Thinking of us as an animal using thirty times more energy than we “should” given our physical size, the effective human population of the planet accordingly operates as if it were much larger than the 7.3 billion people who actually inhabit it. In a very real sense, we are operating as if our population were at least thirty times larger, equivalent to a global population in excess of 200 billion people. If the most optimistic of cornucopian thinkers are correct and the world’s population reaches 10 billion by the end of the century, all living at a standard comparable to that of the United
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