Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant

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pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Melvin Webber’s concept of “community without propinquity” is best explained in his essay “Order in Diversity: Community Without Propinquity,” which was collected in Cities and Space: The Future Use of Urban Space. His quotation is lifted from the same. Marchetti’s Constant is derived from Cesare Marchetti’s paper “Anthropological Invariants in Travel Behavior” (Technological Forecasting and Social Change, vol. 47, 1994). His maglev thought experiment appears in “The Evolution of Transport,” by Jesse H. Ausubel and Cesare Marchetti (Industrial Physicist, April/May 2001). The Future Forum report was published by the British travel firm Thomson in 2006. The University of California sociologist Claude Fischer wrote about Americans’ itinerancy (or increasing lack thereof) in “Ever More Rooted Americans” (City & Community, June 2002).

When he finished Peachtree Center in 1976, the result was a hermetically sealed “Center” central to nothing except its clones elsewhere. He had built the urban equivalent of a hub, profitable and infinitely repeatable anywhere. And with that, his LEGO-block approach became the reigning vernacular in Airworld’s peculiar geography of nowhere. Kasarda’s Law and Marchetti’s Constant It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Technology was going to ground us by linking and shrinking the world, and in doing so set us free. The world would flatten. Road warriors would beat their platinum medallions into plowshares. It hasn’t happened. For twenty years, we’ve heard how e-mail and videoconferencing— relabeled “telepresence”—would eliminate the need for cross-country meetings.

But as horse trams came along, followed by electric trams, then subways, and finally cars, the city’s periphery raced away from its Enlightenment-era core. Berlin’s diameter was effectively ten times wider in 1950 than it was 150 years earlier, yet it still took only an hour to traverse. The rule has since been dubbed Marchetti’s Constant. Marchetti contended that transportation, not communications, was the “unifying principle of the world.” Ratifying Kasarda’s Law, he attested that the “so-called explosion in communication during the last 20 years did not dent transportation expansion; on the other hand, they tend to move together.”


pages: 352 words: 104,411

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, corporate raider, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Dean Kamen, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, global pandemic, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Marchetti’s constant, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SpaceShipOne, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, telepresence, Tesla Model S, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, éminence grise

Although they work shorter hours, they spend an hour or so each day on the hoof – or about the same as the average OECD commuter. The similarity in daily travel time between such radically different lifestyles inspired Cesare Marchetti, the Venetian theoretical physicist, to suggest that there was a ‘quintessential unity of travelling instincts around the world’ and that this unity resulted in a fixed ‘travel time budget’ that he named after himself as Marchetti’s Constant. He tested his theory against a variety of cultures past and present and decided that it has shaped our behaviour since the dawn of history. The territory associated with ancient Greek villages, for instance, whose inhabitants went about on foot, was about twenty square kilometres, which was about as much as they could manage within their travel time budget, and this pedestrian limit continued to restrict the size of towns and settlements until the Industrial Revolution.

Although the French government promised to spend 400 million euros on upgrading the network in 2013, this was still less than half the sum budgeted for TGV lines. It may be, however, that HS2 and its continental equivalents aren’t being ambitious enough. If displacing aeroplanes is the aim, then why not build an elevated Maglev, such as was imagined by Cesare Marchetti in 1994, running from the Channel tunnel to Aberdeen? It’s only 438 miles, which a Maglev travelling at conservative speeds, and stopping at London Heathrow, Birmingham, Manchester and Edinburgh en route, could manage within an hour. With a few feeder lines it might extend the ‘commuter-shed’ of all these places for dozens of miles in every direction.

