from purchasing—as soon as their rising incomes allowed—new air conditioners that will work through the hot humid nights of monsoonal Asia and hence will not be energized by solar electricity anytime soon.[81|81] The combined effect of these demands: between 1992 and 2019, the global emissions of CO2 rose by about 65 percent; those of CH4 by about 25 percent.[82|82])
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The IPCC report on 1.5°C warming offers a scenario based on such a sudden and persistent reversal of our reliance on fossil fuels that the global emissions of CO2 would be halved by 2030 and eliminated by 2050[85|85]—and other scenario-builders are now offering detailed suggestions on how to achieve a rapid end to the fossil carbon era. Computers make it easy to construct many scenarios of rapid carbon elimination—but those who chart their preferred paths to a zero-carbon future owe us realistic explanations, not just sets of more or less arbitrary and highly improbable assumptions detached from technical and economic realities and ignoring the embedded nature, massive scale, and enormous complexity of our energy and material systems.
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More importantly, the proponents of this unrealistic scenario allow merely a factor-of-two increase across all modes of mobility during the next three decades in what they call the Global South (a common but highly inaccurate designation of low-income nations, mostly in Asia and Africa), and a factor-of-three increase in the ownership of consumer goods. But in the China of the past generation, growth has been on an entirely different scale: in 1999 the country had just 0.34 cars per 100 urban households, in 2019 the number surpassed 40. That is a more than 100-fold relative increase in only two decades.[88|88] In 1990, 1 out of every 300 urban households had an air-conditioning window unit; by 2018 there were 142.2 units per 100 households: a more than 400-fold rise in less than three decades. Consequently, even if those countries whose standard of living is today where China’s was in 1999 were to achieve only a tenth of China’s recent growth, they would experience a 10-fold increase of car ownership and a 40-fold increase in air conditioners. Why do the prescribers of the low-energy-demand scenario think that today’s Indians and Nigerians do not want to narrow the gap that separates them from China’s material ownership?
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Not surprisingly, the latest global production gap report—an annual publication highlighting the discrepancy between fossil fuel production planned by individual countries and the global emission levels necessary to limit warming to 1.5°C or 2°C—does not show any commitments to plunging trend lines; just the opposite, in fact.[89|89] In 2019, the major consumers of fossil energies were aiming to produce 120 percent more fuels by 2030 than would be consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5°C, and whatever the eventual effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, the resulting decline of consumption will be both temporary and too small to reverse the general trend.
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(highlight:: If true, these claims and their enthusiastic endorsements raise the obvious question: why should we worry about global warming? Why be frightened by the idea of early planetary demise, why feel compelled to join Extinction Rebellion? Who could be against solutions that are both cheap and nearly instantly effective, that will create countless well-paying jobs and ensure care-free futures for coming generations? Let us all just sing from these green hymnals, let us follow all-renewable prescriptions and a new global nirvana will arrive in just a decade—or, if things get a bit delayed, by 2035.[94|94]
Alas, a close reading reveals that these magic prescriptions give no explanation for how the four material pillars of modern civilization (cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia) will be produced solely with renewable electricity, nor do they convincingly explain how flying, shipping, and trucking (to which we owe our modern economic globalization) could become 80 percent carbon-free by 2030; they merely assert that it could be so. Attentive readers will remember (see chapter 1) that during the first two decades of the 21st century Germany’s unprecedented quest for decarbonization (based on wind and solar) succeeded in boosting the shares of wind- and solar-generated electricity to more than 40 percent, but it lowered the share of fossil fuels in the country’s primary energy use only from about 84 percent to 78 percent.)
