Sublime

Denmark consumes no more energy today than it did in the late 1960s,28 in part because it is environmentally friendly and in part because of its low population growth. (By contrast, the United States’ energy consumption has roughly doubled over the same period.29)

the steam turbine, the most powerful commonly used prime mover of the 20th (and certainly at least of the first half of the 21st) century

human population has increased fourteen-fold, production 240-fold, and energy consumption 115-fold.)

More information was generated in 2001 than in all the previous existence of our species on earth. In fact, 2001 doubled the previous total. And 2002 doubled the amount present in 2001, adding around 23 “exabytes” of new information—roughly the equivalent of 140,000 Library of Congress collections.

At heart, the Industrial Revolution has been a revolution in energy conversion. It has demonstrated again and again that there is no limit to the amount of energy at our disposal. Or, more precisely, that the only limit is set by our ignorance. Every few decades we discover a new energy source, so that the sum total of energy at our disposal just

As Chapter 7 shows, fracking, for all its environmental downsides, has largely liberated America from the dangers of being dependent on a static yet declining industry.