Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

by Geoffrey West

To put it slightly differently, the rate at which we need to process energy to sustain our standard of living remained at just a few hundred watts for hundreds of thousands of years, until about ten thousand years ago when we began to form collective urban communities. This marked the beginning of the Anthropocene, in which our effective metabolic rate began its steady rise to its present level of more than 3,000 watts today. But this is just its average value taken across the entire planet. The rate at which energy is used in developed countries is far higher. In the United States it is almost a factor of four larger, at a whopping 11,000 watts, which is more than one hundred times larger than its “natural” biological value. This amount of power is not a lot smaller than the metabolic rate of a blue whale, which is more than one thousand times larger in mass than we are.