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What miraculous options will be available to African nations now relying on fossil fuels to supply 90 percent of their primary energy, in order to drive their dependence to 20 percent within a decade while also saving enormous sums of monies? And how will China and India (both countries are still expanding their coal extraction and coal-fired generation) suddenly become coal-free? But these specific critiques of published rapid-speed transformation narratives are really beside the point: it makes no sense to argue with the details of what are essentially the academic equivalents of science fiction. They start with arbitrarily set goals (zero by 2030 or by 2050) and work backwards to plug in assumed actions to fit those achievements, with actual socioeconomic needs and technical imperatives being of little, or no, concern.
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But we can make a great deal of difference, not by pretending to follow unrealistic and arbitrary goals: all too obviously, history does not unfold as a computerized academic exercise with major achievements falling on years ending with zero or five; it is full of discontinuities, reversals, and unpredictable departures. We can proceed fairly fast with the displacement of coal-fired electricity by natural gas (when produced and transported without significant methane leakage, it has a substantially lower carbon intensity than coal) and by expanding solar and wind electricity generation. We can move away from SUVs and accelerate mass-scale deployment of electric cars, and we still have large inefficiencies in construction, household, and commercial energy use that can be profitably reduced or eliminated. But we cannot instantly change the course of a complex system consisting of more than 10 billion tons of fossil carbon and converting energies at a rate of more than 17 terawatts, just because somebody decides that the global consumption curve will suddenly reverse its centuries-long ascent and go immediately into a sustained and relatively fast decline.
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When looking ahead, we must regain a critical perspective when dealing with all models exploring environmental, technical, and social complexities. There are no limits to assembling such models or, as fashionable lingo has it, constructing narratives. Their authors can choose, as so many recent climate models have done recently, excessive assumptions about future energy use, and they can end up with very high rates of warming that generate news headlines about hellish futures.[98|98] Taking the opposite approach, other modelers can posit 100 percent inexpensive thermonuclear electricity or cold fusion by 2050, or, alternatively, they can allow for the unlimited expansion of fossil fuel combustion, because their model deploys miraculous techniques that will not only remove any volume of CO2 from the atmosphere but recycle it as a feedstock for synthesizing liquid fuel—all at a steadily declining cost.
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Here is how a green energy CEO put it in 2020: “Do you remember how we transformed telephony from fixed-line phones to mobile phones, television from watching whatever was on TV to whatever we fancied, from buying newspapers to customising our news feeds? The people-led, tech-powered energy revolution is going to be just the same.”[99|99] How could changing a device (landline to mobile) whose reliable use depends on a massive, complex, and highly reliable system of electricity generation (dominated by thousands of large fossil-fueled, hydro, and nuclear power plants), transformation, and transmission (encompassing hundreds of thousands of kilometers of national and even continental-scale grids be the same as changing the entire underlying system?
Much of this unmoored thinking comes out as intended—ranging from scary to wonderful—and I can see why many people are taken in either by these threats or by unrealistic suggestions. Only the imagination limits these assumptions: they range from fairly plausible to patently delusionary.)
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(highlight:: This is a new scientific genre where heavy doses of wishful thinking are commingled with a few solid facts. All of these models should be seen mainly as heuristic exercises, as bases for thinking about options and approaches, never to be mistaken for prescient descriptions of our future. I wish this admonition would be as obvious, as trivial, and as superfluous as it seems!
Regardless of the perceived (or modeled) severity of global environmental challenges, there are no swift, universal, and widely affordable solutions to tropical deforestation or biodiversity loss, to soil erosion or to global warming. But global warming presents an uncommonly difficult challenge precisely because it is a truly global phenomenon, and because its largest anthropogenic cause is the combustion of fuels that constitute the massive energetic foundations of modern civilization. As a result, non-carbon energies could completely displace fossil carbon in a matter of one to three decades ONLY if we were willing to take substantial cuts to the standard of living in all affluent countries and deny the modernizing nations of Asia and Africa improvements in their collective lots by even a fraction of what China has done since 1980.)
