circular economy

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Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

Webster, K. (2015) The Circular Economy: A Wealth of Flows. Isle of Wight: Ellen McArthur Foundation. 23. Ellen McArthur Foundation (2012) Towards the Circular Economy, Isle of Wight: Ellen McArthur Foundation, available at: http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/assets/downloads/publications/Ellen-MacArthur-Foundation-Towards-the-Circular-Economy-vol.1.pdf 24. Braungart, M. and McDonough, W. (2009) Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. London: Vintage Books. 25. Ellen MacArthur Foundation (2012) In-depth: mobile phones. http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/circular-economy/interactive-diagram/in-depth-mobile-phones 26.

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, Guardian, 24 November 2012, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/nov/24/growing-food-in-the-desert-crisis 36. Lacy, P. and Rutqvist, J. (2015) Waste to Wealth: The Circular Economy Advantage. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 79–80. 37. Muirhead, S. and Zimmermann, L. (2015) ‘Open Source Circular Economy’, The Disruptive Innovation Festival 2015. 38. Open Source Circular Economy: mission statement. https://oscedays.org/open-source-circular-economy-mission-statement/ 39. Personal communication with Sam Muirhead, 27 January 2016. 40. Apertuso https://www.apertus.org/ 41. OSVehicle https://www.osvehicle.com/ 42.

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Fiscal reforms for an inclusive, circular economy. http://ex-tax.com/files/4314/1693/7138/The_Extax_Project_New_Era_New_Plan_report.pdf 56. Crawford, K. et al. (2014) Demolition or Refurbishment of Social Housing? A review of the evidence. London: UCL Urban Lab and Engineering Exchange, available at: http://www.engineering.ucl.ac.uk/engineering-exchange/files/2014/10/Report-Refurbishment-Demolition-Social-Housing.pdf 57. Wijkman, A. and Skanberg, K. (2015) The Circular Economy and Benefits for Society. Club of Rome, available at: http://www.clubofrome.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/The-Circular-Economy-and-Benefits-for-Society.pdf 58.

Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters by Oliver Franklin-Wallis

air freight, airport security, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, big-box store, bitcoin, British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate anxiety, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, global pandemic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kintsugi, lockdown, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, refrigerator car, sharing economy, social distancing, space junk, Suez canal 1869, Tim Cook: Apple

There, as suited executives from the big waste firms gave talks about the circular economy while their stalls handed out single-use plastic tat like candy, and gruff waste dealers admired massive German-made shredders and track shovels like toddlers in a toy shop, I spotted a small stall, barely big enough to contain the bright pink donations box at its centre. There I found Oleksii, the founder and director of Pink Elephant Recycling, a textile recycler based in Leicester. A serious man with a square face, framed with half-rimmed glasses, he is a passionate believer in the circular economy, and in the value of reuse. He is also, unlike many, totally open about what actually happens to our donations.

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‘We need to have a new culture around fashion. We should push for ownership, rather than keeping up with trends.’ To Yayra, Kantamanto is not just a warning, something for the West to feel guilty about and greenwash over. Look closely, and it’s a model of what the circular economy could look like: reusing what we have already made. ‘We don’t need new. If we are able to create a proper circular economy when it comes to clothing, we wouldn’t need to produce more clothes for the next thirty years,’ he says. ‘There are enough clothes produced already.’ I. Although if you can’t sell it, is it worth that much? PART TWO FOUL 6 THE CURE FOR CHOLERA ‘The sewer is the conscience of the city’ —VICTOR HUGO, Les Misérables This might all sound bleak, but we’ve solved a waste crisis before.

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(A few admirable groups, such as The Ocean Cleanup, are actually fishing plastic out of the ocean and rivers, though their efforts to date are tiny compared with the size of the problem.) Whenever I see big brands discussing the circular economy, I think back to something that Oleksii told me at Pink Recycling. As a textile trader, he’d been invited to events and industry discussions on the circular economy with major retailers. ‘When you try to go back to supermarkets and tell them to produce better quality at higher prices, to sell less, they say, “You are talking to the wrong crowd,”’ he told me. ‘You have to go back to Capital, Marx, to understand that what you’re trying to do is utopia – it’s not gonna work.

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference by Alice Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, decarbonisation, diversification, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, family office, food miles, Future Shock, global pandemic, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green transition, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, off grid, oil shock, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, precision agriculture, risk tolerance, risk/return, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, William MacAskill

She believes that mitigation – stopping climate change from getting worse – and adaptation – looking at how we will adapt to climate change – are important themes as well as the innovation and bold bets needed from investors. The circular economy The ‘circular economy’ describes waste that is reused, recycled or repurposed further down the line. Shoe manufacturer Timberland, for example, has partnered with a tyre company to produce shoes from old tyres. The failure to repurpose single-use plastics is widely recognised as a problem by any environmentally minded consumer. But investors are now starting to scrutinise other areas of the economy too. A 2019 paper from the European Commission identifies eight priority areas for a circular economy: in addition to textiles, it lists packaging, food, furniture, electrical and electronic equipment and batteries, transport, building and construction, and chemicals.

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The Ellen MacArthur Foundation – set up by the eponymous UK sailor specifically to promote the idea of the circular economy – calculates that renewable energy and energy efficiency only account for 55 per cent of global emissions. The remaining 45 per cent of emissions are associated with making products, and circular-economy strategies applied to the four key industrial materials of cement, steel, plastic and aluminium could help reduce emissions by 40 per cent by 2050. Fund managers at the Impax Environmental Markets fund argue that a ‘new front’ is opening in the campaign to create a circular economy, in the form of textiles. Creating fabric uses a huge amount of water and land and can lead to considerable pollution.

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Waste management also plays a role in the circular economy – particularly companies involved in recycling. Some expressed caution about such companies during the pandemic, however. Analysts at HSBC warned in April 2020 that recycling was under pressure, with recycling collections falling amid the widespread lockdowns around the world: ‘As economies struggle in coming months, we expect investments in recycling facilities and capacity may slow.’ That could affect smaller businesses and those such as Biffa, a UK-based waste management company that HSBC had previously argued was a circular-economy success story. But the hit might only be short term.

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

Recycling along the value chain New methods of design, production and distribution allow for the continual reuse of parts and components, reducing waste and creating a so-called circular economy. In contrast to the traditional linear economy, in which products are designed, built, sold and consumed, and end up in landfills, the circular economy reuses materials, even waste. The World Economic Forum believes that the circular economy could save $1 trillion a year in major economies by 2025 by using resources better. Mass customisation The 20th century gave birth to three major organisational innovations: the corporate R&D lab (pioneered by Thomas Edison, who founded GE); mass production (perfected by Henry Ford); and “big-box” retail and mass distribution (developed by Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart).

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Underlying their business models are two defining operating principles: the circular economy (the indefinite reuse and recycling of materials); and the sharing economy (where products and services are shared rather than owned). The rise of the circular economy GAPP AA.ORG The dominant model of production and consumption in the 20th century was linear. Firms made products, and consumers used and disposed of them. More recently, however, firms and consumers have started to reduce, recycle and reuse products, thus giving rise to a circular economy (thanks in large part to ideas from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation).

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It describes how to implement sustainable practices such as cradle-to-cradle and the circular economy (where components and materials are repeatedly recycled) to design and manufacture waste-free products of value to customers. It shows how the sharing economy – in which customers share products as pay-as-you-go services rather than own and consume them – can boost customer loyalty and generate new sources of revenue. And it explains how some pioneering firms are using techniques such as upcycling to combine and integrate the principles of the sharing and circular economies, thus paving the way for the “spiral economy”: a virtuous system that generates ever more value while reducing waste and the use of natural resources.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

If we’re to tame the juggernaut of automated delivery, a big source of inspiration is the growing campaign behind circular economies. More a design movement than a solid theory, circular-economy thinking argues for replacing single-use, extractive methods of production with multipleuse, regenerative methods. For example, every time you compost your food waste to fertilize your garden, as I do, you’re creating a tiny circular economy at home. Waste from one process feeds another, and you close the loop, conserving raw materials and energy. Circular economies are already everywhere in our communities, but often they don’t show up on the books.

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(New York: Random House, 1968), 65. 143“When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself”: Dick, Do Androids Dream, 65. 145The rebound effect shows up everywhere: David Owen, “The Efficiency Dilemma,” New Yorker, December 20 & 27, 2010, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/the-efficiency-dilemma. 145eating more pizza than ever: Mona Chalabi, “A National Pizza Day Investigation: How Many Slices a Day Do Americans Eat?” The Guardian, February 9, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/datablog/2017/feb/09/national-pizza-day-how-many-slices-do-americans-eat. 146a design movement than a solid theory: “What Is a Circular Economy?” Ellen MacArthur Foundation, accessed March 6, 2019, https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/circular-economy/concept. 147AVs will make more than 300,000 instant deliveries: McKinsey & Company, Parcel Delivery, 18. 147the meal’s million-mile journey: “Supermarkets in China: Two Ma Race,” The Economist, April 7, 2018, 55. 147Lufa Farms provides personalized, online ordering: Sarah Treleaven, “Is Personalized, Next-Day Delivery the Future of Urban Farming?”

