The Conundrum

Most energy-storage systems have round-trip efficiency of about 80 percent, meaning that you lose 20 percent as you store the energy and then retrieve it.

In order to soften our main environmental impacts, we need to find ways, globally, to

live smaller, live closer, and drive less.

We’re consumers at heart, and our response to difficulties of all kinds usually involves consumption in one form or another:

Dense, efficient, intelligently organized cities are the future of the human race, and they provide the only remotely plausible template for permanently housing large populations.

The environmental problem with mobility isn’t miles per gallon; it’s miles.

The environmental problem with such advances is that the productivity gains have almost always been reinvested in additional production:

many low-carbon energy sources, including nuclear and solar, are heavily dependent on large, uninterrupted supplies of water.

as we’ve gotten better at making things, we’ve made more things.