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(highlight:: Was there a single climate modeler who predicted in 1980 the most important anthropogenic factor driving global warming over the past 30 years: the economic rise of China? At that time even the best models, all being direct descendants of global atmospheric circulation models developed during the 1960s, had no way of reflecting unpredictable shifts in national fortunes, and they also ignored the interactions between the atmosphere and the biosphere. That did not make these models useless: they assumed the continued global growth of greenhouse gas emissions and, in general, they were fairly accurate in predicting the rate of global warming.[100|100]
But a good estimate of the overall rate is only the beginning. To use, once again, the COVID-19 analogy, this is akin to making a forecast in 2010 that—based on the last three pandemics and adjusted for a larger population—global deaths during the first year of the next global pandemic would be about 2 million.[101|101] That would be very close to the actual total—but would that forecast (correctly assuming, based on many precedents, that the pandemic would start in China) also assign only 0.24 percent of those deaths (in absolute terms, less than in Greece or Austria) to China, a country with nearly 20 percent of the global population—and nearly 20 percent to the US, a far richer and (it certainly believes this about itself) far more competent country with less than 5 percent of the global population?
And, even more incredibly, would it predict that the highest mortalities would be concentrated in the most affluent Western economies, those that boast about their state-delivered advanced health care?)
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- [note::This reminds me of Morgan Housel's warning to "not assume future results based on past performance" in an investing context.
Understanding the limitations of models and the inherent uncertainty of the future is so important when it comes to decision-making.]

Most notably, what remains in doubt is our collective—in this case global—resolve to deal effectively with at least some critical challenges. Solutions, adjustments, and adaptations are available. Affluent countries could reduce their average per capita energy use by large margins and still retain a comfortable quality of life. Widespread diffusion of simple technical fixes ranging from mandated triple windows to designs of more durable vehicles would have significant cumulative effects. The halving of food waste and changing the composition of global meat consumption would reduce carbon emissions without degrading the quality of food supply. Remarkably, these measures are absent, or rank low, in typical recitals of coming low-carbon “revolutions” that rely on as-yet-unavailable mass-scale electricity storage or on the promise of unrealistically massive carbon capture and its permanent storage underground. There is nothing new about these exaggerated expectations.
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we are now promised even more astonishing “disruptive” innovations and AI-driven “solutions.” The reality is that any sufficiently effective steps will be decidedly non-magical, gradual, and costly. We have been transforming the environment on increasing scales and with rising intensity for millennia, and we have derived many benefits from these changes—but, inevitably, the biosphere has suffered. There are ways to reduce those impacts but the resolve to deploy them at required scales has been lacking, and if we start acting in a sufficiently effective manner (and this now requires doing so on a global scale) we will have to pay a considerable economic and social price. Will we, eventually, do so deliberately, with foresight; will we act only when forced by deteriorating conditions; or will we fail to act in a meaningful way?
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(highlight:: What has been so remarkable about modern anticipations of the future is how they have gravitated—despite all of the available evidence—toward one of these two extremes. In the past, this tendency toward dichotomy was often described as the clash of catastrophists and cornucopians, but these labels appear to be too timid to reflect the recent extreme polarization of sentiments.[4|4] And this polarization has been accompanied by a greater propensity for dated quantitative forecasts.
You see them everywhere, from cars (worldwide sales of electric passenger vehicles will reach 56 million by 2040) and carbon (the EU will have net-zero carbon emissions by 2050) to global flying (there will be 8.2 billion travelers by 2037).[5|5] Or so we’re told. In reality, most of these forecasts are no better than simple guesses: any number for 2050 obtained by a computer model primed with dubious assumptions—or, even worse, by a politically expedient decision—has a very brief shelf life. My advice: if you would like a better understanding of what the future may look like, avoid these new-age dated prophecies entirely, or use them primarily as evidence of prevailing expectations and biases.
