by Al Gore
194 warned the United States about the “military industrial complex”
Sam Roberts, “In Archive, New Light on Evolution of Eisenhower Speech,” New York Times, December 11, 2010.
195 all of the military weapons sold to countries around the world originate in the United States
Grimmett, “Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 2003–2010.”
196 countries with the potential to build nuclear bombs
Polly M. Holdorf, “Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2010, http://csis.org/files/publication/110916_Holdorf.pdf.
197 could over time result in the ability to project intercontinental power
Graham Allison, “Nuclear Disorder,” Foreign Affairs 89, no. 1 (January/February 2010): 74–85.
198 many believe it is capable of selling nuclear weapons components
William J. Broad, James Glanz, and David E. Sanger, “Iran Fortifies Its Arsenal with the Aid of North Korea,” New York Times, November 29, 2010.
199 “correlation between high levels of development and stable democracy”
Francis Fukuyama, “The Future of History: Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class?,” Foreign Affairs 91, no. 1 (January/February 2012).
200 will reach almost five billion people by 2030
European Strategy and Policy Analysis System, Global Trends 2030—Citizens in an Interconnected and Polycentric World, http://www.iss.europa.eu/uploads/media/ESPAS_report_01.pdf.
201 “economic and social rights and, increasingly, environmental issues”
Ibid.
CHAPTER 4: OUTGROWTH
1 “the personal distribution of income” or “a variety of costs that must be recognized”
Simon Kuznets, National Income 1929–1932, Report to the U.S. Senate, 73rd Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1934), pp. 5–6.
2 three billion people in just the next seventeen years
Homi Kharas, OECD Development Center, “The Emerging Middle Class in Developing Countries,” January 2010, www.oecd.org/dataoecd/54/62/44798225.pdf.
3 standards that are more common in the wealthiest nations
Ibid.
4 exceeding the rate of growth in the number of people in the world
Jeremy Grantham, “Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever,” GMO Quarterly Letter, April 2011.
5 “furnished by the arts and manufactures to be debarred the use of them”
“Letter from Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, 15 March 1784,” Library of Virginia, http://www.lva.virginia.gov/lib-edu/education/psd/nation/gwtj.htm.
6 general public’s happiness or sense of well-being
Institute for Studies in Happiness, Economy and Society, interview with Lester Brown, November 7, 2011, http://ishesorg/en/interview/itv02_01html.
7 increases in consumption do not enhance a sense of well-being
Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 7, 2010, http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/08/27/1011492107.abstract.
8 a dangerous “planetary scale ‘tipping point’ ”
Anthony Barnosky et al., “Approaching a State Shift in Earth’s Biosphere,” Nature, June 7, 2012.
9 “It’s either got to be deflated gently, or it’s going to burst”
Justin Gillis, “Are We Nearing a Planetary Boundary?,” New York Times, Green blog, June 6, 2012, http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/are-we-nearing-a-planetary-boundary/.
10 high levels in 2008 and again in 2011
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, “FAO Initiative on Soaring Food Prices,” http://www.fao.org/isfp/en/; Annie Lowrey, “Experts Issue a Warning as Food Prices Shoot Up,” New York Times, September 4, 2012.
11 political upheavals struck several countries
Jack Farchy and Gregory Meyer, “World Braced for New Food Crisis,” Financial Times, July 19, 2012; Evan Fraser and Andrew Rimas, “The Psychology of Food Riots,” Foreign Affairs, January 30, 2011.
12 northern China, India, and the Western United States
Li Jiao, “Water Shortages Loom as Northern China’s Aquifers Are Sucked Dry,” Science, June 18, 2010; “Groundwater Depletion Rate Accelerating Worldwide,” ScienceDaily, September 23, 2010, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100923142503.htm.
13 countries where 50 percent of the world’s people live
Lester Brown, Earth Policy Institute, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: Norton, 2008), http://www.earth-policy.org/images/uploads/book_files/pb3book.pdf.
14 depressing crop yields in several important food-growing regions
John Vidal, “Soil Erosion Threatens to Leave Earth Hungry,” Guardian, December 14, 2010.
15 surged simultaneously in the last eleven years
Grantham, “Time to Wake Up.”
16 increases larger than those that accompanied either World War I or II
Ibid.
17 the danger that we may soon reach “peak everything”
Ibid.
18 have been at least three times faster than those in the industrial world
Ibid.
19 world’s iron ore, coal, pigs, steel, and lead—and roughly 40 percent
Ibid.; Scott Neuman, “World Starts to Worry as Chinese Economy Hiccups,” NPR News, December 2, 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/12/02/143048898/world-starts-to-worry-as-chinese-economy-hiccups; presentation by Robert Zoellick, World Bank Spring Meetings 2012, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/NEWS/Resources/RBZ-SM12-for-Print-FINAL.pdf.
