Sublime

You can measure those benefits in terms of bad things that don’t happen: civil wars that don’t break out over water rights, farmers who don’t get wiped out by a drought or flood, cities that don’t get destroyed by hurricanes, waves of people who don’t become…

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

The 193 UN member states are pursuing sustainable development with widely varying degrees of consistency and commitment. Some countries are on track to achieve most or all of the SDGs, including the decarbonization of their energy systems and reduced levels of inequality. Others continue on the path of highly polluting fossil fuels and growing ineq

Most of Eurasia’s population has lived in a subtropical band of latitude and climate zone that historians including Ian Morris have christened “the lucky latitudes.”

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

Lewis Mumford wrote, ‘The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity’.8 Cities’ metabolisms take energy and turn it into knowledge, and bigger cities proportionately generate more patents, more ideas and more GDP, helped by

limiting the use of cement and steel, and in some cases cross-laminated wood—made of layers of timber glued together into a stack—is sturdy enough to substitute for both materials.

Nevertheless, space must remain for ‘grassroots’ campaigns which advance the post-scarcity alternative while attacking a broken status quo. Campaigns around divestment from fossil fuels offer one example of how that will work. Rather than calling for climate justice through appeals to turn down the volume on modernity here, criticism of fossil fuel