For generations, businesses and governments were the most common practitioners and consumers of forecasting, then academics joined the game in large numbers from the 1950s, and now anybody can be a forecaster—even without any mathematical skills—simply by using plug-in software or (as has been in vogue lately) by making baseless qualitative predictions. As in so many other cases of newly expanded endeavors (information flows, mass education), the quantity of modern forecasting has become inversely proportional to its quality. Many forecasts are nothing but the simplest extensions of past trajectories; others are the outcome of complicated interactive models which incorporate large numbers of variables and run using different assumptions each time (essentially the numerical equivalent of narrative scenarios); and some have hardly any quantitative component and are just wishful and exceedingly politically correct narratives.)
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Moving from relatively simple pencil-and-paper forecasts to complex computerized scenarios makes it easier to perform the requisite calculations and to produce different scenarios, but it does not eliminate the inevitable perils of making assumptions. Just the opposite—more complex models combining the interactions of economic, social, technical, and environmental factors require more assumptions and open the way for greater errors.
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Such predictably repetitive prophecies (however well-meant and however passionately presented) do not offer any practical advice about the deployment of the best possible technical solutions, about the most effective ways of legally binding global cooperation, or about tackling the difficult challenge of convincing populations of the need for significant expenditures whose benefits will not be seen for decades to come. And they are, of course, quite unnecessary according to those who argue that a “sustainable future is within our grasp,” that the catastrophists have a long history of raising false alarms, who title their writings Apocalypse Not! and Apocalypse Never, and, in the starkest contradistinction to civilization’s supposedly rapidly approaching final curtain, even go as far (as already noted) as seeing a not-too-distant Singularity.[27|27]
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(highlight:: What will happen? An imminent near-infernal perdition, or speed-of-light godlike omnipotence?
Based on the revealed delusions of past prophecies, neither. We do not have a civilization envisioned in the early 1970s—one of worsening planetary hunger or one energized by cost-free nuclear fission—and a generation from now we will not be either at the end of our evolutionary path or have a civilization transformed by Singularity. We will still be around during the 2030s, albeit without the unimaginable benefits of speed-of-light intelligence. And we will still be trying to do the impossible, to make long-range forecasts. That is bound to bring more embarrassments and more ridiculous predictions, as well as more surprises caused by unanticipated events. Extremes are fairly easy to envisage; anticipating realities that will arise from combinations of inertial developments and unpredictable discontinuities remains an elusive quest. No amount of modeling will eliminate that, and our long-range predictions will continue to err.[28|28])
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The
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And in a civilization where production of essential commodities now serves nearly 8 billion people, any departure from established practices also runs repeatedly into the constraints of scale: as we have already seen (in chapter 3), fundamental material requirements are now measured in billions and hundreds of millions of tons per year. This makes it impossible either to substitute such masses for entirely different commodities—what would take the place of more than 4 billion tons of cement or nearly 2 billion tons of steel?—or to make a rapid (years rather than decades transition to entirely new ways of producing these essential inputs.
This inevitable inertia of mass-scale dependencies can eventually be overcome (recall that, before 1920, we had to devote a quarter of American farmland to feed crops for horses and mules), but many past examples of rapid shifts are not good guides for deriving plausible time spans for any future accomplishments.)
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A category mistake—erroneously assigning to something a quality or action that is properly attributable only to things of another category—is behind the frequent, but deeply mistaken, conclusion that in this new, electronically enabled world everything can, and will, move much faster.[36|36] Information and connections do so, and so does the adoption of new personal gadgets—but existential im-peratives do not belong to the category of microprocessors and mobile phones. Securing the sufficient delivery of water, growing and processing crops, feeding and slaughtering animals, producing and converting enormous quantities of primary energies, and extracting and altering raw materials to fit a myriad of uses are endeavors whose scales (required to meet the demand of billions of consumers) and infrastructures (that enable the production and distribution of these irreplaceable needs) belong to categories that are quite distinct from making a new social media profile or buying a more expensive smartphone.