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“automated” vehicles, 39 Autonomy (Burns), 214 autonomy, defined, 42 Autophobia (Ladd), 80 Autopilot (Tesla), 26–29 Autor, David, 150, 151, 152, 155 Baidu, 54 Bezos, Jeff, 221 Big Dog (Boston Dynamics), 79 big mobility, 239–47 bike sharing Bird Rides, 65, 66, 67 dockless bike-share, 64–65, 66, 67 docks, 64 Lime Bike, 67 microsprawl and, 202 rebalancing problem, 64–65 smartphone apps, 64 Vélib system (Paris), 63 VeoRide, 67 “white bikes,” 63 Bird Rides, 65, 66, 67 “block captain” ushers, 78 Bloomberg Philanthropies, 214 Blue Apron, 141, 145–46 Blue Gene/L (IBM), 36 Blueprint for Autonomous Urbanism, 193–94, 196, 242 Boston Dynamics, 79 Bostrom, Nick, 236–37, 238 Brooks, Rodney, 235 Brown, Joshua, 28 Burns, Larry, 214 buses bus rapid transit (BRT), 69–70, 72 CityPilot system, 72 driverless city buses, 216 platoons and platooning, 69–70, 70–71 software trains, 70–71, 70–72, 197, 200–201, 202, 204, 206 BVG (Berlin), 216 CalPers, 182–83 Calthorpe, Peter, 202 Caltrans, 170 carbon emissions AVs as tool for reducing, 19, 137 driverless shuttles and, 105 from manufacturing of clothing, 148 microsprawl and, 200, 202, 203, 204 platooning and, 68 software trains and, 72 Careem, 177 car-lite communes, 14–15, 60, 121, 244, 253, 254 Charles I (king), 161 Charlier, Frederic, 170–71 Cheetah 3 (MIT), 79 Chicago parking-meter contract, 173 Chin, Ryan, 62–63 Christine (King), 42 circular economies, 146–49, 196, 221 Citi Bike docks (New York City), 64 CityMobil2, 102–5 CityPilot system, 72 civic caravans, 73–75, 76–77, 77, 199 Clarke, Randy, 72 ClearRoad, 169–72, 216 clothing AirCloset, 148 carbon emissions from manufacturing, 148 in circular economies, 148–49 Rent the Runway, 140–41, 145 CloudKitchens, 140 coal and Jevons effect, 143–45 Coal Question, The (Jevons), 144 code and programming for AVs malleability of, 228, 245, 248 pushing code, 227 role in shaping driverless revolution, 227–28, 247–49 writing compared to coding, 226–27 see also computers and self-driving vehicles Cody (IDEO), 125 cognitive tasks and automation, 150–51, 151, 152–53 complete streets (shared streets), 208–9 computers and self-driving vehicles data exhaust, 108–12 data logged daily, 35, 108 microtransit mesh, 107–8, 111, 157 Pegasus onboard AV computer, 35–36 scan, study, and steer as basic tasks, 34–38 supercomputer location under seat, 84 vehicular variety increase, 53 see also code and programming for AVs; deep learning; reprogramming mobility computer vision, 152, 230, 231 congestion pricing at the curb, 223 electronic tolling, 169–72 mobility policy and, 182 in New York City, 165–67, 167, 168, 172–73 speculation or perverse incentives, 172–73 support for, 167–69 Uber, 179, 181 Vickrey’s study of, 165–66 weaponization by speculators, 17 see also financialization of mobility continuous delivery compared to historical shopping habits, 115–16, 120–21 and last mile logistics, 121–29 costs decline in twentieth century, 130 deskilling of delivery, 124 effect of instant delivery, 218 efficiency improvements and rebound effect, 145–47 free or cheap delivery and, 116–17, 204 freight AVs and, 125–26 fulfillment centers, 121, 123, 132, 136–37, 152, 158 impact on jobs, 155 impact on local businesses, 140–42 kippleization and, 142–43 nighttime delivery, 128–29, 130 overview, 120–21 package lockers and, 127, 130, 219, 221 piggybacking deliveries, 126–27 same-day delivery, 119, 123–24, 132–33, 138 see also e-commerce conveyors in circular economies, 148 deep learning, 57 Kiwibots, 57 last-mile deliveries, 124–25 maintenance, repair, and remote monitoring, 132 overview, 56–57, 60–61 Starship conveyors, 55–56, 57, 125, 192 Coord, 232–33 Cops (TV show), 24 Coresight Research, 117 core (urban core), 187, 188, 188–96, 194–95 Costco, 116 Could This Be You (TV show), 24 creative destruction, defined, 137 Credit Suisse, 117 cruise control, 24–25, 26 curb pricing and curb-access fees, 220–21, 222–23, 232 Curbs API, 232–33 Cushman & Wakefield, 117 Daimler, 6, 68, 69, 72, 190 Daley, Richard, 173 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Grand Challenges, 6–7, 68, 104, 133, 230 data collaboratives, 233 data exhaust, 108–12 Death and Life of Great American Cities, The (Jacobs), 57 deaths caused by motor vehicles, 9, 38, 156 deep learning advances in, 39, 42 computer power consumption, 37 conveyors, 57 fleet learning, 37 human intelligence tasks (HITs) required, 41 limits of, 235–36 neural networks, 36–37, 84, 235 occupancy grid, 37 overview, 36–37 and task model, 152 training, 37, 41, 153, 235 see also artificial intelligence; machine learning Deliveroo, 56, 124 delivery, continuous.

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

Rather than continue to rely on a take-make-dispose model of material use in manufacturing, many smart companies are tapping into the rapidly developing circular economy. The circular economy creates value by better design and optimization of products for multiple cycles of disassembly and reuse. While it is hardly a new concept—people have been composting food scraps for centuries—the circular economy remains a relatively niche approach for most manufacturers. Often, such efforts may consist of only a few showcase products that constitute less than 5 percent of the overall portfolio.45 In order to succeed at building a circular economy, your business should focus on the logistics and economics of turning finished products back into materials: rethinking product design and creating new rent, lease, and take-back schemes that will resonate with customers and distributors.

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Often, such efforts may consist of only a few showcase products that constitute less than 5 percent of the overall portfolio.45 In order to succeed at building a circular economy, your business should focus on the logistics and economics of turning finished products back into materials: rethinking product design and creating new rent, lease, and take-back schemes that will resonate with customers and distributors. In order to truly spur the creation of robust circular economy value chains, new regulatory schemes, standards, and incentives that influence behavior beyond the factory floor may be required.46 The plant of French carmaker Renault in Choisy-le-Roi, near Paris, is one of the best-known examples of the circular economy in action. The factory remanufactures automotive engines, transmissions, injection pumps, and other components for resale and generates about $270 million in revenue annually.

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To tackle the issue, Walmart changed its unloading processes to prioritize perishables, extended credit financing to small suppliers so they could upgrade their own facilities, and invested to enhance its forecasting ability to minimize production waste. The combination of these measures helped the company significantly reduce the supply chain cost in its Mexican operations. Move Toward a Circular Economy In order to fully realize the benefits of resource productivity, you’ll also need to reset your intuition about the life cycles of products. Rather than focus on how to divert materials from landfills, it would be far more useful to design products so that they don’t have to be sent there in the first place.

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

The sense of critical mass can be contagious, with member companies feeling they are part of something much bigger, something that can really move the needle. And this approach is itself now replicating. Backed by around-the-world sailor Ellen MacArthur, the Circular Economy 100 is another precompetitive innovation program enabling organizations to realize their circular economy ambitions faster. It brings together corporates, governments and cities, academic institutions, emerging innovators, and other stakeholders. Some such initiatives seek to “push” change by moving the supply lever, while others try to “pull” change, by moving the demand lever.

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It helped inspire and was followed by Double and Quadruple Bottom Lines; Social Return on Investment; multiple capital models; Full Cost Accounting; ESG (a framework focusing investors and financial analysts on Environmental, Social, and Governance factors); the Environmental Profit & Loss approach pioneered by Trucost, Puma, and Kering; Net Positive; Blended and Shared Value; Integrated Reporting; Impact Investment; and a range of proprietary versions, including consultancy BCG’s Total Societal Impact framework. That’s even before we get into next-generation concepts like Carbon Productivity, the Sharing Economy, the Circular Economy, and Biomimicry. Such experimentation is clearly essential and can spur a proliferation of potential solutions. But too often the sheer range of options, this Tower of Babel we have been building, provides business with yet another alibi for inaction. Worse, we have conspicuously failed to benchmark progress across these options on the basis of their real-world potential, impact, and performance.

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In the social domain, Green Swan trajectories have been followed by universal schooling in many countries, the evolution of vaccine technology (despite recent anti-vaccine rumors and propaganda), and the growth of social movements focusing on environmentalism, social enterprise, and impact investment. When it comes to the environment, we have seen pollutants like asbestos, DDT, lead, and CFCs largely driven out of the economy, coupled with the emergence of concepts like sustainable development, the circular economy, and biomimicry. Equally impressive on the ground have been such ecosystem restoration projects as the progressive recovery of the Iraqi marsh ecosystems destroyed by Saddam Hussein’s forces, and the progressive re-greening of China’s Loess Plateau, a cradle of early Chinese civilization.10 The scale of the regeneration in such places of past ruination has to be seen to be believed—and is hugely encouraging in terms of the longer-term prospects for our core task of planet-level regeneration.

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

., ‘Electric vehicles: recycled batteries and the search for a circular economy’, Financial Times, 2 August 2021. 3 ‘Sustainable Supply Chain for Batteries’, Storage X Symposium, Stanford University [online], 2 November 2020, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ0yFAGELnE (accessed 7 April 2022). 4 McGee, Sanderson, ‘Electric vehicles: recycled batteries and the search for a circular economy’. 5 Ibid. 6 McDonough, W., Braungart, M., Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (London, Jonathan Cape, 2008), p. 24. 7 Ibid., p. 25. 8 Ibid., p. 158. 9 Home, A., ‘Humble aluminium can shows a circular economy won’t be easy’, Reuters, 26 March 2021. 10 Ibid. 11 ‘Chemistry can help make plastics sustainable – but it isn’t the whole solution’, Nature, 17 February 2021, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00391-7?

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Vehicle miles travelled in the US have increased by one hundred percent since 1980.15 In 1908 the kerb weight of the Ford Model T was 540 kilograms and three decades later the company’s Model 74 weighed almost exactly twice as much.16 Since 1990, US pick-up trucks have added around 1,300 pounds to their weight on average, with some vehicles now weighing 7,000 pounds, the equivalent of three Honda Civics.17 All this weight means more raw materials. Moving to what is known as a ‘circular economy’ by recycling and re-using is a way to make a dent in this continued demand for natural resources. It’s a concept that has been embraced by some of the largest corporations from Apple to Dell. Yet much of it consists of little more than soundbites and public relations messaging. Most smartphones have a limited lifespan, in part because manufacturers such as Google, Samsung and Xiaomi only allow users to download security updates for a set length of time.

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Most smartphones have a limited lifespan, in part because manufacturers such as Google, Samsung and Xiaomi only allow users to download security updates for a set length of time. In November 2020 Apple paid $113 million in the US to settle a lawsuit brought by over thirty states that accused it of secretly reducing performance in older phones, leading consumers to buy new ones. Our progress towards a circular economy has as a result been achingly slow: we throw away an estimated fifty million tonnes of electronic waste a year, less than twenty percent of which is recycled.18 Yet there is more gold in a tonne of this e-waste than in a tonne of mined ore, along with over thirty different raw materials including lithium and cobalt, tin and tungsten.

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow by Tim Jackson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, biodiversity loss, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, secular stagnation, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, Works Progress Administration, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Pointing out that ever greater consumption of resources is (in itself) a ‘driver of growth’ in the current paradigm, US ecological economist Robert Ayres argues that, ‘in effect, a new growth engine is needed, based on non-polluting energy sources and selling non-material services, not polluting products’.10 The same idea is implicit in the concept of the ‘circular economy’, popularised in recent years by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The circular economy is characterised by strategies of reuse, refurbishment, remanufacturing and recycling. The overall aim is reduce the linear throughput associated without compromising the quality of the services that material goods can provide.11 We’ll come back in the following chapter to the question of whether or not this strategy provides a new engine of growth.

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But the concept can be traced back considerably further, at least to a paper published in 1966 by the economist Kelvin Lancaster, entitled ‘Goods are not goods’, in which he argued that goods are really bundles of ‘attributes’ that have value to consumers (Lancaster 1966). 8 See Alperovitz (2013), Jackson and Victor (2013), McKibben (2007), Schor (2010), Schumacher (1973), and references therein. 9 I’m grateful to Brian Davey at FEASTA (Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability) for suggesting the terminology of the Cinderella economy. 10 Ayres (2008: 292). See also BERR (2008). 11 On circular economy, see www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/circular-economy (accessed 26 March 2016). See also Allwood and Cullen (2015), Stahel and Jackson (1993). 12 ILO (2015: 19). 13 Keynes (1930). For some recent proposals to reduce working hours, see Hayden (1999), NEF (2013), Skidelsky and Skidelsky (2013). 14 It’s interesting to note that these trends have been reversed somewhat during the last decade, with working hours increasing and labour productivity growing more slowly (Chapter 2).

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Agriculture will pay more attention to the integrity of the land and the welfare of livestock. Manufacturing will pay more attention to durability and repairability. Construction must prioritise refurbishment of existing buildings and the design of new sustainable and repairable infrastructures. The model of the ‘circular economy’ has much to offer here.13 Investment will be absolutely vital to achieve this transformation. And this represents a radical change in the nature of investment portfolios. Investment in resource extraction and in labour productivity growth will be diminished. Instead our investment portfolios must be geared towards energy and resource productivity, low carbon infrastructure, the protection of social and ecological assets.