A Fixed-Effects Analysis of Panel Data’, Psychological Science, published online 23 April 2013, DOI:10.1177/ 0956797612464659. 229 For ‘Stall Luft’, see: http://metro.co.uk/2011/03/ 04/cow-fart-cans-offers-authentic-smell-of-countryside-642451/. 230 ‘free up sufficient equity to fund’, Sophie Chick, Savills, ‘Value in the commuter zone’, 19 February 2013: http://www.savills.co.uk/research_articles/141560/144657-0. See also Insights, Commuting Trends Review, Autumn 2010, Blue Door Media Ltd., for Savills. 231 ‘quintessential unity of travelling instincts around the world’, Cesare Marchetti, ‘Anthropological Invariants in Travel Behaviour’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, vol. 47, no. 1, 1994, p. 88. 232 For the Hadza tribe of Tanzania, see Michael Finkel, ‘The Hadza’, National Geographic magazine, December 2009. http://ngm.national geographic.com/print/2009/ 12/hadza/ finkel-text. 234 For ‘it’s worth it to me to come home’, Dave Givens talking to Andrea Seabrook of NPR, 14 June 2008, see: http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2002970862_commute04.html. 234 For ‘better option’, see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25551393. 236 For ‘more than half of America’s schoolchildren’, see: http://www.americanschool buscouncil.org/issues/environmental-benefits.


pages: 300 words: 81,293

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives by Stefan Al

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, digital twin, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elisha Otis, energy transition, food miles, Ford Model T, gentrification, high net worth, Hyperloop, invention of air conditioning, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Marchetti’s constant, megaproject, megastructure, Mercator projection, New Urbanism, plutocrats, plyscraper, pneumatic tube, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, SimCity, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, synthetic biology, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering, Victor Gruen, VTOL, white flight, zoonotic diseases

With autonomous vehicles, hyperloops, and aerial ridesharing in the near future, we may be up for a wild ride! Plus, along with it, land that was previously less desirable will become the development hot spots of tomorrow. New mobility systems will change our cities and buildings once again. In 1994, Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti described a principle, now known as “Marchetti’s constant.” He found that, in general, people are willing to commute for about one hour a day, or a half-hour one way. Since Neolithic times, people kept the average time spent for travel the same, even when transportation advances allowed them to increase their distance. This idea has had far-reaching effects on our cities.

This may lead to the explosive growth of metropolitan areas. You could commute from your office in downtown Los Angeles to Las Vegas, where prices are lower, and live in a bigger home. The race will be on for the first hyperloop-integrated skyscraper. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) could desensitize people to distance, possibly lengthening Marchetti’s “constant” of commuting time. Without having to attend to the wheel, you can now sleep in your car, or conduct online meetings there. Perhaps you can live a little farther away and buy a cheaper home? In other words, cities will increasingly sprawl out. The increase of telecommuting, accelerated by COVID-19, may have a similar impact.

While hyperloops are faster, they probably won’t come close to the transport efficiency of the good old subway. Hyperloops can carry 3,360 passengers an hour.29 A single subway can carry more than ten times as many people. (While it might not carry as many people, a hyperloop’s higher speeds would prevent people from otherwise taking a more carbon-intensive ride.) If Marchetti’s constant continues to hold, building new developments around faster forms of mobility may further encroach on untouched land, destroying habitats and threatening ecosystems. But there is another option. Access is a function of proximity and mobility. Instead of focusing on new mobility, we can increase access with proximity, by more densely packing activities or with a larger variety of uses.


pages: 472 words: 80,835

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The lack of road safety also costs up to 5 percent of countries’ GDP, mostly affecting the poorest ones.[316] Most developing countries are still far from being as car-centric as the developed world. City travel is still mostly composed of walking, bicycling and public transport, much more in line with Marchetti’s constant. It is probably preferable if these cities do not replicate the urban mistakes of others, as to multiply them on the scale of Mexico City or Rio would not be feasible. The driverless car might help save developing countries from ever having to replicate the car-centric infrastructure that has emerged in most western cities.

