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Three things exercise a constant influence over the minds of men: climate, government and religion. Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (1756)
1 billion people already live on land less than ten metres above high-tide levels, and 230 million live in coastal communities at less than one metre’s elevation above water.[66]
18 per cent of total global deaths in 2018 were caused by the effects of fossil-fuel pollution.[81]
cost of health damages associated with exposure to air pollution is $8.1 trillion – or more than 6 per cent of global GDP.
just over 15 per cent of the global population lived in towns and cities in 1900; by 2050, more than 70 per cent will do so.
The single most famous moment of large-scale transformation in the past, however, was caused by an asteroid or comet strike that impacted the earth 66 million years ago on the Yucatan peninsula,
the rate of global warming in the coming decades is projected to be in the order of sixty-five times as high as it was during the last major deglaciation.
In around 6150 BC, a 190-kilometre shelf of sediment off the coast of Norway was dislodged, likely by an earthquake, creating a giant tsunami that swept south through the North Sea.
While attention is often paid to political frontiers being reset by the forces of colonialism and by the social and economic consequences of new and even deeper contact and integrations at local, regional and intercontinental level, the reshaping of the natural environment had impacts that are difficult to exaggerate. Flora and fauna were transplanted into new settings,
Oil – and gas – did not replace coal, but rather served as a supplement long into the twentieth century, only displacing the latter from the 1970s as coal-fired steam engines gave way to petrol-powered combustion engines, as oil and gas heating took over from coal ovens and as hydrocarbons became a primary source of electricity production.
Oil shaped the history of the Middle East, and arguably much besides.
Oil and gas have been central to global geopolitics over the eight decades that have followed, shaping the rise of petrostates, helping pay for high-profile football teams and World Cup tournaments, Formula One races and eye-poppingly lucrative golf tournaments, while also being used as a source of oligarch wealth and latterly as a weapon of control for Russia in its relations with Europe and the west following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Anxiety over energy prices has been a crucial factor in the United States’ domestic politics as well as in its foreign, defence and economic affairs,
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copper, whose usage and value soared in the early twentieth century and have continued to rise ever since; it will perhaps even replace hydrocarbons as the most sought-after material as the world transitions, or seeks to transition, to more carbon-friendly technologies.
Europe could not have been rebuilt as quickly nor as cheaply following the catastrophic damage of the Second World War without access to plentiful supplies of copper and other minerals from Africa. Cheap oil and gas have been the lifeblood of economic growth, rising living standards and mass consumerism, with the benefits felt most keenly by societies and states which had industrialised early and which had built institutions that protected investment.
One paper commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association representing the oil and gas industry, reported that prospects ‘for the future must be of serious concern’ given the amounts of carbon being released by the burning of fossil fuels.
Montreal Protocols being signed in March 1985 and September 1987 respectively, with Kofi Annan, later UN Secretary General, referring to the latter as ‘perhaps the single most successful international agreement’ overseen by the United Nations.
looking back now the 1980s in many ways were a golden age, a time of genuine resolve to try to counter major problems through working together and even a time of optimism that it might be possible to find global solutions to global problems.
In June 1988, James Hansen, chief scientist of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, gave testimony to the US Senate, stating that ‘The greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now.’
For Russian nationalists, the fall of the Soviet Union became a subject of shame and distress – the ‘greatest catastrophe’ of the twentieth century, according to President Vladimir Putin speaking in 2005.
the months and years that followed, the shock of what had happened in 1989 in eastern Europe and the USSR had a profound effect on thinking in Beijing, which had almost succumbed to similar demands for reforms and freedoms when mass protests led by students reached Tiananmen Square
The global economy quadrupled in size in the three decades after 1990,
20,000 private vehicles on the road in China in 1985; today, there are more than 240 million.
An estimated 36 billion metric tons of soil are eroded globally every year,
Heavy use of pesticides in soils, along with contamination by heavy metals and plastics,
700,000 barrels of oil per day are burned, primarily to keep premises cooler than they would otherwise be. Around 70 per cent of all energy consumption in Saudi Arabia is spent on air conditioning.
an elevated risk of the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would bring with it projected global sea-level rises of three to four metres
around 75 per cent of all new and emerging infectious diseases are ones that jump from animals to humans.
With 40 per cent of the world’s land degraded and half its population suffering from the impacts, it is hard not to be gloomy about the future.
‘Global ecological disruption is arguably the 21st Century’s most underappreciated security threat.’[199]
The question is not if a major volcanic eruption will take place, but when.
if we and future generations cannot prevent or adapt to global warming, then we go the way of a vast number of other species from the past. Our loss will be the gain of other animals and plants.
as the UK government’s Office for Budget Responsibility recently put it, it is easy to answer the question of how the problem of climate change is solved: it will be nature, rather than human action, that ultimately brings net emissions towards zero.[83] It will do so through catastrophic depopulation, whether through hunger, disease or conflict. With fewer of us around to burn fuel, cut down forests and tear minerals from the earth’s crust, the human footprint may become drastically reduced – and we will move closer to the sustainable, lush paradise of our fantasised past. Perhaps we will
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