The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean tech, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, connected car, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, energy transition, Fairphone, full employment, green new deal, green transition, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lyft, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Tesla Model S, Yom Kippur War

This is where Japan has broken new ground by recognising the sheer quantity of rare-earth metals contained in the thousands of ‘urban mines’ (e-waste dumps) littering its territory.32 For example, every one of Japan’s 200 million used smartphones contain a few tenths of a gram of rare metals that can be isolated. That’s 300,000 tonnes of rare-earth metals potentially lying dormant across the island country — enough to keep it self-sufficient for the next three decades. This realisation is the driving force behind one of the most innovative circular economies for e-waste. (See Appendix 10 on the lifecycle of metals.) Every year, collection drives are held across Japan to return 650,000 tonnes of small electronic items to the consumption circuit. The campaign is so popular that it has earned the endorsement of Japan’s favourite virtual celebrities, including Hatsune Miku.

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The US army, for instance, a formidable consumer of rare metals, has warehouses on the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona, filled to the rafters with out-of-service aircraft, all concealing tonnes of rare-earth metals that US army generals are unable to extract or reuse.35 Worse still is the fact that as the world’s most powerful army withdrew from Afghanistan, it is believed to have left behind $6 billion worth of military equipment crammed with magnets that its enemies could dispose of as they pleased.36 Many in the United States have recognised just how big a challenge it is, and have suggested giving soldiers instructions on how to retrieve components containing rare-earth metals before demobilising. For industry, it’s another matter entirely, for the circular economy has completely upended traditional supply chains. In addition to having to know where their raw materials are sourced, manufacturers must now also be able to trace the users of their product. Companies such as Apple and H&M, which of course know where their rare-earth minerals and cotton bales are coming from, now have to trace the billions of iPhones and old jeans scattered across the globe.

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It could also give us a glimpse into the future of rare metals: a world in which the mining powerhouses are not the countries with the richest mineral deposits, but those with the most bountiful waste dumps; where treasure maps of the world’s biggest scrap mountains will be drawn, and some debris will be ranked ‘world class’ in the same way as some of today’s mineral deposits. Our waste dumps will be coveted goldmines. Accordingly, Japan hardly mines any rare metals from its soils. Its pre-eminence in this circular economy could also turn it into a powerful exporter of those retrieved metals on which other countries depend. Thus, the geopolitics of recycling would be born — at least, this is what Japan believes. It’s also not hard to imagine the technological advances that would make production more ecological, reducing the need to mine and to export old television sets to e-waste dumps in Ghana and Nigeria.

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

When you wear it out, you send the sneaker back to the company for recycling, and they send you a new pair.21 You may never own or throw out a pair of shoes again. Driving many of these innovations is the concept of a circular economy. In a circular economy, all resources, products, and materials are kept in use for as long as possible and are never simply discarded. Most big companies are already working toward circular economy solutions, with the expectation that within a decade or two, it will be the norm. So if you do find yourself waking up in a world like “The Road to Zerophoria,” the good news is that you won’t be figuring out how to adapt on your own.

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Here’s How It Works,” New York Times, July 22, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/climate/maine-recycling-law-EPR.html. 16 Mike Pomranz, “California Coffee Shops Test Reusable To-Go Cups Backed by Big Companies Like Starbucks,” Food and Wine, February 20, 2020, https://www.foodandwine.com/news/reusable-cup-trials-starbucks-mcdonalds-california; Mike Pomranz, “Burger King Tests Eco-Friendly Packaging Options,” Food and Wine, May 4, 2021, https://www.foodandwine.com/news/burger-king-loop-new-sustainable-packaging. 17 “Renew,” Eileen Fisher, accessed August 27, 2021, https://www.eileenfisher.com/renew. 18 Anna Ringstrom, “IKEA Opens Pilot Second-Hand Store in Sweden,” World Economic Forum, October 30, 2020, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/ikea-opens-pilot-second-hand-store-sweden-circular-economy/. 19 “Why Hyla?,” Hyla Mobile, accessed August 27, 2021, https://www.hylamobile.com/why-hyla/. 20 Alex Thornton, “These 11 Companies Are Leading the Way to a Circular Economy,” World Economic Forum, February 26, 2019, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/companies-leading-way-to-circular-economy/. 21 “This Is Cyclon,” On, accessed August 27, 2021, https://www.on-running.com/en-us/cyclon. Future Simulation #2 1 Yaryna Serkez, “Every Country Has Its Own Climate Risks.

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Try to have a bit of balance in your list—at least one of the forces you pick should feel like a risk to you, and at least one should feel like an opportunity: the climate crisis post-pandemic trauma social justice movements increasing economic inequality social and political tensions caused by refugee crises and mass migration automation of work decreasing birthrates in Western countries and a “youth boom” in Africa shifting religious majorities and increasing theological diversity the global switch to renewable energy sources alternatives to capitalism and market-based economies social media–driven misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories rise of authoritarianism and loss of faith in democracy widespread adoption of facial recognition and surveillance technologies digital currencies, cryptocurrency, and programmable money universal basic income and direct cash transfers internet shutdowns mandated by government or law enforcement the “right to disconnect” movement and four-day workweeks lifelong learning and “reskilling” at the workplace job guarantees regenerative design and the circular economy genomic research and CRISPR genetic modification the Internet of Things augmented and virtual reality satellite networks and space internet If there’s something on the institute’s list above that you don’t know anything about at all, this is the perfect opportunity to go find your first clue.

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

Sustainability: Cities that provide services without stealing from future generations.19 Even more fundamentally, the concept of a ‘closed-loop’ or ‘circular’ economy offers the potential to minimize waste, to reduce costs, to prevent harmful pollution such as greenhouse gas emissions and degradation of the natural world, and to safeguard supply of finite resources such as rare earth metals. There need no longer be a trade-off between economic growth and sustainability. The diagram below, from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, illustrates the biological and technical cycles in the circular economy as well as the three key principles:20 1. preserve and enhance natural capital by controlling finite stocks and balancing renewable resource flows; 2. optimize resource yields by circulating products, components and materials in use at the highest utility at all times in both technical and biological cycles; 3. foster system effectiveness by revealing and designing-out negative externalities.

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The diagram below, from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, illustrates the biological and technical cycles in the circular economy as well as the three key principles:20 1. preserve and enhance natural capital by controlling finite stocks and balancing renewable resource flows; 2. optimize resource yields by circulating products, components and materials in use at the highest utility at all times in both technical and biological cycles; 3. foster system effectiveness by revealing and designing-out negative externalities. Figure 19: The key cycles in the circular economy Source: The Ellen MacArthur Foundation Taken together, these technologies and business models will have some extraordinary impacts, not the least of which is that the total cost to the world could fall dramatically. The principal financial costs of a product or service are those of labour, energy, raw materials and land.

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A world using clean energy in a closed-loop economy would have lower total costs: the financial cost as we can currently measure it plus the cost of externalities. Such a world would be far more sustainable. Our current – financial only – definition of profit makes it harder for companies to migrate towards a circular economy. Correctly charging them for their externalities – what Margaret Thatcher called the ‘polluter pays’ principle – brings their incentives in line with the needs of society at large.21 At the same time as the costs fall, we could see a dramatic expansion in our ability to provide new products and services.

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth by Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato

Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, collaborative economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Detroit bankruptcy, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, facts on the ground, fiat currency, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systems thinking, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, vertical integration, very high income

Rehn, The Trade Union Movement and Full Employment. Report to the LO Congress in 1951, Stockholm, The Swedish Confederation of Trade Unions (LO), 1951. 23 Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Towards A Circular Economy: Business Rationale For An Accelerated Transition, Report, 2 December 2015, https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/publications/towards-a-circular-economy-business-rationale-for-an-accelerated-transition (accessed 29 December 2015); Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Growth Within: A Circular Economy Vision For A Competitive Europe, Report, 25 July 2015, http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/assets/downloads/publications/EllenMacArthurFoundation_Growth-Within_July15.pdf (accessed 29 December 2015). 24 C.

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This clustering of interdependent users and producers and of self-reinforcing capabilities results in synergies and support networks that make further innovations easier and profitable, as well as less risky.27 In essence this is about achieving growth and well-being across society by increasing the proportion of services and intangibles, both in GDP and in the individual satisfaction of needs. Product innovation trends are already visible: custom-designed eco-friendly materials, conservation, recycling, reduction of material content per product and designing for durability and zero-waste. The notion of a ‘circular economy’ has entered the mainstream, with global corporations such as Philips and Unilever championing the process. This promotes the gradual replacement of ‘products’ with ‘services’, particularly in the replacement of possession with renting. From commercial lighting systems and airplane engines to jeans, carpets and cars, the question has become: why buy when you have the option of ‘renting’ a product that is upgradeable, maintained and available on demand?

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Redesigning the tax system (using digital databases) to tax ‘bads’ rather than ‘goods’—for example, taxing resource and energy use instead of labour and consumption—would stimulate saving of materials and energy and encourage employment and consumer spending on intangibles. Regulate for durability and maintenance. Making producers responsible for the entire lifespan of their products would encourage the circular economy and manufacturing durability, as well as stimulating the growth of a rental and maintenance economy. Redesign the metrics with which to measure wealth production. As numerous studies have shown in recent years, GDP has very limited meaning and is even distorting in the knowledge economy. New metrics need to be designed to account for the use of energy and materials and to measure the various ways in which value is now created and well-being enhanced.

Simply Living Well: A Guide to Creating a Natural, Low-Waste Home by Julia Watkins

airport security, big-box store, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, demand response, Mason jar, microplastics / micro fibres, off-the-grid

And even where forests are replanted, most often we’re replacing old-growth forests and all their rich biodiversity with tree plantations that at best comprise just a few species of trees. In a circular economy, we’re still extracting at least some of our resources, though with a bit more thought and a lot more care. For example, there are ways to manage certain types of resource extraction so they align more with natural cycles of regeneration. And once extracted, resources can be processed and utilized in a way that anticipates value in a product even after it has been used by a consumer, at which point it can be repurposed, reused, remanufactured, or otherwise refurbished. In a circular economy, we avoid creating waste (and minimize what little waste we do produce) by keeping things continually in use, in one form or another.

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Fundamentally, starting your pursuit of zero-waste means looking carefully at how you consume and what kinds of waste that produces. Everyone’s different, but even a cursory audit of your consumption habits ought to reveal opportunities to cut back on waste. It also sometimes helps to put your habits in a broader context, which to me means asking whether you’re part of the linear economy or the circular economy. Most of our economy is still a linear economy, where resources are extracted, processed, consumed, and discarded. Take a paper coffee cup—there’s a straight line running from a tree in the forest through the paper mill, the manufacturing plant, the coffee shop, your hand, the trash can, and a landfill.

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In a circular economy, we avoid creating waste (and minimize what little waste we do produce) by keeping things continually in use, in one form or another. A great deal of the circular economy is accomplished by smarter designs, innovative materials, technological advances, and radically different business models. But there’s a lot—and I mean a lot— you can do in your own home, often by looking back to a time when the demands of feeding a family of four were no different than they are today, but with no fancy supermarkets or big box stores down the road or fast and easy take-out or delivery options a phone call away. This is why, for me, zero-waste has been about so much more than just avoiding trash or preventing waste.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

There’s another common fallacy that we need to face up to, and it has to do with recycling. The idea of a ‘circular economy’ has been gaining traction in policy circles recently as a response to the ecological crisis. These days everybody seems to be into it. The claim is that if we can scale up our recycling rate then we can keep growing GDP indefinitely, without worrying about the ecological impact of consumption. The European Union sees this as a plan to save capitalism, hoping that a circular economy will ‘foster sustainable economic growth’. Yes, we should absolutely aspire to a more circular economy. But the idea that recycling will save capitalism doesn’t hold water.