Going against the theory is the UK Department for Transport, which predicts that road traffic in the United Kingdom will grow by between 19 and 55% by 2040.[61] In a study examining urban car use, Jeff Kenworthy, a professor of sustainability at Curtin University in Australia, found that the pace at which people increase their use of cars has been slowing. It may be explained, at least in part, by a concept known as the "Marchetti Wall."[62] Back in 1994, the Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti observed that throughout history—going back to ancient Rome—the majority of people disliked commuting more than one hour to work. If you're faced with a longer commute, you hit the Wall and rearrange your life, finding a new, more local job or moving closer to the office. In the 1990s and early 2000s, not only did use of public transit grow, but Kenworthy found that cities worldwide were becoming denser, in part because millennials weren't decamping for the suburbs (like their boomer parents did), and because seniors were moving back to urban cores, to enjoy the walkable life.[63] The advent of driverless cars may be the biggest challenge to the strength of the Marchetti wall yet.


pages: 578 words: 168,350

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

This surprising observation of the approximately one-hour invariant that communal human beings have spent traveling each day, whether they lived in ancient Rome, a medieval town, a Greek village, or twentieth-century New York, has become known as Marchetti’s constant, even though it was originally discovered by Zahavi. As a rough guide it clearly has important implications for the design and structure of cities. As planners begin to design green carless communities and as more cities ban automobiles from their centers, understanding and implementing the implied constraints of Marchetti’s constant becomes an important consideration for maintaining the functionality of the city. 4. THE INCREASING PACE OF WALKING Zahavi and Marchetti presumed that for a given mode of transportation, such as walking or driving, travel speed did not change with city size.

., 48–49 life expectancy (life span), 6, 11–12, 183–94, 457n estimated gain in, if given disease was cured, 193, 193–94 human mortality curve, 189–90, 192, 192–94, 193 human survivorship curves, 189–94, 191, 192 maximum, 6, 24, 188–94, 202–3 temperature dependence of, 175, 176, 177, 203–4 life extension, 6, 183–94, 203–7 body temperature and, 203–4 caloric restriction and, 205–7, 206 heartbeats and pace of life, 204–5 Limehouse (London), 224–26 Limits to Growth, The (Meadows), 231–32 linear thinking, 17–18, 44–45, 72, 157 links and social networks, 297–98, 298, 319–20 Liverpool, walking lanes, 335–36, 336 Living Earth Simulator, 271 Lobo, José, 274–75, 356, 364, 386 logarithms, 26, 47–48, 49 London, 222–26, 267–68 garden cities, 255 growth curve, 376 Longevity Prize, 184 Los Alamos National Laboratory, 83–84, 106, 274, 405, 434, 435 Los Angeles, 17–18, 251, 310 growth curve, 377 infrastructure networks, 252 Lösch, August, 290 Lower Manhattan Expressway, 260 LSD, 52–54 MacBook Air, 439, 445 machine learning, 443–44 macroecology, 105 magic number four, 6, 117 self-similarity and origin of, 126–30 universality and, 93–99 maintenance expenses, 391–93 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 227–30, 287, 414–15, 416, 423 Malthusians, 227–30, 414–15 mammals. See animals Manchester, England, 223–24 Mandelbrot, Benoit, 130–31, 132, 138–45, 152, 364 Mandelbrot set, 143–44 manufacturing, 211 Marchetti, Cesare, 333–35 Marchetti’s constant, 334–35 market capitalization, 379, 389–90 market share, 408–9 Marx, Karl, 228, 332 Masdar (Abu Dhabi), 256, 258, 299 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (Newton), 181 mathematics, 8 biology and, 85–86, 87 Euclidean geometry, 130–31, 141–42 matryoshka, 128 maximal Krogh radius, 160 maximum life span, 6, 188–94, 202–3 maximum size of animals, 158–63 Maxwell, James Clerk, 109, 115, 428 McCarthy, Cormac, 425 McKinsey & Company, 404, 405 McMahon, Thomas, 198 Mead, Margaret, 239 Meadows, Dennis, 231–32 measurement process, 135–41 mechanical constraints, 122, 158–63 mechanistic theory, 12, 85, 111–12, 144, 145, 182, 408 Medawar, Peter, 86 medical research, 52–55 Medical Research Council Unit (MRCU), 437 medicine, scaling in, 16, 51–57 megacities, 7, 215, 223–24, 267–68 Meier, Paul, 403 mergers and acquisitions, 33, 403–4 survivorship curves, 396–97, 399 metabolic energy emergent laws and hierarchy of life, 99–103 growth and, 165–66 metabolic rate, 13, 18–19, 124–26, 201, 234 of animals, 2, 2n, 3, 13, 18–19, 25–26, 91–92, 285–86 of average human, 88–89 of bacteria and cells, 93, 94, 96 of companies, 391–92 definition of, 13 Kleiber’s law and, 26–27, 90–93, 117, 145 in mammals, plants, and trees, 18–19, 118–22 natural selection and, 88–90, 151 scaling of, 90–91, 173 metabolic theory of ecology (MTE), 115–16, 173–78, 203–4 metabolism of cities, 371–78 energy, and entropy, 12–15 social, 13, 373–74, 415 Metabolism (architecture), 247–48 metaphysics, 179–80 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), 356, 462n Mexico City, growth curve, 375 mice, 6, 12, 16, 52, 114 caloric restriction and survival curves, 205, 206 Milgram, Stanley, 296–97, 301–4 Milgram experiment, 301–2 Milky Way, 79 Millennium Bridge (London), 298–300 minimum size of animals, 155–58 mitochondria, 100–102, 101, 113 mobile phone data, as detector of human behavior, 337–45, 351–52, 439 modeling, 62–63 modeling theory, 35, 71–75 Modena, Italy, 249 momentum, 20–21 Moore, James, 249 mortality.