20 being produced each year are now made in China
Charles Riley, “Obama Hits China with Trade Complaint,” CNN Money, September 17, 2012, http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/17/news/economy/obama-china-trade-autos/index.html.
21 automobiles in China than in its home country
Alisa Priddle, “GM’s Big Plans for China Includes More Cadillac Models,” USA Today, April 25, 2012.
22 250 million to slightly over one billion in 2013
“One Billion Vehicles Now Cruise the Planet,” Discovery News, August 18, 2011, http://news.discovery.com/autos/one-billion-cars-cruise-planet-110818.html.
23 double again in the next thirty years
ExxonMobil, “The Outlook for Energy: A View to 2040,” 2012, http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/files/news_pub_eo.pdf.
24 “All of the net growth”
International Energy Agency, “World Energy Outlook,” 2011.
25 countries may be slowing, and in some cases may have peaked
See, for example, U.S. Energy Information Administration, press release, “EIA examines alternate scenarios for the future of U.S. energy,” June 25, 2012, http://www.eia.gov/pressroom/releases/press361.cfm, and “U.S. Energy-Related Carbon Dioxide Emissions, 2011,” August 14, 2012, http://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/carbon/.
26 world’s population of cars and trucks would be 5.5 billion
Justin Lahart, “What If the Rest of World Had as Many Cars as U.S.?,” Wall Street Journal blog, November 12, 2011, http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/11/12/number-of-the-week-what-if-rest-of-world-had-as-many-cars-as-u-s/.
27 U.S. oil production may soon edge back slightly above the 1970 peak
Ronald D. White and Tiffany Hsu, “U.S. to Become World’s Largest Oil Producer by 2020, Rep
ort Says,” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 2012.
28 the Arab members of OPEC implemented the first oil embargo
U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, “OPEC Oil Embargo, 1973–1974,” 2012, http://history.state.gov/milestones/1969-1976/OPEC.
29 China and other emerging markets portend further significant increases
International Energy Agency, Key World Energy Statistics, 2011, http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/key_world_energy_stats-1.pdf.
30 China’s coal imports have already increased
Kevin Jianjun Tu, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Policy Outlook, “Understanding China’s Rising Coal Imports,” February 2012.
31 and will double again by 2015
Rebekah Kebede and Michael Taylor, “China Coal Imports to Double in 2015, India Close Behind,” Reuters, May 30, 2011.
32 increase in both coal and oil consumption through the next two decades
International Energy Agency, “World Energy Outlook,” 2011.
33 to exploit the newly discovered abundance of deep shale gas
Chrystia Freeland, “The Coming Oil Boom,” New York Times, August 9, 2012.
34 At current levels of growth
International Energy Agency, “World Energy Outlook,” 2011.
35 seems to have peaked more than thirty years ago
Grantham, “Time to Wake Up.”
36 more expensive unconventional onshore sources
Ibid.
37 unforgiving and environmentally fragile Arctic Ocean
Guy Chazan, “Total Warns Against Oil Drilling in Arctic,” Financial Times, September 25, 2012.
38 more expensive oil than the world has enjoyed in the past
Jeff Rubin, “How High Oil Prices Will Permanently Cap Economic Growth,” Bloomberg View, September 23, 2012, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-23/how-high-oil-prices-will-permanently-cap-economic-growth.html; Bryan Walsh, “There Will Be Oil—and That’s the Problem,” Time, March 29, 2012.
39 methane for 90 percent of their fertilizer costs
Maria Blanco, Agronomos Etsia Upm, “Supply of and Access to Key Nutrients NPK for Fertilizers for Feeding the World in 2050,” November 28, 2011, http://eusoils.jrc.ec.europa.eu/projects/NPK/Documents/Madrid_NPK_supply_report_FINAL_Blanco.pdf, p. 26.
40 “more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food”
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 46.
41 spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food
Lester Brown, Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity (New York: Norton, 2012), ch. 1, http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-09-17/full-planet-empty-plates-new-geopolitics-food-scarcity-new-book-chapter.
42 diminishes grain yields by 6 percent
Jims Vincent Capuno, “Soil Erosion: The Country’s Unseen Enemy,” Edge Davao, July 11, 2011, http://www.edgedavao.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4801:soil-erosion-the-countrys-unseen-enemy&catid=51:on-the-cover&Itemid=83; Lester Brown, Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth (New York: Norton, 2001), ch. 3, http://www.earth-policy.org/books/eco/eech3_ss5.
43 50 percent reduces many crop yields by 25 percent
Vidal, “Soil Erosion Threatens to Leave Earth Hungry.”
44 Increasing desertification of grasslands
Judith Schwartz, “Saving US Grasslands: A Bid to Turn Back the Clock on Desertification,” Christian Science Monitor, October 24, 2011.