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It’s because growth in total material demand is outstripping our gains in recycling. Once again, it’s not our technology that’s the problem – it’s growth.35 But there’s an even more fundamental problem with the idea of a ‘green growth’ circular economy. Even if we were able to recycle 100% of materials, that would pose a problem for the prospect of GDP growth. Growth tends to require an ‘outside’: an external source from which to extract value for free, or as close to free as possible. In a circular economy, the cost of materials is internalised. That’s good from the perspective of ecology, but bad from the perspective of capital accumulation. Recycling costs money, and the cost of paying for recycled materials makes it more difficult to generate ever-rising surplus.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

New innovations in thermoset plastics, for example, could make reusable materials that have been considered nearly impossible to recycle but are used in everything from mobile phones and circuit boards to aerospace industry parts. The recent discovery of new classes of recyclable thermosetting polymers called polyhexahydrotriazines (PHTs) is a major step towards the circular economy, which is regenerative by design and works by decoupling growth and resource needs.8 2.1.2 Digital One of the main bridges between the physical and digital applications enabled by the fourth industrial revolution is the internet of things (IoT) – sometimes called the “internet of all things”.

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* * * Box B: Environmental Renewal and Preservation * * * The convergence of the physical, digital and biological worlds that is at the heart of the fourth industrial revolution offers significant opportunities for the world to achieve huge gains in resource use and efficiency. As Project MainStream, the World Economic Forum’s initiative to accelerate the transition to the circular economy, has shown, the promise is not just that individuals, organizations and governments can have less impact on the natural world but also that there is great potential to restore and regenerate our natural environment through the use of technologies and intelligent systems design. At the heart of this promise is the opportunity to shift businesses and consumers away from the linear take-make-dispose model of resource use, which relies on large quantities of easily accessible resources, and towards a new industrial model where effective flows of materials, energy, labour and now information interact with each other and promote by design a restorative, regenerative and more productive economic system.

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., “The State of 3D Printing…”, Quora100 Positive impacts – More personalized products and personal fabrication – Creating niche products, and making money selling them – Fastest growth of 3D printing where each customer has slightly different needs from a product – e.g. a particular shaped foot requires a specially sized shoe – Reduced logistics costs, with the possibility of huge energy savings101 – Contributing to abundant local activities; crafting own goods that benefit from the removal of logistics costs (circular economy) Negative impacts – Global and regional supply and logistics chain: lower demand resulting in job losses – Gun control: opening opportunities for printing objects with high levels of abuse, such as guns – Growth in waste for disposal, and further burden on the environment – Major disruption of production controls, consumer regulations, trade barriers, patents, taxes and other government restrictions; and, the struggle to adapt The shift in action Almost 133,000 3D printers were shipped worldwide in 2014, a 68% increase from 2013.

The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age by David S. Abraham

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbus A320, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, circular economy, Citizen Lab, clean tech, clean water, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairphone, geopolitical risk, gigafactory, glass ceiling, global supply chain, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, planned obsolescence, reshoring, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “Statistics on the Management of Used and End-of-Life Electronics,” accessed December 19, 2014, http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/conserve/materials/ecycling/manage.htm. Electronics TakeBack Coalition, “E-Waste Problem Overview.” 30. “Why Are Rare Earth Metals So Important?” accessed December 19, 2014, lamprecycling.veoliaes.com/newsletter/September2013/6. 31. Desiree Mohindra, “Circular Economy Can Generate US$ 1 Trillion Annually by 2025,” World Economic Forum, accessed December 19, 2014, www.weforum.org/news/circular-economy-can-generate-us-1-trillion-annually-2025. 32. Francois-Xavier Lienhart, “The Implementation of an Energy-Saving Society Contributes to the Environment, People and Economy,” presentation, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Tokyo, Japan, November 1, 2011. 33.

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For people to begin to make educated decisions about their resource consumption, they need to know what they are consuming. Labeling also encourages companies to know what materials are in their products and can facilitate recycling when the information is placed in bar codes on the side of a product.30 A report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation states that a circular economy, based on remanufacturing, reuse, and recycling would save $1 trillion in material costs by 2025 and create one million jobs in Europe alone. It could also fuel the next generation of recycling techniques, which the world desperately needs.31 An even better way to keep minor metal resource use in check is decidedly low-tech: conservation.

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In the United States, only two of every three aluminum cans are recycled, despite an established infrastructure to handle them. And the cans are relatively easy to reprocess because they are made almost completely of aluminum. 35. Barbara Reck, telephone interview, May 8, 2013. 36. Action and Resource Center, Investigating the Role of Design in the Circular Economy, 1st ed., e-book (Actions and Research Centre2013), available at https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/reports/the-great-recovery-exec-summary/. 37. Kenji Baba, Yuzo Hiroshige, and Takeshi Nemoto, “Rare-Earth Magnet Recycling,” Hitachi Review 62, no. 8 (2013): 452, www.hitachi.com/rev/pdf/2013/r2013_08_105.pdf. 38.

What We Need to Do Now: A Green Deal to Ensure a Habitable Earth by Chris Goodall

blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, decarbonisation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, food miles, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haber-Bosch Process, hydroponic farming, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Ocado, ocean acidification, plant based meat, smart grid, smart meter

This small business operates in a building alongside other carbon-reducing activities such as an enterprise that rents out consumer appliances, like pressure washers, for short-term use. For clothing that no longer fits, or has been damaged in use, Oxford Alterations can make inexpensive changes so you can continue wearing the garment. They even hold workshops to help you make your own clothes. Businesses like this will be central to the development of the ‘circular economy’, as well as producing good-quality skilled employment for local people. ‘Fixing something we might otherwise throw away is almost inconceivable to many in the heyday of fast fashion and rapidly advancing technology,’ says Rose Marcario, the CEO of Patagonia, one of the most sustainable fashion companies in the world.

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I was both right and wrong. IKEA recently started using the phrase ‘peak stuff’ to explain the plateauing of its sales in developed markets. But, while Europe is probably using a smaller weight of materials, Asia is more than making up for this slowdown. ‘Peak stuff’ won’t save us from the climate crisis. CIRCULAR ECONOMY CHALLENGES Building a working global economy that minimises the need to constantly extract new resources should be the world’s target. There is growing talk about ‘circular’ production processes that reuse existing materials, but most industries have made only token progress towards reducing their footprint.

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And anyone interested in the carbon footprints of modern lifestyles should also read Berners-Lee’s How Bad are Bananas (Profile Books, new edition in Spring 2020). CLOTHING AND STUFF The website of Ellen MacArthur’s foundation (www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org) contains much of interest on the circular economy, and clothing in particular. WRAP (www.wrap.org.uk), the waste minimisation institute, publishes consistently interesting material on cutting the use of resources. The work of the Energy Transitions Commission (www.energy-transitions.org) is exceptional and includes detailed reports on sectors of the economy which are most difficult to decarbonise.

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

To take one example, when a building is demolished, some of its elements—steel girders and plastic piping, for instance—will hardly have degraded and could be reused. Moreover, girders could be more cleverly designed at the outset so as to offer the same strength with less weight, thereby saving on steel production. This exemplifies a concept that is gaining traction: the circular economy—where the aim is to recycle as much material as possible.19 Often, technical advances make appliances more efficient. It would then make sense to scrap the old ones, but only if the efficiency gain is at least enough to compensate for the extra cost of manufacturing the updated version. Appliances and vehicles could be designed in a more modular way so that they could be readily upgraded by replacing parts rather than by being thrown away.

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Woltzman, Climate Shock and the Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 17.  W. Mischel, Y. Shoda, and M. L. Rodriguez, ‘Delay of Gratification in Children’, Science 244 (1989): 933–38. 18.  ‘Cuba’s 100-Year Plan for Climate Change’, Science 359 (2018): 144–45. 19.  In the United Kingdom the case for the circular economy has gained traction through the advocacy of a widely admired high-profile figure, the around-the-world sailor Ellen MacArthur. 20.  An excellent survey of geoengineering is Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World (Princeton: NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

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See also climate change; global warming carbon sequestration, 51 carbon tax, 44 care givers, 96–97 Carson, Rachel, 223 Cassini space probe, 142–43 catastrophes: in Diamond’s analysis of five societies, 216; ending all humanity or life, 9, 110–18; global warming and, 40, 42, 57–58; natural threats possibly leading to, 16; need for international planning and, 217, 218–19, 226; worse in interconnected world, 76, 109–10, 215–16 Catholic Church: opposing embryo research, 65; stewardship of planet and, 34–35 CCTV (video surveillance), 78 CFCs, 31–32, 47, 161 Challenger disaster, 145 Chernobyl disaster, 56 chess, 86, 87–88 China: information technology in, 83, 84; one-child policy of, 22; space program of, 145 circular economy, 46 cities. See megacities of developing world; urbanisation citizen science, 157, 212 climate change, 21, 37–44; appropriate deployment of technology and, 4; computer models of, 57, 190; confidence in predictions of, 171; Dyson’s skepticism about urgency of, 79; feedback from water vapour and clouds, 39, 57; geoengineering and, 58–59, 60, 225; geopolitical obstacles to planning for, 226; loss of biodiversity due to, 32–33; politically realistic mitigation measures, 46–48; predicting what will happen, 57–58; reasons for inaction on, 44–45; serious societal consequences of, 215; timescale for response to, 60, 226; Vatican involvement with, 34–35.

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Lean Startup prototyping and testing Using the Lean Startup method to test and validate assumptions around new campaigns and new products via advanced testing and prototyping forms, such as A/B-testing concepts in Google AdWords and landing pages, social media monitoring, neuro-feedback in retail stores of test groups, customer development interviews, crowdfunding, and testing in virtual worlds such as High Fidelity. In sum: a data-driven and continuous testing approach to marketing. New revenue models More subscriptions versus one-off sales due to access versus ownership trend; more apps; more connected products and more cradle to cradle and Circular Economy; more freemium models (free and paid—e.g., the horribly named “tryvertising”). New fee models, such as API fees, platform licensing, syndication fees and virtual goods. CFO – Chief Financial Officer The finance function, although historically very conservative and cautious, is about to face radical disruption from several technologies, including AI (Deep Learning), sensors and Bitcoin (the underlying block chain protocol in particular).

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Key Opportunity Implications and Actions Decentralized or outsourced production Digital production and unbundling of production steps, freeing the company to focus on its core competencies (customer relationships, R&D, design and marketing). Accomplished by leveraging OEMs (e.g., PCH International, Flextronics, Foxconn) or through the use of 3D printers, robots and nanotech/stacks (see Tesla). Recyclable materials / circular economy Production materials that can be recycled and reused multiple times. Salvaging of faulty products through the systematic extraction of raw materials. This feeds on the decentralized production model above. Using bio-nanocomposites and nanocellulose for biodegradable packaging. Nanomaterials and nanomanufacturing Manufacturing and using materials made from engineered atoms and molecules (e.g., carbon graphene and carbyne), designed with specific shape, size, surface properties and chemistry to enhance reactivity, strength and electrical properties.