The conclusion is clear: the size of cities has to some degree been determined by the efficiency of their transportation systems for delivering people to their workplaces in not much more than half an hour’s time. Zahavi’s fascinating observations made a powerful impression on the Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, who was a senior scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna. IIASA has been a major player in questions of global climate change, environmental impact, and economic sustainability, and this is where Marchetti’s interests and contributions have mostly been.


Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Pry, “A Simple Substitution Model of Technological Change,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 3 (1971–72): 75–88, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0040-1625(71)80005-7. 41. Cesare Marchetti, “A Personal Memoir: From Terawatts to Witches,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 37, no. 4 (1990): 409–414, https://doi.org/10.1016/0040-1625(90)90049-2. 42. Ibid. 43. C. Marchetti and N. Nakićenović, The Dynamics of Energy Systems and the Logistic Substitution Model, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, December 1979, http://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/1024/1/RR-79-013.pdf. 44. Marchetti, “A Personal Memoir: From Terawatts to Witches.” 45. Cesare Marchetti, “Primary Energy Substitution Models: On the Interaction Between Energy and Society,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 10, no. 4 (1977): 345–56, https://doi.org/10.1016/0040-1625(77)90031-2. 46.

Nations harvest fewer than two thousand whales annually, an amount that is 97 percent less than the nearly seventy-five thousand whales killed in 1960.38 The moral of the story, for the economists who studied how vegetable oil saved the whales, was that, “to some extent, economies can ‘outgrow’ severe environmental exploitation.”39 4. A System Without a Schedule While consulting for General Electric in the early 1970s, a playful, forty-something-year-old Italian nuclear physicist named Cesare Marchetti became friendly with one of GE’s in-house economists. The man had recently coauthored a paper, “A Simple Substitution Model of Technological Change.”40 The model calculated how quickly new products become suitable replacements for older ones in order to predict how quickly new products would saturate the market.

