Category: Progress

Great Power, Great Responsibility

Written by Ryan McGuine // The history of humanity is to a large extent one of harvesting increasingly powerful sources of energy. Indeed, the relationship between energy consumption and income level is nearly linear, and Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev famously defined a society’s level of technological development based on the amount of energy it is capable of using and storing. But at the same time that controlling ever-higher amounts of energy is necessary for improving levels of well-being, it also creates immense dangers. Continue reading

The Carbon Must Flow

Written by Ryan McGuine // Most countries around the world, and increasingly many companies, have pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions by or around 2050. Crucially, net-zero does not necessarily mean zero emissions. Rather, it means that a quantity of carbon emissions equivalent to those emitted have been either removed from the atmosphere, or prevented from having reached the atmosphere in the first place. Additionally, nearly every modeled pathway to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping the global temperature rise well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and preferably below 1.5°C, include assumptions for large amounts of carbon capture and sequestration. As such, even though carbon management is a nascent field today, it is poised to grow dramatically in the next few decades. Continue reading

Forging the Modern World

Written by Ryan McGuine //

The modern age has been characterized by the skyrocketing use of a number of materials, including steel. Remarkable for its strength as well as its durability, steel is the key metal of industrialization — in 2014 steel production was almost 20 times larger than that of aluminum, copper, zinc, and lead combined. As countries build out the infrastructure needed for the energy transition and urbanization, global steel demand is poised to grow by over one-third by 2050. Continue reading

Doing Less More With Less

Written by Ryan McGuine // In many ways, it feels like the world is changing faster than it ever has, yet measures of economic productivity have been growing more slowly than any time in the last 200 years. Productivity growth has been the main driver of historically-improving living standards, leading to more food, better health, better housing, and more consumer goods. But despite growing at around 2% per year for the past few decades, productivity growth has been slowing in advanced economies around the world. Continue reading

Pouring the Foundations of Modernity

Written by Ryan McGuine // The modern age has been characterized by the skyrocketing use of a number of materials, including concrete, the most widely-used construction material in the world. The basic foundation of concrete is cement, a remarkable material due to its combination of robustness and ability to be shaped into all manner of beautiful forms, and one which would seem futuristic if it weren’t thousands of years old. Going forward, rapid urbanization and rising incomes in developing countries will ensure the continued use of concrete for decades to come. Continue reading

Grow Crops, Not Algae

Written by Ryan McGuine // The incredible crop yields made possible by modern, intensive agriculture have literally made it possible to feed the world. Fossil fuels, which are used to power mechanized cultivation and as feedstocks for fertilizers and pesticides, are central to intensive agriculture. Chief among the fossil fuel-derived agrochemicals is nitrogen fertilizer, in the form of ammonia. Continue reading

Environmental Kuznets Curve

Written by Ryan McGuine //

In the 1950s, Simon Kuznets postulated that as economies become wealthier, the level of inequality there would increase, then decrease. When plotted against income per capita, this creates the inverted-U shaped curve seen below. Around 1991, Gene Grossman and Alan Krueger noted a similar inverted-U shaped relationship between income levels and environmental degradation, dubbed the Environmental Kuznets Curve. Continue reading

Technology Dynamics and Growth

Written by Ryan McGuine // According to the Solow Model, productivity growth is the key to long-term, sustained economic growth. Countries that lag behind the global technological leaders should be able to achieve rapid productivity growth by transplanting existing knowledge developed elsewhere, but available everywhere. But authors of a new paper propose replacing the concept of productivity as readily available knowledge with a two-part notion consisting of "technological adoption" and "intensity of use." Continue reading

Feeding the World: Population vs Technology

Written by Ryan McGuine // Today the world produces historically spectacular amounts of food. Despite this, around 12% of the world remains undernourished, and assuming current trends hold, the world's population is projected to reach 9.8 billion people around 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100, making the challenge of keeping everyone well-fed even more difficult. Technological progress has enabled the huge crop yields of today, but how to continue that yield growth, and whether that is the best way forward, remains uncertain. Continue reading