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" Farmers can't plant much more land because almost every accessible acre of arable soil is already in use. Nor can the use of fertilizer be increased: it is already being overused everywhere except some parts of Africa, and the runoff is polluting rivers, lakes, and oceans. "

Charles C. Mann

Africa

Land

Farmers

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" The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent. "

" The queue of activists, interest groups, and ordinary people wringing their hands over what a President Donald Trump might do in office is long, and environmentalists are at the front of the line. "

" The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors. "

" Canceling the climate pact will loudly demonstrate Trump's willingness to fight - an important step for the White House because, on a concrete level, few tools are available to revive the coal industry. "

" The way I think of it, economics and ecology occupy two intellectual silos, isolated from each other. Even when they do take each other into consideration, it's not uncommon for ecologists to spout absolute nonsense about economics, and vice versa. "

" The Paris pact was correctly described by its opponents - greens and anti-greens alike - as toothless. But it was also the first time that nations around the world had officially agreed that climate change was a problem and that concrete steps should be taken to avoid its worst effects. "

" Big Water makes an argument straight out of Economics 101. The best way to deliver water to people's homes efficiently, the water barons argue, is to put the process in the hands of the market. If water is scarce, then raise the price - let the law of supply and demand take over! "

" Cash-strapped cities in nations from Argentina to Albania have begun to turn over their municipal water systems to Big Water, often under lease arrangements that can continue in force for decades. "

" There are several types of greenhouse gasses, but carbon dioxide is the most important. "

" Major power and telephone grids have long been controlled by computer networks, but now similar systems are embedded in such mundane objects as electric meters, alarm clocks, home refrigerators and thermostats, video cameras, bathroom scales, and Christmas-tree lights - all of which are, or soon will be, accessible remotely. "

" Artificial lighting, air-conditioning, and automobiles, all powered by fossil fuels, swaddle us in our giddy modernity. In our ergonomic chairs and acoustical-panel cubicles, we sit cozy as kings atop 300 years of flaming carbon. "

" Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter. "

" A whole bunch of big technological shocks occurred when Asian innovations - paper, gunpowder, the stirrup, the moldboard plow and so on - came to Europe via the Silk Road. "

" Under the Paris agreement, every one of the 147 signatories issues what is called an 'intended nationally determined contribution' (INDC), which amounts to a promise that the nation will take certain actions to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by a certain date. "

" The Japanese drive on the left side of the road. Most streets literally do not have names. "

" Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering. "

" Smartphones can relay patients' data to hospital computers in a continuous stream. Doctors can alter treatment regimens remotely, instead of making patients come in for a visit. "

" So many wells have been dug in Changzhou that its groundwater has been over-exploited, and the local ground level has sunk by two feet. The city has officially banned new wells and mandated the installation of pollution controls, but China's endemic corruption ensures that neither measure has much meaning. "

" Indeed, for all Donald Trump's railing about the efforts to curb climate change, nobody in his administration seems to have paid any attention to what they actually are. "

" Rather than forcing local factories to clean up after themselves, Changzhou decided to outsource the job of managing its water supply to a French company named Veolia - one of a handful of corporate giants now scrambling to take over city water systems around the planet, especially in the often polluted and water-short developing world. "

" A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now. "

" Americans are willing to cheer on politicians who denounce bureaucratic overreach and job-killing red tape in abstract terms. But they turn out to like specific regulations against toxic chemicals in their drinking water. "

" Historically, large-scale global trade has served two functions: 1) the exchange of goods between willing sellers and buyers described in Econ 101 textbooks; 2) as a tool of state aggrandizement, in which the private parties are stand-ins for governmental interests. "

" A smartphone links patients' bodies and doctors' computers, which in turn are connected to the Internet, which in turn is connected to any smartphone anywhere. The new devices could put the management of an individual's internal organs in the hands of every hacker, online scammer, and digital vandal on Earth. "