“But there’s nothing in this fish that would last more than a single generation because of its low fitness.”92 As for Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, former AquaBounty CEO Ron Stotish was optimistic that he could change their minds. “We are hopeful that over time, they will embrace our product.”93 But five years later, neither the environmental groups supposedly worried about the future of wild fish, nor Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Costco, Kroger, and Target, had changed their minds.94 8. Class War Today, Cesare Marchetti is in his early nineties and lives as a “gentleman farmer near Florence,” says his friend and coauthor, Jesse Ausubel, “with olive groves, grapevines, goats, black cats,” and his typewriter collection.95 Ausubel, who works at Woods Hole Research Institute and Rockefeller University, has been friends with Marchetti since they met in the 1970s at IIASA.


pages: 653 words: 155,847

Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, California gold rush, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Copley Medal, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dmitri Mendeleev, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, Ted Nordhaus, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Vanguard fund, working poor, young professional

Walker, Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 204–8. 15. Fukushima accident: “Fukushima Accident,” World Nuclear Association Information Library (online). 16. Anil Markandya and Paul Wilkinson, “Electricity Generation and Health,” Lancet 370 (2007): 982. 17. Cesare Marchetti, “My CV as a Personal Story,” Cesare Marchetti Web Archive online, 2003, 4–5. 18. Cesare Marchetti and N. Nakicenovic, “The Dynamics of Energy Systems and the Logistic Substitution Model,” pt. 1, pt. 2, RR-79-13, IIASA, 1979, 1 (online). Italics in original. 19. Luis de Sousa, “Marchetti’s Curves,” The Oil Drum: Europe, 2007 (online). 20.

As a harbinger of what’s coming, the Iranian city of Bandar Mahshar suffered a heat index—a measure of temperature and humidity combined—of 165°F (74°C) in August 2015. Temperatures in the Middle East in recent years have frequently exceeded 125°F. Energy: A Human History originated in my encountering the work of an Italian physicist named Cesare Marchetti. Born in 1927, Marchetti has been based for many years at an institute in Laxenburg, Austria, outside Vienna—IIASA, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. IIASA is one productive outcome of the ill-fated Club of Rome, founded in 1968 as a loose organization of European business leaders, scientists, and high-level government officials concerned (again) with overpopulation and resource depletion.

Many more are proposed.22 These developments reflect the increasing economic expansion toward prosperity of the most populous nations in the world, which have been choking on their fossil-fuel pollution much as Europe and the United States choked on their pollution a hundred years ago. The prosperous West can—barely—afford to produce all its power with renewables if it decides to do so. The rest of the world doesn’t have that option. Cesare Marchetti’s graph, assuming its vectors unfreeze themselves as conditions change, predicts a future energy supply dominated by nuclear and natural gas. We will need all that and renewables as well to sustain a world population of ten billion in anything like reasonable prosperity. The boats are lining up.


pages: 290 words: 85,847

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage

accelerated depreciation, active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-city movement, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, City Beautiful movement, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, Ida Tarbell, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, prompt engineering, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, safety bicycle, self-driving car, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, tech bro, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbiased observer, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

These could travel at 12 mph or even 15 mph, extending the half-hour commuting distance from three to at least six miles, and once again hugely increasing the potential residential area around a city as streetcar lines were run to new developments. More people had more choice about where to live. This half-hour commuting distance may sound arbitrary, but an analysis of urban layouts by Cesare Marchetti, an Italian physicist, suggests that one hour is, on average, how long people are willing to spend traveling to and from work each day and has been for centuries. (Some people’s commutes are much shorter or longer; this is an average across a whole city’s population.) Marchetti suggested that this time limit defined the size of cities.

According to an analysis published in 2016 by Shlomo Angel, an urban-studies expert at New York University, 75 percent of jobs in a typical American city are now outside the urban center. That means commuters mostly spend their time driving from one suburb to another, rather than in and out of the city center. (The average time spent driving to and from work, as predicted by Cesare Marchetti, remains at thirty minutes.) Modern suburbia may not be the world promised by Futurama, with fast-flowing highways transporting commuters between downtown jobs and leafy suburbs—“healthy uplands between forest and stream,” as Bel Geddes put it. But it is the world that most Americans, and an increasing proportion of people elsewhere, now live in.


pages: 469 words: 142,230

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

Roger Revelle, the man who had first drawn attention to the ‘geophysical experiment’ of increasing carbon-dioxide levels, included a mention of the effects that experiment was expected to have on the climate in a 1965 report on environmental pollution drafted for President Johnson – the first greenhouse-warming alert ever presented to a head of state. But Revelle made no suggestion that carbon-dioxide emissions should be reduced as a way of dealing with the problem. Instead he described a technical fix – floating ping-pong balls on the surface of the ocean to make it more reflective. A decade later an Italian physicist, Cesare Marchetti, outlined a scheme in which much of the world’s industrial carbon dioxide would be piped directly from power plants to the ocean depths, rather than released into the atmosphere. Under the pressures of the abyss the carbon dioxide would become a liquid, denser than water, which would pool harmlessly in depressions in the sea floor.