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Leverage bio-based materials and synthetic biology as alternative means of production. Bio-production remains difficult to scale, but in the medium term promises to transform current production methods. It is important to note that the need for long-distance transport will drop over time due to the rise of localized production and a growing circular economy (recycling). More and more products will be produced on the spot through local partners (Leveraged Assets), access to 3D printers and cheap labor provided by highly customizable robots. Since customers prefer to receive products the moment they decide they need them, they will be increasingly receptive to locally assembled products for two reasons: ethics (jobs and sustainability) and practicality (lower delivery costs, improved customer service, etc.).

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Other sharing networks are nonprofits or cooperatives where members freely share knowledge, goods, and services with one another. Millions of individuals are constructing the knowledge of the world and sharing it on Wikipedia, a nonprofit website that is the fifth-most-trafficked website, all for free.2 The sharing of a range of virtual and physical goods is the cornerstone of an emerging circular economy, allowing the human race to use far less of the resources of the Earth while passing on what they no longer use to others and, by doing so, dramatically reducing carbon emissions. The Sharing Economy is a core feature of the Green New Deal era. The Sharing Economy is now in its infancy and is going to evolve in many directions.

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New studies, however, show that with the shift to an Internet of Things platform and a Third Industrial Revolution, it is conceivable to increase aggregate energy efficiency to as high as 60 percent over the next twenty years, amounting to a dramatic increase in productivity while transitioning into a nearly 100 percent postcarbon renewable energy society and a highly resilient circular economy.4 I regularly meet with heads of state, provincial governors, and mayors around the world; during our discussions I describe the smart green infrastructure shift into a zero-carbon Third Industrial Revolution economy that is the very centerpiece of a Green New Deal, then ask them if they have a better plan for mitigating climate change and creating the new businesses and employment opportunities that come with it.

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Commissioner Cañete made note of the historic importance of this EU milestone, saying that “today, we are stepping up our efforts as we propose a strategy for Europe to become the world’s first major economy to go climate neutral by 2050.”5 According to the report, renewable energy consumption had spiked from 9 percent in 2005 to 17 percent in 2018 and was on schedule to meet the 20-20-20 target of 20 percent renewable energy consumption across the 28 member states along with the other two targets of a 20 percent increase in energy efficiency and a 20 percent reduction in CO2 emissions, by the 2020 deadline.6 Going forward, the plan requires joint action earmarked in seven strategic areas: energy efficiency; deployment of renewables; clean, safe, and connected mobility; competitive industries and a circular economy; infrastructure and interconnections; bioeconomy and natural carbon sinks; and carbon capture and storage to address remaining emissions. With 2020 targets in reach, the EU has set still even more aggressive new targets of 32 percent renewable energy, a 32.5 percent increase in energy efficiency, and a 45 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, all by 2030, and a target to be nearly carbon-free by 2050.7 But the report acknowledged that although the EU was leading the world into a zero-emission postcarbon era, efforts were still far too slow, given the newly released IPCC report warning that the world’s nations only have twelve years left to transform their economies out of a carbon culture or risk sliding over the 1.5°C rise in Earth’s temperature and into an inevitable free fall, taking us deeply into the sixth mass extinction.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

., 103 Brown, Joshua, 223–4, 254 Brown, Michael, 231 “buddy punching,” 198 bullshit jobs, 203, 205 Bui, Quoctrung, 192–3 bushido, 266–7 Bushido Project, the, 266 Business Microscope, 197 Buterin, Vitalik, 147–50, 152, 154, 162–4, 167, 169, 172, 175, 177, 179, 303, 311 Byzantium, 69 CAD-Coin, 157 Californian Ideology, the, 283 Carmack, John, 82 cartography, 20 cats, 214 CCTV, 49–50, 54, 241 cellular automata, 86 Champs-Élysées, 1 Chaum, David, 121 Checkpoint Charlie, 70 chess, 263 Chevrolet Camaro, 216–18 Chicago Police Department, 230–1 China, 87, 102, 190, 194, 278–9, 286, 290, 306 Churchill, Winston, 28 circular economy, 92, 96, 99, 288 Ciutat Meridiana, Barcelona neighborhood, 109 climax community, 289 Cockney rhyming slang, 311 code library, 274–5 commons, the, 171–3 computer numerical control, CNC milling, 86, 93, 95, 97, 108, 110, 273 Container Store, 196 cooperatives, 171 cooperative motility, 80 Copenhagen, 31, 51 Cornell Law School, 151 Cortana virtual assistant, 39 Costco, 45 cozy catastrophe, 291 cradle-to-cradle industrial ecosystem. See circular economy The Craftsman (Sennett), 111 Creative Commons, 102–3 CRISPR technique, 298 Crossmatch, startup, 198 Crown Heights, Brooklyn neighborhood, 136 cryptocurrency, 8, 115–44, 145, 148–9, 153, 156, 164–5, 177–8, 248, 273, 279, 290, 293, 318 cryptofinance, 180 cryptography, 116, 118–19, 121–3, 129, 146–7, 176, 178–9 “Custom Notifications,” Chicago Police Department program, 235 cybernetic socialism, 191 DAO, The, distributed autonomous organization, 161–81 data subject, 251 Davao City, Philippines, 31, 43, 46 Day, Jeffrey, 63 distributed denial-of-service attacks, 45 “The Dead” (Joyce), 261 Deep Blue, 263–5 Deep Dream.

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The only way widely distributed production might be reconciled with the desire for sustainability would be to ensure that digital fabrication can be made to work as a component of a metabolic process—what the visionary engineers Michael Braungart and William McDonough called a “cradle-to-cradle” industrial ecology, and what is these days more often referred to as a circular economy.14 Proposals along these lines call for manufacturing processes to consume as much as possible of the waste they produce. To a degree, we can surely pare down the waste that’s generated in the course of ordinary digital production. For depositional fabrication techniques like 3D printing, clever algorithms can be used to determine the optimal form of structural members; while this approach often lends an uncanny, posthuman aesthetic to machined objects, there’s no doubt that it also yields unprecedented strength-to-weight ratios, using the least matter to make the strongest possible component.

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Some three years after Pai first announced his partnership with SWaCH, though, Protoprint still does not offer finished product for sale. This makes Pai’s claims—that production-grade filament can be made at scale in this way, for example, or that Protoprint’s trashpickers earn fifteen times what their unaffiliated peers do—all but impossible to evaluate. Nevertheless, here is a model for a sustainable, circular economy founded on digital fabrication. We may not be at all comfortable with Pai’s vision, or what it implies about our use of things made with HDPE. But millions of human beings, both throughout India and elsewhere around the world, live and work in garbage dumps, and this work recognizes their labor as an irreplaceable element of an extended circuit of digital production.

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince

3D printing, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, charter city, circular economy, clean water, colonial exploitation, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, global pandemic, Global Witness, green new deal, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, job automation, joint-stock company, Kim Stanley Robinson, labour mobility, load shedding, lockdown, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, megacity, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, old age dependency ratio, open borders, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, place-making, planetary scale, plyscraper, polynesian navigation, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The debate over granting approval triggered a political crisis in the world’s largest island, forcing a general election in 2021, with Greenland’s 56,000 citizens torn between protecting their fragile environment and developing their economy, which currently relies on fishing and grants from Copenhagen. On that occasion, the environment won. Resource scarcity will force a move towards a circular economy, in which every product’s end of life is considered at the design stage so materials can be easily reused and cycled continually with little waste. Effective low-energy plastic-recycling methods have been developed, that can turn any plastic back into oil, from which any plastic can be made.

