The Conundrum

don’t account for energy use and carbon emissions that have been not eliminated but merely exported out of the region under study—say, from California to a factory in China.

How far you live from your grocery store is of far greater environmental significance than how far you live from the places where your food is grown.

“frugality first induces efficiency second; efficiency first dissipates itself by making frugality appear less necessary. Frugality keeps the economy at a sustainable scale; efficiency of allocation helps us live better at any scale, but does not help us set the scale itself.” If we impose limits on our consumption of fossil fuels, advances in effi

The only clearly, unambiguously effective method of reducing the carbon and energy footprints of air travel is to fly less—a behavioral change, not a technological one.

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:

Making more goods from fewer inputs reduces the material content

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.

That has made us astonishingly richer, healthier, more comfortable, and more numerous, but it has also incurred a mounting