Various systems have been designed to pull the carbon dioxide out of this flue gas, and as thermodynamics would predict, they do so with much greater ease than systems designed to pull much more dilute carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at large. Yet even these systems have yet to make much progress in the fight to cut emissions, a failure which should – and does – give pause to direct-air-capture enthusiasts. The idea of scrubbing the carbon out of power-station smoke stacks was first mooted in the 1970s. Cesare Marchetti, an Italian physicist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (an international think tank outside Vienna; as it happens, Harrison Brown was one of the people who set it up) first used the term ‘geoengineering’ in the climate context to describe a system in which carbon dioxide from power stations would be stored away in deep ocean waters.


pages: 520 words: 129,887

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce

Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Bernie Madoff, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

That’s the equivalent of about 30.7 billion barrels—or one cubic mile—of oil.14 The surging use of natural gas and nuclear power demonstrates and reinforces one of the most important energy megatrends of the modern era: decarbonization. Decarbonization is the ongoing global trend toward consumption of fuels that contain less carbon. This megatrend was first identified by a group of scientists that included Nebosa Nakicenovic, Arnulf Grübler, Jesse Ausubel, and Cesare Marchetti,15 who found that over the past two centuries, the process of decarbonization has been taking place in nearly every country around the world. Because consumers always want the cleanest, densest forms of energy and power that they can find, the trend will surely continue. The ratio of carbon to hydrogen atoms in the most common fuels tells the story.

In 2008, Mexico had about 54,000 megawatts of installed capacity. 9 World Nuclear Association, “World Nuclear Power Reactors and Uranium Requirements.” 10 BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2009. 11 World Nuclear Association, “World Nuclear Power Reactors and Uranium Requirements.” 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2009. 14 Hewitt Crane, Edwin Kinderman, and Ripudaman Malhotra, A Cubic Mile of Oil: Realities and Options for Averting the Looming Global Energy Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press), prepublication copy, 188. 15 See, for example, Cesare Marchetti, “On Decarbonization: Historically and Perspectively,” International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, January 2005, http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Admin/PUB/Documents/IR-05-005.pdf. 16 Ibid. 17 International Energy Agency, “IEA Executive Director: The Climate Challenge Is Immense but We Have the Clean Technology,” November 25, 2008, http://www.iea.org/Textbase/press/pressdetail.asp?


pages: 512 words: 165,704

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, cellular automata, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Donald Shoup, endowment effect, extreme commuting, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, hive mind, human-factors engineering, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, Induced demand, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, megacity, Milgram experiment, Nash equilibrium, PalmPilot, power law, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, SimCity, statistical model, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

The small English city of Kingston-upon-Hull’s physical area was only 4.4 percent the size of London; nevertheless, Zahavi found, car drivers in both places averaged three-quarters of an hour each day. The only difference was that London drivers made fewer, longer trips, while Kingston-upon-Hull drivers made more frequent, shorter trips. In any case, the time spent driving was about the same. The noted Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti has taken this idea one step further and pointed out that throughout history, well before the car, humans have sought to keep their commute at about one hour. This “cave instinct,” as he calls it, reflects a balance between our desires for mobility (the more territory, the more resources one can acquire, the more mates one can meet, etc.) and domesticity (we tend to feel safer and more comfortable at home than on the road).