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COVID-19’s impact in rich countries in general, and in the United States in particular, also illustrates how misplaced some of our highly touted (and very expensive) future-forming endeavors have been. Foremost among these have been the renewed steps toward manned space flight, and particularly the sci-fi-type goal of missions to Mars; trying to move toward personalized medicine (diagnosis and treatment tailored to individual patients based on their specific risk or response to a disease), with The Economist running a special report on this topic on March 12, 2020, just as COVID-19 began to sweep through Europe and North America filling urban hospitals with oxygen-deprived people; and being preoccupied with ever-faster connectivity, with endless hype surrounding the benefits of 5G networks.[43|43] How irrelevant are all of these quests while (as the cliché goes) the only remaining superpower could not provide its nurses and doctors with enough simple personal protection equipment, including such low-tech items as gloves, masks, caps, and gowns?
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Persistence is as important as forgetting: despite the promises of new beginnings and bold departures, old patterns and old approaches soon resurface to set the stage for another round of failures. I ask any readers who doubt this to check sentiments during and immediately after the great financial crisis of 2007–2008—and compare them with the post-crisis experience. Who has been found responsible for this systemic near collapse of the financial order? What fundamental departures (besides enormous injections of new monies were taken to reform questionable practices or to reduce economic inequality?[48|48]
Returning to the COVID-19 example, this pattern of persistence means that nobody will ever be found responsible for any of the many strategic lapses that guaranteed the mismanagement of the pandemic even before it began. Undoubtedly, some desultory hearings and a few think-tank papers will produce a list of recommendations, but those will be promptly ignored and will make no difference to deeply ingrained habits. Did the world take any resolute steps after the pandemics of 1918–1919, 1958–1959, 1968–1969, and 2009? Governments will not ensure adequate provisions of needed supplies for a future pandemic, and their response will be as inconsistent—if not as incoherent—as ever. The profits of mass-scale single-source manufacturing will not be changed for less vulnerable but more expensive decentralized production. And people will resume their constant global mingling as they return to intercontinental flights and cruises to nowhere, although it is hard to imagine a better virus incubator than a ship with 3,000 crew, and 5,000 passengers who are often mostly elderly with many pre-existing health conditions.[49|49])
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- [note::Damn. This is extremely pessimistic, but it's not wrong...]

Neither the evolution nor the history of our species is an ever-rising arrow. There are no predictable trajectories, no definite targets. The steadily accumulating mass of our understanding and the ability to control a growing number of variables that affect our lives (ranging from food production that is sufficient to feed the world’s entire population to highly effective inoculation that prevents previously dangerous infectious diseases has lowered the overall risk of living, but it has not made many existential perils either more predictable or more manageable.
In some critical instances, our successes and our abilities to avoid the worst outcomes have been due to being prescient, vigilant, and determined to find effective fixes. Notable examples range from eliminating polio (by developing effective vaccines) to lowering the risks of commercial flying (by building more reliable airplanes and introducing better flight control measures), from reducing food pathogens (by a combination of proper food processing, refrigeration, and personal hygiene) to making childhood leukemia a largely survivable illness (by chemotherapy and stem cell transplants).[53|53] In other cases, we have been undoubtedly lucky: for decades we have avoided nuclear confrontation caused by an error or accident (we have experienced both on several occasions since the 1950s), not only because of built-in safeguards but also thanks to judgments that could have gone either way.[54|54] Again, there are no clear indications that our ability to prevent failures has been uniformly increasing.)
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- [note::Well said, but do we even have the means to measure such a complex metric? Even if we had an idea that are ability to overcome existential problems was increasing, how would we know for sure?]

To conclude that we will be able to achieve decarbonization anytime soon, effectively and on the required scales, runs against all past evidence. The UN’s first climate conference took place in 1992, and in the intervening decades we have had a series of global meetings and countless assessments and studies—but nearly three decades later there is still no binding international agreement to moderate the annual emissions of greenhouse gases and no prospect for its early adoption.