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Kung peoples; lack of water resources; low levels of migration to; migration from as relatively low; poor infrastructure and city planning; population rise in; rainfall due to Indian irrigation; remittances from urban migrants; and restoring of planet’s habitability; Transaqua Project of water diversion; transatlantic slave trade; transport infrastructure in; urbanization in African Union agoraphobia AI and drone technology aid, development/foreign air-conditioning/cooling airships or blimps Alaska algae Aliens Act (UK, 1905) Alps, European Amazon region Americas Anatolia Anchorage, Alaska Anderson, Benedict animals/wildlife; global dispersal of; impact of fires on; impact of ice loss on see also livestock farming Antarctica; ice sheet Anthropocene era; four horsemen of Aravena, Alejandro Archaeology architecture/buildings: Aravena’s ‘partial houses’; energy-efficiency retrofits; floating infrastructure; heat- and light-responsive materials; low-carbon concrete; prefabricated and modular housing; in successful migrant cities; wooden skyscrapers; zero-carbon new-builds Arctic region; first ice-free summer expected; opening up of due to climate change Argentina Arrhenius, Svante Asia: cities vulnerable to climate change; drought-hit areas; extreme La Niña events; extreme precipitation in monsoon regions; Ganges and Indus river basins; and heat ‘survivability threshold’; huge populations of South Asia; lack of water resources; rivers fed by glaciers; small hydropower installations; urbanization Aswan High Dam asylum-seekers: Australia’s dismal record on; Britain’s proud history on; dominant hostile narratives about; drownings in English Channel; limbo situation due to delayed claim-processing; misinformation about see also refugees Athens Australia: Black Summer (2019–20); energy-supply economy; impact of climate emergency; indigenous inhabitants; low population density in; migration to; and mineral extraction in Greenland; renewable power in; treatment of asylum-seekers; White Australia Policy aviation Aztecs Babylon bacteria, in food production bamboo Bangkok Bangladesh; ‘Bangla’ communities in London; Burmese Rohingya refugees; impact of climate emergency; migration across Indian border; population density in; relocation strategies; training for rural migrants Bantu people Barber, Benjamin Barcelona Beckett, Samuel Belarus Belgium Bergamo, Italy Bhutan Bijlmermeer (outside Amsterdam) biodiversity loss/ecosystem collapse; coral reefs as probably doomed; crash in insect and bird populations; depletion of fish stocks; due to agriculture; due to farming; four horsemen of the Anthropocene; and human behaviour; Key Biodiversity Areas; links with climate change; and marine heatwaves; and overuse of fertilizers; restoring of; species extinction; and urban adaptation strategies see also environmental sustainability bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) biotech industry birds black soldier flies black-footed ferrets BoKlok (IKEA spinoff) Bolivia Borneo Bosch, Carl Boston, Massachusetts Boulder, Colorado Brazil Brexit Brin, Sergey British Columbia Brown, Pat bureaucracy Burke, Marshall Burma business/private sector Cairo California; forest fires in Cambodia Cameroon Canaan Canada; and charter cities model; Climate Migrants and Refugee Project; economic benefits from global heating; expansion of agriculture in; first carbon-neutral building in; forest fires in; indigenous populations; infrastructure built on permafrost; regional relocation schemes Capa, Robert, capitalism Caplan, Bryan Caprera (Italian warship) carbon capture/storage; BECCS; ‘biochar’ use in soil; carbon capture and storage (CCS); direct capture from the air; by forests; in grasslands; Key Biodiversity Areas; in oceans; by peatlands; by phytoplankton; vegetation as vital carbon pricing/taxing carbon/carbon dioxide: amount in atmosphere now; Arrhenius’ work on; and biomatter decay in soil, ‘carbon quantitative easing’; continued emitting of; decarbonizing measures; effect on crop growth; emissions cut by building from wood; emissions from farming; emissions from human energy systems; emissions from urban buildings; geoengineering to remove; during last ice age; Miocene Era levels; new materials made from; ocean release of; released by wildfires; tree-planting as offsetting method; in tropical rainforests Carcassonne, France Card, David Cardiff Castro, Fidel Çatalhöyük, ancient city of Central African Republic Central America Chad ‘char people’ charcoal (‘biochar’) Chicago children: childcare costs; deaths of while seeking safety; ‘invisible’/living on the margins; left behind by migrant parents; and move to cities; numbers at extreme risk; in refugee camps; and sense of ‘belonging’ Chile China: adaptation for heavy rainfall events; Belt and Road Initiative; cities vulnerable to climate change; demography; desertification of farmland in north; economic domination of far east; emigrants and knowledge-flow; emissions as still rising in; extreme La Niña events; ‘green wall’ tree-planting projects; and heat ‘survivability threshold’; Hong Kong–Shenzhen–Guangzhou mega-region; hukou system; integrated soil-system management; internal migration in; migrant workers in Russia’s east; and mineral extraction; net zero commitment; small hydropower installations; South-to-North Water Diversion Project; ‘special economic zones’; Uyghur Muslim communities in; and water scarcity; ‘zhuan‘ documents Chinatowns Churchill (town in Manitoba) Churchill, Winston cities: adapting to net-zero carbon economy; city state model; coastal cities; as concentrated nodes of connectivity; ‘consumption cities’ in Africa; control of migration by; deadly urban heat; demand for cooling; devolving power to communities; in eighteenth/nineteenth-century Europe; entrenched assets; and extreme flood risk; flood defences; as focal points for trade networks; food production in; genetic impacts of; in high altitude locations; large megacities; merging into mega-regions; as particularly vulnerable to climate change; phased abandonment of; population densities in; private gardens in; relocation of; relocation strategies within; sprawling shanty towns in; strategies against impact of heat; zero-carbon new-builds see also migrant cities; migration, urban citizenship; patriotism of welcomed migrants; ‘UN/international passport’ idea Clemens, Michael climate change, historic: Cretaceous–Palaeogene meteorite impact event; in late-bronze-age Near East; and migration; in Miocene Era; and transition to farming climate change/emergency; 3–5° C as most likely scenario; as affecting all of Earth; cities as particularly vulnerable to; destruction of dam infrastructure; enlisting of military/security institutions against; every tenth of a degree matters; extreme weather events; global climate niches moving north; global water cycle as speeding up; greenhouse gas emissions as still growing; impact of cities; impact on lives as usually gradual; inertia of the Earth’s climate system; lethality by 2100; links with biodiversity loss; near-universal acceptance of as human made; net zero pledges; Paris Agreement (2015); path to 3–4° C-hotter world; situation as not hopeless; slow global response to; as threat multiplier; warming as mostly absorbed by oceans see also biodiversity loss/ecosystem collapse; drought; fires; floods; heat climate models: future emissions scenarios; heating predictions; impact of 4° C-hotter world; IPCC ‘Representative Concentration Pathways’ (RCPs); optimum climate for human productivity; threshold for mass migrations coastal areas: coastal cities; migration from; retreating coastlines; seawater desalination plants cochineal scale insect Colombia colonialism, European Colorado Columbia Concretene construction industry copper coral reefs Cornwall Costa Rica cotton Covid-19 pandemic; cooperation during cross-laminated timber (CLT) Crusaders Cruz, Abel Cuba cultural institutions/practices: cultural losses over time; diversity as improving innovation; migration of; in well-planned migrant cities cyclones Cyprus Czech workers in Germany Dar es Salaam Death Valley Delhi Democratic Republic of Congo demographic changes/information: and decline of nationality viewed in racial terms; depopulation crisis; elderly populations in global north; GenZ; global climate niches moving north; global population patterns; global population rise; ‘household formation’; huge variation in global fertility rates; migrants as percentage of global population; population fall due to urban migration; population-peak projection; post-war baby boom; and transition to farming Denmark Denver, Colorado desert conditions Dhaka Dharavi (slum in Mumbai) diet and nutrition: edible seeds of sea grasses; genetically engineered microbes; global disparities in access to nutrition; and Haber–Bosch process; insects as source of protein and fats; loss of nutrition due to heat stress of crops; move to plant-based diet; vitamin D sources; zinc and protein deficiencies dinosaurs direct air capture (DAC) disease; waterborne Doha Domesday Book (1086) Driscolls (Californian berry grower) drone technology drought; as affecting the most people; in Amazon region; impact on farming; in late-bronze-age Near East; and rivers fed by glaciers; and sulphate cooling Dubai Duluth, Minnesota Dunbar, Robin economies; Chinese domination of far east; economic growth; forced move towards a circular economy; GDP per capita measure; Global Compact for Migration; global productivity losses due to heat; immigrant-founded companies; and influx of low-skilled migrant workers; migration as benefitting; mining opportunities exposed by ice retreat; and nation state model; need to open world’s borders; new mineral deposits in northern latitudes; northern nations benefitting from global heating; ‘special economic zone’ concept; taxing of robots see also employment/labour markets; green economy; political and socioeconomic systems; trade and commerce education: availability to migrants; as key to growth; and remittances from urban migrants; systems improved by migration Egypt; Ancient electricity: current clean generation as not sufficient; decarbonizing of production; electric vehicles; grid systems; hydroelectric plants; and net zero world; renewable production Elwartowski, Chad employment/labour markets: amnesties of ‘illegal’ migrants; and arguments against migration; and automation; controlled by city authorities; and global labour mobility; and the green economy; impact of heat on jobs; indentured positions; and influx of low-skilled migrant workers; jobs in growth industries; jobs restoring diversity; jobs that natives don’t want to do; mechanization/automation slowed down by migrant workers; migrants bring greater diversity to; need for Nansen-style scheme; occupational upgrading of locals due to immigration; refugees barred from working; role of business in migrant integration; rural workers moving to cities; skilled migrants; support/access for migrants; Trump’s work visa restrictions; ‘urban visas’ in USA; workforce shortages in global north energy systems: access to in global south; air-conditioning/cooling demand; and carbon capture; ‘closed-loop’ radiator construction; decarbonizing of; and economic growth; geothermal production; global energy use as increasing; new dam-construction boom in south; nuclear power; oceans as source; poor grid infrastructure in global south; power outages; power sharing as not equitable; reducing growth in demand; replacement of inefficient heating/cooling systems; transmission/transport see also electricity English Channel Environmental Protection Agency, US environmental sustainability: decarbonizing measures; decoupling of GDP from carbon emissions; and economic growth; heat- and light-responsive materials; low-energy plastic recycling methods; and migrant cities; need for open mind in planning for; phytoplankton as hugely important; replacement of inefficient heating/cooling systems; zero-carbon new-builds see also biodiversity loss/ecosystem collapse environmentalists; negative growth advocates; opponents of geoengineering equatorial belt Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Europe: 2003 heatwave; depopulation crisis; eighteenth/nineteenth-century shanty towns; impact of climate emergency; medieval barriers to movement; Mediterranean climate moving north; migrant indentured labour in; migration of women working in domestic service; small hydropower installations; three mass migrations in Stone and Bronze Ages European Union: free movement within; fund for aid to Africa; Green New Deal; no ‘asylum crisis’ within; nuclear power in; open-border policy for refugees from Ukraine; as popular migrant destination; seeks quota system for refugees; as successful example of regional union; war against migrants Fairbourne (Welsh village) farming: in abandoned areas in south; in Africa; ancient transition to; bad harvests as more frequent; barns/storehouses; benefits of warming in Nordic nations; biodiversity loss due to; cereal crops; closing the yield gap; early nineteenth century expansion of; ever-decreasing, sub-divided plots of land; expanded growing seasons; fertile land exposed by ice retreat; genetic research to produce new crops; genetically modified crop varieties; global disparities in food production; Green Revolution; greenhouse gas emissions from; in Greenland; Haber–Bosch process; heat-tolerant and drought-resistant crops; high-yielding wheat and rice variants; impact of climate emergency; indoor industrial systems; modern improvement in yields; nutrient and drip-irrigation systems; pre-twentieth-century methods; relying on new forms of; Russian dominance; salt-tolerant rice; smallholder; and solar geoengineering; solar-powered closed-cycle; urban vertical farms; use of silicates; and water scarcity; wildflower strips in fields see also livestock farming Fiji Fires fish populations: artisanal fishers; boost of in Arctic region; and decommissioned offshore oilrigs; fish farming; future pricing of fish products; as under huge pressure; insects as farmed-fish feed; land-based fish-farming Five Points slum, New York floods; flash floods; low-lying islands and atolls; sea walls/coastal defences; three main causes; in urban areas; water-management infrastructure Florida food: algal mats; carbon-pricing of meat; impact of soaring global prices; insect farming; kelp forest plantations; lab-grown meats; meat substitutes; for migrant city dwellers; move to plant-based diet; need for bigger sources of in global north; need to cut waste; photosynthesizing marine plants and algae; plant-based dairy products; reduced supplies due to temperature rises; refrigerated storage; replication of Maillard chemical reaction; sourced from the oceans see also diet and nutrition; farming; livestock farming food security Ford, Henry forests: advance north of in Nordic nations; deforestation; impact of climate emergency; ‘negative emissions activity’; replanting of; Siberian taiga forest fossil fuels; carbon capture and storage (CCS); as embedded in human systems France Fraser, Sean freedom of movement French Polynesia Friedman, Patri Gargano, Gabriele gas industry Gates, Bill gender: heat related inequalities; physical/sexual danger for female migrants; women in domestic service in Europe; women rejoining workforce genetic modification genetics, population Genghis Khan geoengineering; artificial sill proposals; cloud-brightening idea; as controversial/taboo; and ideal temperature question; possible unwanted effects; proposals for dealing with ice melt; to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide; solar radiation reduction tools; sulphate cooling concept; thin-film technology; tools to reflect the sun’s heat away from Earth geology GERD dam, Ethiopia Germany; Syrian refugee resettlement in Ghana Glasgow climate meeting (2021) Global Parliament of Mayors global south; benefit of solar cooling idea; capital costs of deploying new renewables; cutting of food waste in; future repopulation of abandoned regions; global income gap as rising; little suitable landmass for climate-driven migration; migration to higher elevations with water; need for improved infrastructure; need for sustainable economic growth; new dam-construction boom in; new domestic sources of energy; population rise in; remittances from urban migrants; resource extraction by rich countries; and vested interests in the rich world see also Africa; Asia; Latin America and entries for individual nations golf courses Gore, Al, An Inconvenient Truth (2006) Gothenburg Grand Inga hydroelectric dam project (Congo River) Granville, Earl grasslands Great Barrier Reef Great Lakes region, North America Greece; Ancient green economy; and building of fair societies; Green New Deals; migration as vital to; multiple benefits of see also environmental sustainability; renewable power production; restoring our planet’s habitability greenhouse gas emissions; charging land owners for; in cities; emitters trying to avoid/delay decarbonization; from farming; national emissions-reductions pledges; underreporting of; unfair global impact of see also carbon/carbon dioxide Greenland; ice sheet; potato farming in Gulf states Haber, Fritz Hangzhou Hawaii health: climate change as threat multiplier; dementia care; diseases of poor sanitation; healthcare in successful migrant cities; heat related inequalities; lethality of extreme heat; and life in cities; mental illness and migration; migration as benefitting social care systems; pathogens in frozen tundras; rural living as single largest killer today; and smoke pollution heat: 35°C wet bulb threshold crossed; climate model predictions; cloud and water vapour feedbacks; combined with humidity; and demand for cooling; extreme hotspots; global productivity/work hour losses; impact of 4° C-hotter world; impact on farming/food supplies; infrastructure problems due to; lethality by 2100; lethality of extreme temperatures; Paris pledge of below 2°C; solar radiation reduction tools; subtropical climate spreading into higher latitudes; temperatures above 50°C; threshold for mass migrations; ‘threshold of survivability’; urban adaptation strategies; urban heat island effect; ‘wet bulb’ temperature calculations Held, David Hernando, Antonia HIV Höfn, southeastern Iceland Holocene epoch Honduras Hong Kong horses, domestication of housing: Aravena’s ‘partial houses’; controlled by city authorities; equitable access to; floating infrastructure; in flood-affected areas; and heat related inequalities; and migrants; planning and zoning laws; policies to prevent segregation; prefabricated and modular; twentieth-century social programmes see also slum dwellers Hudson Bay Huguenot immigrants human rights, universal Hungary hunter-gatherers hurricanes hydrogen ice age, last ice loss; as accelerating at record rate; in Antarctica; in Arctic region; artificial reflective snow idea; artificial sill proposals; and flash floods; loss of glaciers; permafrost thaw; reflective fleece blankets idea; retreat of ice sheets; rising of land due to glaciers melting; tipping points for ice-free world Iceland ICON, construction company identity: accentuation of small differences; and ancient transition to farming; borders as ‘othering’ structures; language as tool of self-construction; mistrust of outsiders; pan-species; sense of ‘belonging’; social norms of ‘tribe’; social psychology; stories crafting group identity see also national identity immigration policies: bilateral or regional arrangements; deliberately prejudicial policy; development of since later nineteenth-century; and harnessing migrant potential; immigrant inclusion programmes; immigration lottery schemes; move needed from control to managing,; points-based entrance systems; poorly designed; quota systems; responses to terrorist incidents; restrictions as for people not stuff; restrictive border legislation; Spain’s successful policy Impossible Foods India; crop irrigation in; emigrants and knowledge-flow; emissions as still rising in; falling fertility rate in; Ganges Valley; and heat ‘survivability threshold’; impact of climate emergency; internal migration in; lime-washing of roofs in; Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA); National River Linking Project; population density in; young population in indigenous communities Indo-European language Indonesia industrial revolution inequality and poverty: and access to reliable energy; benefit of solar cooling to south; climate change as threat multiplier; climate migration and social justice; and demand for cooling; despair and anger of ‘left behind’ natives; and environmental destruction; and European colonialism; as failure of social/economic policy; and geoengineered cooling; global disparities in access to nutrition; and global food prices; global income gap as rising; heat related; and impact of flooding; increased by ancient transition to farming; as matter of geographical chance; migration as best route out of; and modern farming; and national pride; need for redistributive policies; the poor trapped in vulnerable cities; and post-war institutions; rural living as single largest killer today; slow global response to crisis of; superrich and private jets; tribalism as not inevitable; and vested interests in the rich world insects; collapsing populations; farming of; as human food source insulation insurance, availability of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) International Energy Agency (IEA) International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) International Labour Organization Iquique (Chile) Ireland iron, powdered Islam islands, small/low-lying Israel Italy Ithaca, city of (New York) Jakarta Japan Jobs, Steve Johnson, Boris Jordan kelp Kenya Khan, Sadiq Khoisan Bushmen Kimmel, Mara King, Sir David Kiribati knowledge and skills: better environment for in rich countries; ‘brain drain’ issue; channelled through migrant networks; diversity as improving innovation; global knowledge transfer; Global Skill Partnerships model; impact of European colonialism; migrants returning to origin countries; and Nansen-style schemes; need for rapid transference of; and points-based entrance systems Kodiak Island, Alaska krill Kuba Kingdom, West Africa !