Chapter Five: Why Women Cause More Congestion Than Men 1.1 hours: Andreas Schafer and David Victor, “The Past and Future of Global Mobility,” Scientific American, October 1997, pp. 58–63. made more frequent, shorter trips: Vacov Zahavi, “The ‘UMOT’ Project,” August 1979, prepared for the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Ministry of Transport, Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn. in one hour: Cesare Marchetti, “Anthropological Invariants in Travel Behavior,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change, vol. 47 (1994), pp. 75–88. thirty minutes each way: M. Wachs, B. D. Taylor, N. Levine, and P. Ong, “The Changing Commute: A Case-study of the Jobs-Housing Relationship over Time,” Urban Studies, vol. 30, no. 10 (1993), pp. 1711–29.


pages: 284 words: 79,265

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date by Samuel Arbesman

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, bioinformatics, British Empire, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, data science, David Brooks, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, guest worker program, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, National Debt Clock, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, p-value, Paul Erdős, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, SimCity, social contagion, social graph, social web, systematic bias, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation

Note that the distance traveled is on a logarithmic axis, meaning that the distances capable of being traveled increases exponentially over time. The thick black line shows the general exponential trend. Data from Grübler, Technology and Global Change (Cambridge University Press, 2003). These transportation speeds have clear implications for how the world around us changes. Cesare Marchetti, an Italian physicist and systems analyst, examined the city of Berlin in great detail and showed that the city has grown in tandem with technological developments. From its early dimensions, when it was hemmed in by the limits of pedestrians and coaches, to later times, when its size ballooned alongside the electric trams and subways, Berlin’s general shape was dictated by the development of ever more powerful technologies.


pages: 279 words: 87,875

Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare by Ryan Dezember

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, interest rate swap, low interest rates, margin call, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, rent control, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, transaction costs

Hagerty, “Countrywide Pulls on the Reins,” Wall Street Journal, August 8, 2006. The agency created by Congress amid the Great Depression Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, “In Focus This Quarter: The U.S. Consumer Sector,” December 7, 2004. In doing so, they were bucking thousands of years of habit Cesare Marchetti, “Anthropological Invariants in Travel Behavior,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 47 (1994): 75–88. 9. WANNA BUY A BRIDGE? Bob Shallow wound up selling $173.3 million Kathy Jumper, “Bob Shallow Is RE/MAX’s Top Agent on Earth,” Press-Register, March 26, 2006. He was making more than $20,000 a day Ibid.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

In fact, using the IMF’s definition of recession (six months during which global growth dips below 3 per cent), they calculate that, while there were no recessions for the period 1945–73, there have been six recessions since 1973. They are confident that the Kondratieff wave is present in world GDP figures after 1870, and observable in Western economies before that. There is more evidence for the existence of long cycles in the work of Cesare Marchetti, an Italian physicist who analysed historical data on energy consumption and infrastructure projects. The result, he concluded in 1986, ‘very clearly reveals cyclic or pulsed behaviour’ in many areas of economic life, with cycles lasting roughly fifty-five years.21 Marchetti rejects the idea that these are waves, or primarily economic – preferring to call them long-term ‘pulses’ in social behaviour.


pages: 462 words: 150,129

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Better kinds of nuclear power will include small, disposable, limited-life nuclear batteries for powering individual towns for limited periods and fast-breeder, pebble-bed, inherent-safe atomic reactors capable of extracting 99 per cent of uranium’s energy, instead of 1 per cent as at present, and generating even smaller quantities of short-lived waste while doing so. Modern nuclear reactors are already as different from the inherently unstable, uncontained Chernobyl ones as a jetliner is from a biplane. Perhaps one day fusion will contribute, too, but do not hold your breath. The Italian engineer Cesare Marchetti once drew a graph of human energy use over the past 150 years as it migrated from wood to coal to oil to gas. In each case, the ratio of carbon atoms to hydrogen atoms fell, from ten in wood to one in coal to a half in oil to a quarter in methane. In 1800 carbon atoms did 90 per cent of combustion, but by 1935 it was 50:50 carbon and hydrogen, and by 2100, 90 per cent of combustion may come from hydrogen – made with nuclear electricity, most probably.