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Since the year 2007, more than half of humanity has lived in cities (more than 80 percent in all affluent countries), and unlike in the industrializing cities of the 19th and early 20th centuries, jobs in modern urban areas are largely in services.
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.
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.
there is nothing inevitable about the future course of this ambivalently perceived (much praised, much questioned, and much criticized) phenomenon. Recently, there have been some clear retreats
Globalisation
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.
“the economic system is essentially a system for extracting, processing and transforming energy as resources into energy embodied in products and services.”
Google’s Ngram Viewer, a tool that allows you to see the popularity of terms that appeared in printed sources between 1500 and 2019, illustrates this point: during the 20th century the frequency of the term “energy price” remained quite negligible, until a sudden spike that began in the early 1970s (caused by OPEC’s quintupling of crude oil prices; details of which follow later in this chapter) and peaked in the early 1980s.
our civilization is so deeply reliant on fossil fuels that the next transition will take much longer than most people think.
in the 50 years between 1970 and 2020, global electricity generation quintupled while the total primary energy demand only tripled.
modern nuclear reactors, if properly built and carefully run, offer safe, long-lasting, and highly reliable ways of electricity generation; as already noted, they are able to operate more than 90 percent of the time, and their lifespan can exceed 40 years. Still, the future of nuclear generation remains uncertain.
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.
In two centuries, the human labor to produce a kilogram of American wheat was reduced from 10 minutes to less than two
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 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.
Sharre with shiok meats singapore
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!).
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.
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 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.
the best nutritional advice is that we do not have to eat more than an adult’s body mass equivalent in meat per year to obtain an adequate amount of high-quality protein.
That equates to around 200g per day
in 2020, nearly 4 billion people would not have been alive without synthetic ammonia.
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.
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.
“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.”
Google’s Ngram Viewer charts
But during the second decade of the 21st century, China averaged about $230 billion of foreign direct investment a year, compared to less than $50 billion for India and just around $40 billion for all of sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa).9 China provided a combination of other attractors—above all, centralized one-party government that could guarantee political stability and acceptable investment conditions; a large, highly homogeneous and literate population; and an enormous domestic market—that made it the preferred choice over Nigeria, Bangladesh, and even India, resulting in a
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The first quantitative leap in the process of globalization came only with the combination of more reliable navigation, steam power (resulting in larger ship capacities and faster speeds), and the telegraph—the first means of (nearly) instant long-distance communication.
the first London to Singapore link in 1934 took eight days with 22 layovers, including Athens, Cairo, Baghdad, Basra, Sharjah, Jodhpur, Calcutta, and Rangoon.
Repeat the trip? or by land
the greatest shipping innovation came in 1957, when a North Carolina trucker Malcolm McLean finally transformed his pre–Second World War idea—carrying cargo in uniformly-sized steel boxes, which are easy to load by large port cranes and can be off-loaded directly onto waiting trucks or trains or stacked temporarily for later distribution—into a commercial reality.
1984 was the last year the US had a surplus trading goods with Beijing; in 2009, China became the world’s largest exporter of goods;
This means that between 1971 and 2019 microprocessor power increased by seven orders of magnitude—17.1 billion times, to be exact.
MarineTraffic website
Check it out
This means that the high degree of globalization reached during the first two decades of the 21st century has not been inevitable, and that it can be weakened by future developments.
America’s post-2000 loss of some 7 million (formerly well-paying) manufacturing jobs—with most of that loss attributable to globalization, as most of that production moved to China—has been the principal reason of these deaths of despair, largely attributable to suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-induced liver disease.95
only about 18 percent of the global goods trade is now driven by lower labor costs (labor arbitrage), that in many chains this share has been declining throughout the 2010s, and that global value chains are becoming more knowledge-intensive and rely increasingly on highly skilled labor.
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development considered repatriating manufacturing from Asia to North America and Europe and a shift to shorter, less fragmented value chains—extending from design through manufacturing to distribution within a single country or a single economic unit—that would produce a higher concentration of value added. Swiss Re produced a report about the de-risking of global supply chains (rebalancing them to strengthen resilience). And the Brookings Institution saw the reshoring of advanced manufacturing as the best way to create good jobs.99
Americans have recently consumed about 8 kilograms more fat and 16 kilograms more sugar every year than the average adult in Japan.15
During the 2010s, SUVs became the second-highest cause of rising CO2 emissions, behind electricity generation and ahead of heavy industry, trucking, and aviation.
The data are clear: between 1989 and 2019 we increased global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions by about 65 percent.
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 The combined effect of these demands: between 1992 and 2019, the global emissions of CO2 rose
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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.
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.
By 2019 China was, in terms of purchasing power, the world’s largest economy; its per capita GDP was five times the Nigerian mean; the country was the world’s largest producer of cars; half of all urban households had two window-mounted air-conditioning units; the length of its rapid train network surpassed the combined length of all the EU’s links; and about 150 million of its citizens had traveled overseas. The
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.
during the early 2020s the world’s population will cross a significant demographic milestone as half of it will be living in countries whose total fertility rate is below the replacement level.
average daily per capita food supply in China, the world’s most populous nation, is now about 15 percent higher than in Japan.
Because the total energy demand was an order of magnitude lower in 1920 than it was in 2020, it was much easier to displace wood by coal in the early 20th century than it is to displace fossil fuels by new renewables (that is, to decarbonize) in the early 21st century.