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Kung peoples Kutupalong refugee camp, Bangladesh Kyrgyzstan Lagos Lake Chad Lammy, David land ownership language/linguistics; language classes for new arrivals; and nation state Laos Las Vegas Latin America: Amazon region; first nation states in; fragile social systems in; impact of climate emergency; mega-El Niño (1997–8); migrants in Parla, Spain; rivers fed by glaciers; rural to urban migration League of Nations Leipzig liberalism Libya Lima livestock farming: by drone; feeding of animals; impact of drought; inhumane treatment of animals; insects as feed; land and water used for; meat and dairy subsidies; need for huge reduction in Ljubljana, Slovenia locust plagues London Macau Maillard chemical reaction maize production, global Malacca Straits Malaysia Maldives Mali Manchester Mangroves Marijuana marine life: fish populations; impact of global warming; starved of oxygen by algae marshes Mayan civilization Mayors Migration Council McCarthy, Kate McCay, Adam McConnell, Ed Medellín, Colombia media, prejudice against migrants Mediterranean Mekong River Melbourne, Pixel Building Merkel, Angela Mesopotamia Met Office, UK, methane Mexico Mexico City Miami Micronesians Middle East migrant cities: the Arctic as new region for; charter cities option; and circulation of community resources; ‘climate haven’ cities; creation of entirely new cities; as cultural factories; environmental sustainability; evidence of decline of tribalism in; expanding existing cities; in the new north; planning future cities; repurposing/adaptation of; successful urban development/planning in; as synergistic; training for rural migrants; water-management infrastructure migrants/immigrants: arrival in family groups; ‘Bangla’ communities in London; contribution to global GDP; creation of active markets by; distinction between refugees and; dominant hostile narratives of in West; ‘economic migrant’ term; evidence of decline in hostility towards; harnessing potential of; immigrant inclusion programmes; as indentured labour; internal migration; Boris Johnson’s language on; language classes for; levels of patriotism of; living in slums/shanty towns; mentoring and support for; as percentage of global population; racist and prejudicial tropes about; returning to origin countries; seasonal; situations of appalling abuse/danger; state-sponsored support needed for migration: and advantageous genetic modifications; barriers to today; as benefitting everyone; controlled by city authorities; as deeply interwoven with cooperation; and diversified genes/culture; evidence of decline of anti-immigrant feeling; free movement ends in twentieth century; and historic climate change; historical; human displacement at record levels; inherited routes and channels; and mental illness; as not reduced by aid; reluctance to move; and skin colour; of stuff/resources; as survival strategy used widely in nature; as valid and essential part of human nature; world’s major cities created by migration, arguments against/fears around: fears around crime and violence; and jobs; long evolutionary roots to prejudice; in the media; populist politicians; pressure on inadequate host services; prospect of radical change; resting on true/pure national identity idea; security/terrorism issues; and welfare systems migration, climate-driven: Covid cooperation as hopeful example; due to flooding; and geopolitical mindset; global agreement on pathways needed; hypothetical scenarios/models enabling; as inevitable; Kiribati’s ‘migration with dignity’ programme; mass movement already under way; move to higher elevations; national and regional relocation schemes; need for strong nation-states; need to plan practically now; numbers affected today; predicted future numbers; and Refugee Convention (1951); risk of domination by wealthy elites; as solution not problem; speed of movement of climate niches; water issues to be main driver migration, urban; access to health and education; community sponsorship models; family retention of farmland; and intensive infrastructure development; as most effective route out of poverty; population fall due to; role of business in migrant integration; from rural areas; successful management of; as unplanned and iterative; in the West (1850–1910); and workforce shortages in global north Miller, David mineral supples/extraction mining industry Mongla (Bangladesh) Mongolian steppes Morocco Mumbai, mussels Myanmar Nairobi Nansen, Fridtjof nation state: Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’; claims that country is ‘too full’; first created by revolutionaries; and genetic variation; and geopolitical mindset; and language; leases/purchases of territory by; model as often failing; nationality as arbitrary line drawn on map; need for reinvention of; as norm after First World War; and system of borders; translocation of existing nation states National Health Service (UK) national identity: and anti-immigrant feeling; and bureaucracy; creation of first nation states; ethnic and cultural pluralism as the norm; evidence of decline of tribalism; feelings of loss of/decline; and ideology of nationalism; lack of political meaning before end of eighteenth century; nation state as norm after First World War; need to change immigration narrative; patriotism of welcomed migrants; predicated on mythology of homogeneity; and supranational identity; transition to pan-species identity Nauru Neanderthals negative emissions technologies Netherlands; Delta Programme; Energiesprong house insulation Neukölln (Berlin) New Orleans New Story (nonprofit) New York City; ‘Big U’ seawall project; NYCID programme New Zealand; Managed Retreat and Climate Adaptation Act Newtok, Alaska Nicaragua Niger, West Africa Nigeria nitrogen Noem, Kristi nomadic pastoralism Nordic nations Normans North Korea Northern Ireland Northwest Passage Norway Notre Dame, University of, Global Adaptation Initiative nuclear power; fusion reactor technology Nusantara (Borneo) Nuuk (Greenland) Obayashi (Japanese firm) oceans/seas: acidification; as energy source in north; and enhanced weathering techniques; global warming absorbed by; impact of 4° C-hotter world; impact of carbon emissions; jellyfish explosions; long-distance migratory voyages; marine heatwaves; and migratory raiders; Miocene Era sea levels; North Atlantic currents; Northwest Passage; nutrient and oxygen circulation; ocean fertilization; release of carbon dioxide; rise in sea levels; sea grasses; sourcing food from; toxic algae blooms oil industry OmniTrax (US freight company) Ottoman Turks Overjeria, Bolivian village Paine, Thomas Pakistan Palaeo-Eskimos, Canadian palaeontology Palestine Panama Papua New Guinea Paris climate meeting (2015) Parla (near Madrid) passports Patagonia Patel, Priti patriotism Pearl River Delta Peatlands people-traffickers Peri, Giovanni permafrost, infrastructure built on Persian Gulf Peru Pfizer vaccine Philippines; nurses from Philistines Photios of Constantinople Phuket, Thailand Phytoplankton plains/steppes plants/vegetation: destruction of by wildfires; genetic tools to help adaptation; grass verge areas; heat damage to crops; during last ice age; move to plant-based diet; planted to increase crop yields; replanting of; rooftop vegetation/gardens plastic waste Pleistocene epoch Poland political and socioeconomic systems: in Africa; benefits to democracy of migration; cooperation during Covid upheaval; corporate food system; democracy based on inclusiveness; development of governance systems; end of multinational empires; erosion in the powers of global bodies; failure over decarbonization; far-right political parties/groups; fossil fuels as embedded in; geopolitical constraints; geopolitical implications of farming’s shift north; global institutions with enforceable powers needed; and ideal temperature question; inequality as failure of policy; institutional bias over skin-colour; institutional trust levels; international diplomacy; move from feudalism to centralized monarchy; nation-state model spreads; need for global planning over migration; need for redistributive policies; need for strong nation-states; new regional unions option; pledge of ‘strong borders’ as vote-winner; possible new political institutions/structures; post-war institutions and inequality; strong/stable institutions in north; translocation of existing nation states; and transnational rivers/’water towers’; vested interests in the rich world; Westphalian state system pollinators pollution Polynesians populist politicians Portugal postcolonial diaspora poverty see inequality and poverty Próspera ZEDE (embryonic charter city) Prussia Puerto Rico Putin, Vladimir Pygmies Qatar race and ethnicity: and anti-immigrant feeling; deliberately prejudicial policies; and demographic change; European colonialism; fallacy of biological ‘race’; heat related inequalities; unconscious bias in society; white supremacists rain gardens rainfall: altering patterns of; captured by roof gardens/storage; seeding of clouds rare earth metals Raworth, Kate, Doughnut Economics, recycling Refugee Convention (1951) refugees: from Afghanistan; barred from working; Burmese Rohingya in Bangladesh; climate change not in legal definition of; distinction between migrants and; EU seeks quota system for; hostile rhetoric towards; judgemental terms used about; and Nansen passports; privately sponsored; from Syrian crisis (2015–16) see also asylum-seekers renewable power production: as adding to, not replacing, fossil fuels; artificial light delivered by LEDs; hybrid hydro-solar power concept; hydroelectric plants; as leading job creator; and net zero targets; phenomenal rise in; refrigerant units in global south; solar-powered closed-cycle farming; storage technology; zero-carbon new-builds Republic of the Congo restoring our planet’s habitability; biodiversity loss; ‘blue carbon’; climate change-biodiversity loss as linked; cooling of global temperatures; decarbonizing measures; enhanced weathering techniques; future repopulation of abandoned regions; genetic tools to help species adapt; as global, labour-intensive task; natural restoration after human abandonment; nature guardianship in tropical regions; need for speed; negative emissions technologies; ocean fertilization; paying communities to protect ecosystems; regenerative agriculture; replanting of vegetation; solar radiation reduction tools, see also geoengineering retail services rice; SRI cultivation process rivers: drying out of; fed by glaciers; heavier rainfall as increasing flows; lack of in Gulf region; pollution discharged into; transnational Roatan, Caribbean island of Rocky Mountains Rome, ancient Romer, Paul Rotterdam rural living: and depopulation crisis; flight from drought/heat hit areas; impact of flooding; massive abandonment of in coming decades; migration to urban areas; and population expansion in Africa; remittances from urban migrants; as single largest killer today; and water scarcity Russell, Bertrand Russia: and charter cities model; depopulation crisis; economic benefits from global heating; economic sanctions on; expansion of agriculture in; infrastructure built on permafrost; invasion of Ukraine (2022); mega-heatwave (2010); migrant workforce in east; as potential area for charter cities; small-scale modular nuclear reactors in; water resources in Rwanda: Hutus and Tutsis in; special protective zones in; and UK asylum-seeker plan Salla, Finnish town of sanitation Saudi Arabia Saunders, Doug Sawiris, Naguib Scandinavia scientific discovery Scotland sea grasses Seasteading movement Seven Dials, London sex industry Shanghai sharing/circular economy Shenzhen Shyaam a-Mbul Siberia silicates Silicon Valley Silk Road Singapore sinkholes Skellefteå, Sweden slavery Slovenia slum dwellers; conditions at Kutupalong refugee camp; in Lagos; in Lima; and urban heat island effect; vulnerability to flooding social class/hierarchies: and anti-migrant attitudes; barriers erected against migration of the poorest; despair and anger of ‘left behind’ natives; development of; and gentrification; middle class migrants; myth of meritocracy; prejudice as often defensive fear-based reaction social networks; benefits of trade; cities as focal points for trade; Dunbar number; entangled ancestries/identities; forged by migrants; and knowledge flow; loss due to gentrification; migrants in family groups; and mistrust of outsiders; need for inclusive governance; and reluctance to migrate; in slum areas; social clustering of migrants; synergy created by; and unjust hierarchies; welcoming of strangers to social services see welfare systems and social services socioeconomic system see political and socioeconomic systems soil: ‘biochar’ use in; biomatter decay in; as carbon store; impact of heat on; impact of wildfires on; integrated soil-system management in China; and overuse of fertilizers; and perennial cereals; use of silicates in solar power Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative South Dakota South Korea Southern Ocean Soviet Union soya production Spain Spitalfields, London stateless persons Sudan sulphate cooling concept Sumerian civilization Sunak, Rishi Sweden Switzerland Syrian crisis (2015–16) Tabasco, Mexican state of Tabassum, Marina Tahiti Tajikistan Tanzania Tasmania textiles industry Thailand Thepdet, Supranee thermal wallpaper Thiel, Peter Thirty Years War Thwaites Glacier Tokyo Toltecs Tong, Anote Tourism trade and commerce; cities as focal points for networks; free movement of goods; free trade; global trade deals; origins and development of transport infrastructure: aviation; decarbonizing of; electric-powered vehicles; equitable access to; in global south; and limitations of battery weight; problems due to extreme heat; sail power as due a revival; in successful migrant cities; use of foot or pedal trees: American chestnut trees; cycles of burn and recovery; as ‘emissions offset’; giant sequoias; ‘green wall’ tree-planting projects; vine-like lianas Trestor, Anne Marie tropical regions: benefit of solar cooling idea; impact of climate emergency; nature guardianship in; population rise in Trump, Donald Tsipras, Alexis tundra Turkey Turkmenistan Tuvalu UAE Uganda Ukraine: maize exports; Russian invasion of (2022) United Kingdom: ageing population in; anti-immigrant feeling in; Brexit; Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962); and Covid pandemic; destruction of peatlands in; flood defences in London; historical migration to; history of granting asylum; ‘hostile environment’ policy; impact of climate emergency; and inevitability of change; low statutory sick pay level; migratory shift to southeast; planned fusion reactors; planning laws; renewable power production; Rwanda proposal for asylum-seekers; slow processing of asylum claims; small boats in English channel; wet-farming in United Nations: Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (2018); HCR; Human Rights Council; International Labour Organization; International Organization for Migration; and Nansen Passport concept; suggested new global migration body United States: Chinese Exclusion Act (1882); ‘climate-proof’ cities in; as created from global migrants; dam removal in; demographic change in; and depopulation crisis; and extreme La Niña events; and future climate problems; Green New Deal; heat related inequalities; Homestead Act; immigrant-founded companies; impact of climate emergency; indigenous communities; and inevitability of change; lack of universal healthcare in; leases/purchases of territory by; low spending on social services; mass incarceration of Mexicans in; meat industry in; migration to since 1980s; and mineral extraction; municipal codes; net zero commitment; nineteenth century migration to; patriotism of migrants; refugee children in detention camps; resettlement project in Louisiana; rural to urban migration; seeding of clouds in; Trump’s work visa restrictions; ‘urban visas’ in; yield gap in university towns urban development/planning: Bijlmermeer (outside Amsterdam); and elderly populations; and inclusive government policies; machizukuri process in Tokyo; need for integrated high-rise/low-rise; new canals/water features to combat heat; parks/squares/public spaces; planning and zoning laws; slum clearance programmes; social capital investment in cities USAID Uttarakhand, Indian state Uzbekistan Venezuela Venice Vermont Vietnam Vikings war/violent conflict: over water scarcity; triggered by climate upheaval water, fresh: circulated, cleaned, stored and reused; closed-circuit water recycling; conflict triggered by scarcity; crop irrigation; desalination techniques; drip-irrigation systems; evaporative losses; geopolitics of water control; held in glaciers; impact of heat on supplies; importance of new water policies; inland lake systems; need for urban underground reservoirs; new waterways and river diversions; pumping of groundwater; purified sewage recycled; as resource anxiety of this century; running dry of aquifers; salination of groundwater; used for livestock; water pricing/tax policies Waterloo, Ontario weather systems: cyclonic storms in Bay of Bengal; El Niño events; extreme La Niña events; extreme weather events; Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ); monsoon regions; trade winds welfare systems and social services: access to in migrant cities; and arguments against migration; and bureaucracy; despair and anger of ‘left behind’ natives; intensive infrastructure development needed; low spending on in USA; migrant access to; migration as benefitting social care systems; punitive restrictions on new migrants Westphalia, Peace of (1648) Whales wheat production, global Wilson, E.

