Sublime

are now predicting rapid decarbonization. Those same people would be shocked to know that our present situation cannot be changed easily or rapidly: as we saw in the preceding chapter, the ubiquity and the scale of the dependence are too large for that.

energy exists in various forms, and to make it useful to us we need to convert one form of it into another type. But treating this multifaceted abstract as a monolith has been the norm, as if different forms of energy were effortlessly substitutable.

we are now promised even more astonishing “disruptive” innovations and AI-driven “solutions.” The reality is that any sufficiently effective steps will be decidedly non-magical, gradual, and costly. We have been transforming the environment on increasing scales and with rising intensity for millennia, and we have derived many benefits from these ch

One sweeping, simplifying way to describe the advances of modern civilization is to see them as serial quests to reduce the risks that come from us being complex and fragile organisms trying to survive against many odds in a world abounding with dangers.

Scheduled commercial flights, already a very low-risk activity at the end of the last century, got appreciably safer during the first two decades of the 21st century.

a large share of humanity lives in conditions that the affluent minority left behind generations ago, and because the growing demand for energy and materials has been stressing the biosphere so much and so fast that

Kremer illustrates this by showing that as the population of the earth has increased, the rate of population growth has increased rather than declined. Had humans been a burden consuming resources, then the larger the population, the lower the quantity of resources available to each individual and the lower the rate of economic growth and thus popu

Catastrophists are wrong, time after time. And techno-optimists, who promise endless near-miraculous solutions, must reckon with a similarly poor record. One of the best-known (and embarrassingly well-documented) failures has been the belief in the all-encompassing power of nuclear fission. Many people appreciate that the partial success achieved b

The steam engine and the breakthrough to an energy-rich economy set off such a process of endogenous growth that it has so far lasted for more than two centuries. Global GDP per capita, which hardly budged for centuries before the age of industrialization, has been rising rapidly and fairly consistently since 1820.