With three stops it took 15½ hours from New York to Los Angeles, and the first London to Singapore link in 1934 took eight days with 22 layovers, including Athens, Cairo, Baghdad, Basra, Sharjah, Jodhpur, Calcutta, and Rangoon.[43] But long as it was, it was a considerable improvement on the approximately 30 days needed to travel by ship from

New ships were also needed for expanding intercontinental car exports. The American market opened up first to Volkswagen’s Beetle (the first car imported already in 1949) and then to small Japanese designs (the Toyopet since 1958, Honda N600 since 1969, and Honda Civic since 1973), and new roll-on/roll-off vessels (…

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The global population rose from 1 billion in 1800 to 1.6 billion in 1900 and 6.1 billion in the year 2000, and hence the supply of useful energy rose (all values in gigajoules per capita) from 0.05 in 1800 to 2.7 in 1900 and to about 28 in the year 2000. China’s post-2000 rise on the world stage was the main reason for a further increase in the

Inevitably, this book—the product of my life’s work, and written for the layperson—is a continuation of my long-lasting quest to understand the basic realities of the biosphere, history, and the world we have created. And it also does, yet again, what I have been steadfastly doing for decades: it strongly advocates for moving away from extreme

more complex models combining the interactions of economic, social, technical, and environmental factors require more assumptions and open the way for greater errors.

tomato cultivation is a highly specialized affair and most of the varieties available in North American and European supermarkets come from only a few places. In the US it is California; in Europe it is Italy and Spain.

we may have seen the peak of globalization, and its ebb may last not just for years but for decades to come.

Another set of truisms applies to our risk assessment. We habitually underestimate voluntary, familiar risks while we repeatedly exaggerate involuntary, unfamiliar exposures. We constantly overestimate the risks stemming from recent shocking experiences and underestimate the risk of events once they recede in our collective and institutional

The late-1980s “discovery” of carbon dioxide–induced global warming thus came more than a century after Foote and Tyndall made the link clear, nearly four generations after Arrhenius published a good quantitative estimate of the possible global warming effect, more than a generation after Revelle and Suess warned about an unprecedented and