45 45 percent more water
“No Easy Fix: Simply Using More of Everything to Produce More Food Will Not Work,” Economist, February 24, 2011.
46 from 3.5 percent annually three decades ago to a little over one percent
Grantham, “Time to Wake Up.”
47 three quarters of all plant genetic diversity may have already been lost
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, “Building on Gender, Agro-biodiversity and Local Knowledge,” 2004, ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/007/y5609e/y5609e00.pdf.
48 “some form of export ban in an effort to increase domestic food security”
Toni Johnson, Council on Foreign Relations, “Food Price Volatility and Insecurity,” August 9, 2011, http://www.cfr.org/food-security/food-price-volatility-insecurity/p16662.
49 less frequent but larger downpours
Kevin Trenberth, “Changes in Precipitation with Climate Change,” Climate Research 47 (2010): 123–38.
50 produce a 10 percent decline in crop yields
Wolfram Schlenker and Michael Roberts, “Nonlinear Temperature Effects Indicate Severe Damages to U.S. Crop Yields under Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 37 (October 2008): 15594–98.
51 increasing global preference for resource-intensive meat consumption
Johnson, “Food Price Volatility and Insecurity.”
52 food crops to crops suitable for biofuel
Ibid.
53 Conversion of cropland to urban and suburban sprawl
Lester Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: Norton, 2009), http://www.earth-policy.org/images/uploads/book_files/pb4book.pdf.
54 with 67 percent of its people under the age of twenty-four
John Ishiyama et al., “Environmental Degradation and Genocide, 1958–2007,” Ethnopolitics 11 (2012): 141–58.
55 “don’t succeed in solving them by our own actions”
Jared Diamond, “Malthus in Africa, Rwanda’s Genocide,” ch. 10 in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005).
56 run into a wall
“Groundwater Depletion Rate Accelerating Worldwide,” ScienceDaily, September 23, 2010, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100923142503.htm.
57 “when the balloon bursts, untold anarchy”
Fred Pearce, “Asian Farmers Sucking the Continent Dry,” New Scientist, August 2004.
58 capital city of Sana’a only one day in four
Lester Brown, “This Will Be the Arab World’s Next Battle,” Guardian, April 22, 2011.
59 declined more than 30 percent in the last four decades
Ibid.
60 “a hydrological basket case”
Ibid.
61 dramatically overminimize the future effects of choices
David Laibson, “Golden Eggs and Hyperbolic Discounting,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 112 (May 1997): 443–78.
62 more than 95 percent of the new additions will be in developing countries
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision,” 2011, http://esa.un.org/wpp/Documentation/pdf/WPP2010_Highlights.pdf.
63 global population will take place in cities
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Urbanization Prospects: The 2011 Revision,” March 2012, http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/pdf/WUP2011_Highlights.pdf.
64 population of the world at the beginning of the 1990s
Ibid.; U.S. Census Bureau, “Total Midyear Population for the World: 1950–2050,” http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpop/table_population.php.
65 increased tenfold over the last forty years
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Urbanization Prospects: The 2011 Revision.”
66 see a reduction in their share of the world’s urban population
Ibid.
67 no more th
an 15 percent of people ever lived in urban areas
Susan Thomas, “Urbanization as a Driver of Change,” Arup Journal, 2008.
68 still only 13 percent at the beginning of the twentieth century
Sukkoo Kim, “Urbanization,” The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Thomas, “Urbanization as a Driver of Change.”
69 for the first time, more than half of us lived in cities
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Urbanization Prospects: The 2011 Revision.”
70 64 percent of the population in less developed countries living in cities
Ibid.
71 in 2013, twenty-three cities will have more than that number
Ibid.
72 thirty-seven such megacities will sprawl across the Earth
Ibid.
73 a projected increase of 175 percent between 2000 and 2030
United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth, http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2007/english/introduction.html.
74 from 11 million today to just under 19 million in 2025
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Urbanization Prospects: The 2011 Revision.”
75 projected to have a population of almost 33 million people by 2025
Ibid.
76 By 2050, almost 70 percent of the world’s population will be city dwellers
Ibid.
77 roughly one out of every three inhabitants of cities
Most of us have an image of what a “slum” is, but in fact slums come in different shapes and sizes. What they share in common, according to the United Nations definition: “lacking at least one of the basic conditions of decent housing: adequate sanitation, improved water supply, durable housing or adequate living space.” UNFPA, State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth.
78 two billion people within the next seventeen years
Ben Sutherland, “Slum Dwellers ‘to Top 2 Billion,’ ” BBC, June 20, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/5099038.stm.
79 growing at a rate even faster than the overall urban growth rate
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Population Monitoring: Focusing on Population Distribution, Urbanization, Internal Migration, and Development, 2009.