The Environment, Capitalism, Technology

We worry about things like nuclear waste... but we don't worry about how much harm is caused by the pollution from other kinds of power generation. Worldwide, there are hundreds of thousands of deaths a year from people breathing coal dust and emissions from coal plants.

The reason I thought GMOs were important to include in this book is because they are a great way to help us tread more lightly on the planet. They cause the crop yield to increase and you can grow GMO plants in different places. If climate change happens, you're going to need plants that can survive heat waves and droughts. The GMO toolkit is our best toolkit for accomplishing those things right now, and yet it's stridently opposed by governments and all kinds of groups around the world.

Looking forward, resources are going to become more affordable and America will utilize less energy (despite growing economically)

The notion that capitalist systems have no way of dealing with increasing pollution is just dead flat wrong

Let markets work to develop the goods and services, and let free trade happen; that's where prosperity and innovation will come from.

If you draw a graph of the U.S. economy, the real GDP of the U.S., from 1802 to 1970 and then you add one more line to that graph, which is total energy consumption per year from 1802 to 1970, those lines are really hard to tell apart.

I'm for damn sure that we're going to need a much smaller acreage of cropland for all of humanity in 2100 than we do right now

I've got this deep faith in markets - once you put things in them and price them, they deal with that price in a very fast way. If you change a business' cost structure quickly, they'll run from that increased cost like a gazelle runs when it smells a lion. It's just amazing how quickly it'll happen.

I think that in 2100 we'll be this species that occupies a very a small physical footprint on the planet without depriving ourselves. We'll go into nature because it's cool and because we want to, not because we need to strip it to satisfy our growth.

Carbon emissions are falling across the U.S. and Europe

"Ephemeralization is the process of making making more and more with less and less until eventually we are making everything with nothing." - Buckminster Fuller