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In order to be effective, this would have to entail nothing less than a global accord. This does not mean that 200 nations must sign on dotted lines: the combined emissions of about 50 small nations add up to less than the likely error in quantifying the emissions of just the top five greenhouse gas producers. No real progress can be achieved until at least these top five countries, now responsible for 80 percent of all emissions, agree to clear and binding commitments. But we are nowhere close to embarking on such a concerted global action.[57|57] Recall that the much-praised Paris accord had no specific emission-reduction targets for the world’s largest emitters, and that its non-binding pledges would not mitigate anything—they would result in 50 percent higher emissions by 2050!
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A commonly used climate-economy model indicates the break-even year (when the optimal policy would begin to produce net economic benefit for mitigation efforts launched in the early 2020s would be only around 2080.
Should average global life expectancy (about 72 years in 2020) remain the same, then the generation born near the middle of the 21st century would be the first to experience cumulative economic net benefit from climate-change mitigation policy.[61|61] Are the young citizens of affluent countries ready to put these distant benefits ahead of their more immediate gains? Are they willing to sustain this course for more than half a century even as the low-income countries with growing populations continue, as a matter of basic survival, to expand their reliance on fossil carbon? And are the people now in their 40s and 50s ready to join them in order to bring about rewards they will never see?)
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- [note::Seems like both a "valuing future generations" problems and a collective action problem]

Being agnostic about the distant future means being honest: we have to admit the limits of our understanding, approach all planetary challenges with humility, and recognize that advances, setbacks, and failures will all continue to be a part of our evolution and that there can be no assurance of (however defined) ultimate success, no arrival at any singularity—but, as long as we use our accumulated understanding with determination and perseverance, there will also not be an early end of days. The future will emerge from our accomplishments and failures, and while we might be clever (and lucky) enough to foresee some of its forms and features, the whole remains elusive even when looking just a generation ahead.
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- futurism, realism, cluelessness, futures thinking,

And the most powerful prime mover (an organism or machine delivering kinetic energy) an individual could commonly control during the preindustrial era was a powerful horse at 750 watts.[4|4] Now hundreds of millions of people drive vehicles whose power ranges between 100 and 300 kilowatts—up to 400 times the power of a strong horse—and the pilot of a wide-body jetliner commands about 100 megawatts (equivalent to more than 130,000 strong horses) in cruising mode. These gains have been too large to be grasped directly or intuitively: understanding the modern world needs a careful attention to orders of magnitude!
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Data for these calculations can be found in the United Nations’ Energy Statistics Yearbook, https://unstats.un.org/unsd/energystats/pubs/yearbook/; and in BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy, https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/downloads.html.
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Detailed statistics on energy production and consumption are available in the United Nations’ Energy Statistics Yearbook and BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy.
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International Atomic Energy Agency, The Database of Nuclear Power Reactors (Vienna: IAEA, 2020).
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Electric Power Research Institute, Metrics for Micro Grid: Reliability and Power Quality (Palo Alto, CA: EPRI, 2016), http://integratedgrid.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/4-Key-Microgrid-Reliability-PQ-metrics.pdf.
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See also the Climate Action Tracker (https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/).
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N. Troja and S. Law, “Let’s get flexible—Pumped storage and the future of power systems,” IHA website (September 2020).
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V. Smil, “What we need to know about the pace of decarbonization,” Substantia 3/2, supplement 1 (2019), pp. 13–28; V. Smil, “Energy (r)evolutions take time,” World Energy 44 (2019), pp. 10–14.
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For a different perspective, see Energy Transitions Commission, Mission Possible: Reaching Net-Zero Carbon Emissions from Harder-to-Abate Sectors by Mid-Century (2018), http://www.energy-transitions.org/sites/default/files/ETC_MissionPossible_FullReport.pdf.
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FAO, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (Rome: FAO, 2020), http://www.fao.org/3/ca9692en/CA9692EN.pdf.
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