How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

But there is a major gap in terms of average fat intake, with American males consuming about 45 percent more and women 30 percent more than the Japanese. And the greatest disparity is in sugar intake: among US adults it is about 70 percent higher. When recalculated in terms of average annual differences, Americans have recently consumed about 8 kil

Fatalistic people also underestimate risks in order to avoid the effort required to analyze them and draw practical conclusions, and because they feel totally unable to cope with them.[31] Traffic fatalism has been particularly well studied. Fatalistic drivers underestimate dangerous driving situations, are less likely to practice defensive driving

But none of this means that major shifts in our dependence on fossil fuel subsidies in food production are impossible. Most obviously, we could reduce our crop and animal production—and the attendant energy subsidies—if we wasted less food. In many low-income countries, poor crop storage (making grains and tubers vulnerable to rodents, insects, and

much of what we rely on to survive, from wheat to tomatoes to shrimp, has one thing in common: it requires substantial, direct and indirect, fossil fuel inputs.

The combination of our inaction and of the extraordinarily difficult nature of the global warming challenge is best illustrated by the fact that three decades of large-scale international climate conferences have had no effect on the course of global CO2 emissions. The UN’s first conference on climate change took place in 1992; annual climate chang

Four materials rank highest on this combined scale, and they form what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization: cement…

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Calculating the baseline, the average population-wide or sex- and age-specific risk of overall mortality, is easy. In 2019, overall mortality (crude death rate) of well-off (developed) countries clustered at around 10/1,000, with actual rates ranging from 8.7 for North America to 10.7 in Japan and 11.1 for Europe. That annual mortality of 10/1,000

Mass-scale car usage in Europe and Japan and the concurrent conversion of their economies from coal to crude oil, and later to natural gas, began only during the 1950s, as did the expansion of foreign trade and travel (including the first jetliners) and the use of petrochemical feedstocks for the synthesis of ammonia and plastics. Global oil extrac

There are still significant numbers of children, adolescents, and adults who experience food shortages, particularly in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, but during the past three generations their total has declined from the world’s majority to less than 1 in 10 of the world’s inhabitants. The United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization