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My own choice of a single-variable measure for rapid and revealing comparisons of quality of life is infant mortality: the number of deaths during the first year of life that take place per 1,000 live births.
For every dollar invested in vaccination, $16 is expected to be saved in healthcare costs and the lost wages and lost productivity caused by illness and death.
The lesson is obvious: the easiest way to improve a child’s chances of growing taller is for them to drink more milk.
And if you think that you have a high chance to make it to 100 because some of your ancestors lived that long, you should know that the estimated heritability of lifespan is modest, between 15 and 30 percent. Given that people tend to marry others like themselves—a phenomenon known as assortative mating—the true heritability of human longevity is probably even lower than that.
But amid all these developments, we must single out the momentous innovation that allowed a blockaded Germany to endure its two-front war for four years: the synthesis of ammonia.
The EU has just over 450 million people, less than 6 percent of the global population, but it generates nearly 20 percent of the world’s economic output, as against almost 25 percent for the United States. It accounts for nearly 15 percent of global exports of goods—a third more than the United States—including cars, airliners, pharmaceuticals, and luxury goods. Moreover, half of its 27 members are among the top 30 countries in terms of quality of life, as measured by the United Nations’ Human Development Index.
Over time, that efficiency gap has narrowed, but today’s diesel engines remain at least 15 to 20 percent more efficient than their gasoline-fueled rivals.
The claim that nuclear electricity would be “too cheap to meter” is not apocryphal: that’s what Lewis L. Strauss, chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission in 1954, told the National Association of Science Writers in New York in September of that year.
It would be a lot easier to expand our use of solar and wind energy if we had better ways to store the large quantities of electricity we’d need to cover gaps in the flow of that energy.
Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries are today’s storage workhorses in both stationary and mobile applications. They deploy a lithium compound for their positive electrode and graphite for the negative electrode (common lead-acid car batteries use lead oxide and lead for their electrodes).
Perhaps the best long-term hope is to utilize cheap solar electricity to decompose water by electrolysis and use the produced hydrogen as a multipurpose fuel, but such a hydrogen-based economy is not imminent.
Pumped storage accounts for more than 99 percent of the world’s storage capacity, but inevitably it entails energy loss on the order of 25 percent.
Today’s state-of-the-art diesel container vessels thus carry nearly 200 times as many boxes over distances almost 400 times as long, at speeds three to four times as fast as the pioneering electric ship can handle.
This represents a relative decline of more than 97 percent—or, stated in reverse, a dollar now buys nearly 38 times more electricity than it did in 1902.
So, a simple balancing machine consisting of two equally sized wheels, a minimal metal frame, and a short drive chain emerged more than a century after Watt’s improved steam engines (1765), more than half a century after the introduction of mechanically far more complex locomotives (1829), years after the first commercial generation of electricity (1882)—but concurrently with the first designs of automobiles.
Introduction of a moving assembly line at Detroit’s Highland Park factory in 1913 brought substantial economies of scale: by 1914 the plant was already turning out 1,000 automobiles a day.
due to the greater use of heavy metals. Similarly, a detailed comparative life-cycle analysis, published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, found the production of EVs to involve substantially higher toxicity, both to human beings and to freshwater ecosystems. I am not suggesting that these are arguments against the adoption of EVs. I am merely pointing out that the implications of the new technology must be appraised and understood before we accept any radical claims in its favor. We cannot simply imagine ideal, pollution-free machines and then will them into existence. When did the jet
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The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization puts the annual global losses at 40–50 percent for root crops, fruits, and vegetables, 35 percent for fish, 30 percent for cereals, and 20 percent for oilseeds, meat, and dairy products. This means that, globally, at least one-third of all harvested food is wasted.
Postwar French living standards remained surprisingly low: according to the 1954 census only 25 percent of homes had an indoor toilet, and only 10 percent had a bathtub, shower, or central heating. But all of that changed rapidly during the 1960s, and the rising affluence also brought some notable dietary shifts—and the decline of wine-drinking.
We are—much like chimpanzees, our closest primate ancestors whose males are keen hunters of smaller animals such as monkeys and young wild pigs—an omnivorous species, and meat has always been an important part of our normal diet.
Meat (together with milk and eggs) is an excellent source of complete dietary protein required for growth; it contains important vitamins (above all, those of B-complex) and minerals (iron, zinc, magnesium); and it is a satisfying source of dietary lipids (fats providing the feeling of satiety, and hence highly prized by all traditional societies).
In North America and Europe, about 60 percent of the total crop harvest is now destined for feeding—not directly for food.
This means that perhaps the single most important explanation of Japan’s longevity primacy is quite simple: moderate overall food consumption, the habit expressed in just four kanji characters, 腹八分目 (hara hachi bun me, “belly eight parts [in ten] full”)—an ancient Confucian precept, and hence yet another import from China. But the Japanese, unlike the banqueting and food-wasting Chinese, actually do practice it.
The key factors behind the decline have included higher consumption of meat and fish (supplying protein and fat formerly derived from milk) and decades of warnings about the deleterious effect of consuming saturated dairy fat. That conclusion has been disproved, and the latest findings claim that dairy fat may actually lower the frequency of coronary heart disease and stroke mortality—but these findings come too late for the declining industry.
Milk, an ideal food for babies, is thus also, in moderation, an excellent food for anybody . . . except for those with overt lactose intolerance.
This means that the cattle zoomass is now more than 50 percent larger than the anthropomass, and that the live weight of the two species together is very close to a billion tons. Even the largest wild mammals add up to only a small fraction of those masses: the 350,000 elephants in Africa, with an average body weight of 2,800 kilograms, have an aggregate zoomass of less than 1 million tons, which is less than 0.2 percent of the cattle zoomass. By 2050 there will be 9 billion people and, most likely, 2 billion cattle, together augmenting their already crushing dominance of Earth.
China became the world’s largest producer in 1986, and its output of cement—more than 2.3 billion tons in 2018—now accounts for nearly 60 percent of the global total. The most impressive illustration of China’s unprecedented construction effort is that in just the last two years the country emplaced more cement (about 4.7 billion tons) than the US did cumulatively throughout the entire 20th century (about 4.6 billion tons)!
New cars thus weigh more than 180 times as much as all portable electronics, but require only seven times as much energy to make.
Both in the United States and in the European Union, buildings account for about 40 percent of total primary energy consumption (transportation comes second, at 28 percent in the US and about 22 percent in the EU). Heating and air conditioning account for half of residential consumption, which is why the single best thing we could do for the energy budget is to keep the heat in (or out) with better insulation.
Numbers may not lie, but which truth do they convey?
