The Great Disruption

We produce more calories, for example, than are needed to sustain the world population.

The fascinating thing is how comprehensive this is, impacting life expectancy, obesity, imprisonment rates, teenage pregnancy, mental health, levels of trust in the community, educational performance, status of women, and so on.

When you include commercial and industrial electricity bills, total U.S. end user spending in 2008 amounted to a staggering $363.7 billion.6

spread the resources we have more equally around the world.

The earth is full. It is not possible for the future to have nine billion people in a growing quantitative economy. We can argue we should have fewer people, but most of the people we are going to have in this situation are either already born or soon will be. Given that we have limited resources and wealth and can’t grow either significantly, we h

technology company, where the myriad complexities of the market, technology, and consumer behavior are subject to many unpredictable, game-changing developments. The situation with sustainability, particularly climate change, is much simpler. As we covered earlier in some detail, there will certainly be surprises in technology, politics, and events

The natural ones are about how the environment behaves as a system, with interconnectedness, tipping points, and feedback loops. Examples are issues like the ocean’s absorption of CO2 emissions causing acidification, which can undermine marine life, then accelerating the collapse of fisheries.

from local farmers, creating enough market demand to encourage a move back to family farming? This is the dominant way food gets to market in many developing countries, and it’s now making a comeback in the developed world, driven by the desire for fresh food, picked when it’s ripe and bought from the people who grew it. Even in the United States,

phosphorous inputs to the biosphere and oceans, aerosol loading, and chemical pollution.