More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
animal-free dairy products.
In a few years, humans will become the first animals that get their protein from other animals without any animals being harmed along the way. Slaughterhouses will become a ghost story we tell our grandchildren. And a planet that is already strained under the weight of nearly 8 billion souls will have a fighting chance when our numbers top 9 billion.
In Part One, we examined the forces of acceleration, seeing how converging technology is unleashing waves of change historically unrivaled in their capacity for disruption. In Part Two, we tracked those waves through society, paying particular attention to their impact on our day-to-day lives. In both cases, we kept the scope of our examination limited to the next ten years.
virtual worlds explorations, outer space colonization, and hive-mind collaborations—or the quintet of mass movements that will reshape the demographics of the globe and the nature of society over the next hundred years.
climate scientists, we have just twelve years to fix this problem. Either limit global warming to 1.5 degrees or face catastrophic consequences.
ecological in nature: water crises, biodiversity loss, extreme weather, climate change, and pollution.
Dean Kamen
440 different patents,
insulin pumps, robotic prosthetics, and all-terrain wheelchairs. Because so many of his inventions have had such an impact, in 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Kamen the highest honor awarded to inventors, the National Medal of Technology.
900 million people lack access to clean drinking water.
3.4 million lives a year, most of them children. Climate change, our rapidly ballooning
turn this tide, Kamen designed the Slingshot, a vapor compression distillation system powered by a Stirling engine—or, a water purifier the size of a mini-fridge capable of running off any combustible fuel, including dried cow dung. Using less electricity than required to power a hair dryer, the Slingshot can purify water from any source: polluted groundwater, saltwater, sewage, urine, take your pick. One machine provides clean drinking water for three hundred people a day; a hundred thousand machines—now that’s the kind of cooperative effort we’re talking about.
78.1 million liters of safe drinking water a year—not bad for a handshake deal.
example, Kamen’s Slingshot has competition from the Bill Gates–backed Omni Processor, which turns human feces into potable drinking water while simultaneously producing electricity for power and ash for fertilizer.
There’s also the California-based company, Skysource, winner of the $1.5 million Water Abundance XPRIZE, whose technology extracts two thousand liters of water a day from the atmosphere—or enough for two hundred people.
7 billion are between 350 and 400 million gallons a day,
12 quadrillion gallons contained in the atmosphere at any one time might be the only way to quench that thirst.
global warming.
backtracked to just a hundred fossil fuel companies.
energy generation, energy storage, and green transportation.
Wind and solar power have been riding exponential growth curves for decades,
In the 1980s, the energy produced by a new wind plant cost 57 cents a kilowatt-hour. Today, in windy locations, it’s 2.1 cents (if you remove all subsidies, it’s 4 cents). That’s a 94 percent decrease in price.
moment. In 1977, generating one watt of power from a solar panel cost $77. Today, it’s 30 cents, or a 250-fold reduction in price. “This
rampage. In 2016 alone, China canceled the construction of 160 plants. India did something similar the following year, killing $9 billion in ongoing projects in a single month.
According to research conducted by the Carbon Disclosure Project, over a hundred major cities got 70 percent of their energy from renewables in 2017. The same year, Costa Rica spent 300 days running entirely off renewables, and other countries aren’t that far behind. In total, 8 percent of the world’s electricity now comes from solar and wind, and it costs less to build a new wind farm or solar plant than it does to operate an existing coal plant.
And cheap everywhere. In sunny parts of the US, solar costs 4.5 cents a kilowatt-hour. In India, where coal was supposed to dominate for most of this century, it’s 3.8 cents. Abu Dhabi: 2.4 cents—which, when this contract was signed, was the lowest energy cost in history. Then Chile beat it with 2.1, and Brazil beat that with 1.75.
Take “quantum dots,” essentially nanoscale chunks of semiconductor material that are starting to show up in solar cells.
Sunlight is free. And abundant. Every 88 minutes, 470 exajoules of solar energy hit our planet, which is as much as humanity consumes in a year. In 112 hours—or just less than five days—we get 36 zettajoules of energy, or what’s contained in all proven oil, coal, and natural gas reserves on Earth.
Recently, California decided to source 100 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2045.
A second Gigafactory has been built in Buffalo, a third in Shanghai, and a European
While it remains to be seen, Elon Musk has calculated that one hundred Gigafactories could manufacture enough storage for our planet’s needs.
slightly smaller 20 percent.
In 2016, they announced the phaseout of the internal combustion engine by 2030. The following year, Norway sped past Germany, with their ban taking hold in 2025. Norwegians really got behind the idea, making 52 percent of their 2017 new car purchases electric. By comparison, it was 2.1 percent in the US in 2018. India is also on board, aiming to be fossil fuel free by 2030.
stopped production on everything but electric vehicles. Meanwhile, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Korea, Costa Rica, and Spain have all set official targets for electric car sales.
total, global automakers have already plunked down more than $300 billion in investments.
Volkswagen has invested in the startup QuantumScape, whose next generation solid state batteries are cheap, light, and—unlike their lithium-ion cousins
By 2022, your average mid-range model will get 275 miles on a full charge, while higher-end models will be closer to 350–400,
It pushes one hundred kilometers (sixty-two miles) of charge into a car battery in three minutes, and can take that same battery 10 percent charged to 80 percent charged in less than fifteen minutes.
The Tel-Aviv startup StoreDot has taken things even further.
Charging station availability is the final piece. Estimates vary, but most figure there are about 150,000 gas stations in America. Each averages eight pumps, for a national total of 1.2 million. By comparison, there are only sixty-eight thousand EV charging units in the US today. But these numbers are misleading.
Nor do they account for ChargePoint, a company that has raised over $500 million to build 2.5 million charging ports by 2025,
In 2017, the average American home ran on 29.5 kilowatt-hours a day, while the average Tesla Model-S has an 85 kilowatt-hour battery pack. In a pinch, this means a fully charged Model-S could power three American homes for almost twenty-four hours. So if a hurricane takes out South Florida, a fleet of Teslas can be the emergency backup system. With an AI-driven smart grid, electric vehicles become nodes in a national network, a mobile fleet of backup generators to prepare for the extreme weather to come.
Biodiversity is foundational to the health of our ecosystems and to the health of ecosystem services, which are all of the things that the planet does for us that we cannot do for ourselves. This includes oxygen production, food production, wood production, pollination services, flood protection, climate stabilization—thirty-six in total. And due to the loss of biodiversity, 60 percent of these services are critically degraded and unsustainable in the long term.
Drone Reforestation: On land, forests are biodiversity hotspots, which is also why
deforestation is one the largest drivers of extinction. The scale of destruction is vast. Every year, we lose 18.7 million acres of forest, or a swatch as big as Panama. Since trees are a major carbon sink, deforestation also accounts for 15 percent of total annual greenhouse gas emissions. So how do you combat industrial-scale deforestation? With industrial-scale
Borrowing tissue engineering techniques, Vaughan has figured out how to regrow one hundred years’ worth of coral in under two years. And while normal coral will only spawn once it reaches maturity—something that can take twenty-five to a hundred years—Vaughan’s corals reproduce at age two, giving us, for the first time, a way to radically replenish our reefs.
Aquaculture Reinvention: Fishing is one of the largest drivers of ocean wildlife decline, Right now, one-third of all global fisheries are stretched beyond their
fact, there are now six different companies pursuing exactly this goal, with everything from cultured salmon to lab-grown shrimp heading for our menus. Agricultural Reinvention: Plants and animals need room to roam, enormous stretches of pristine, uninterrupted habitat, both terrestrial and aquatic. Right now, 15 percent of the Earth is protected wildlands. To stave off what’s now known as “the Sixth Great Extinction,” Harvard’s E. O. Wilson and other experts believe that half the planet might be required. Which raises a critical
kills 9 million people a year and costs almost $5 trillion.
Arguably the biggest bat is zero-to-zero manufacturing. This process allows companies to completely remove waste rather than managing it via landfill. The list of companies now going this route is growing: Toyota, Google, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, and more. Not only is this good for the environment, it’s good for the bottom line. GM recently reported they’ve saved $1 billion over the past few years with their 152 zero waste facilities.