Sustainable Minimalism: Embrace Zero Waste, Build Sustainability Habits That Last, and Become a Minimalist Without Sacrificing the Planet (Green Housecleaning, Zero Waste Living) by Stephanie Marie Seferian

8-hour work day, Airbnb, big-box store, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate anxiety, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, do what you love, emotional labour, food desert, imposter syndrome, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lifestyle creep, Mason jar, mass immigration, microplastics / micro fibres, ride hailing / ride sharing

Waste is trash in oceans and garbage in landfills, yes, but waste is also uneaten food, lost manufacturing byproducts, and even pollution. Almost all environmental problems result from waste. And while the idea of a circle economy is gaining international traction as a means of wasting nothing on an international scale, I believe each of us can adopt the tenets of a circular economy within our own homes by making conscious choices aimed at reducing all forms of waste. The Three-Bin System for Waste Collection Reduce food waste and send as little to the landfill each week by utilizing three distinct bins to separate waste. Your three bins will include a recycling bin, a small compost transport container, and a bin for trash that cannot otherwise be recycled or composted. 1.

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., Plastic & Climate: The Hidden Costs of a Plastic Planet, (Washington, DC: The Center of International Environmental Law, 2019), 8, https://www.ciel.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Plastic-and-Climate-FINAL-2019.pdf. 60 Hamilton et al., Plastic & Climate, 4. 61 Robert Kunzig, “Is a World without Trash Possible?” National Geographic,February 18, 2020, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2020/03/how-a-circular-economy-could-save-the-world-feature/. 62 Serm Murmson, “Plastic Recycling Symbols and Meanings in the USA,”Sciencing, April 25, 2017, https://sciencing.com/plastic-recycling-symbols-meanings-usa-5977.html. 63 Melissa Pflugh Prescott et al., “Child Assessments of Vegetable Preferencesand Cooking Self-Efficacy Show Predictive Validity with Targeted Diet Quality Measures,” BMC Nutrition 5, no. 21 (March 2019). 64 Trevor Nace, “We’re Now at a Million Plastic Bottles Per Minute—91% of WhichAre Not Recycled,” Forbes, July 26, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2017/07/26/million-plastic-bottles-minute-91-not-recycled/. 65 Laura Parker, “How the Plastic Bottle Went from Miracle Container to Hated Garbage,” National Geographic, August 23, 2019, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/plastic-bottles/. 66 Sergio Peçanha, “Congrats!

Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI by Paul R. Daugherty, H. James Wilson

3D printing, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital twin, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, friendly AI, fulfillment center, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Benioff, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, personalized medicine, precision agriculture, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, software as a service, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telepresence robot, text mining, the scientific method, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Chapter 4 1.Phil Wainewright, “Salesforce Captures the Limits of AI in a Coca-Cola Cooler,” Diginomica, March 7, 2017, http://diginomica.com/2017/03/07/salesforce-captures-the-limits-of-ai-in-a-coca-cola-cooler/. 2.“Transitioning to a Circular Economy,” Philips, https://www.usa.philips.com/c-dam/corporate/about-philips-n/sustainability/sustainabilitypdf/philips-circular-economy.pdf. 3.Jordan Crook, “Oak Labs, with $41M in Seed, Launches a Smart Fitting Room Mirror,” TechCrunch, November 18, 2015, https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/18/oak-labs-with-4-1m-in-seed-launches-a-smart-fitting-room-mirror/. 4.“The Race for Relevance, Total Retail 2016: United States,” PwC, February 2016, http://www.pwc.com/us/en/retail-consumer/publications/assets/total-retail-us-report.pdf. 5.

Demystifying Smart Cities by Anders Lisdorf

3D printing, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bike sharing, bitcoin, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion pricing, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Google Glasses, hydroponic farming, income inequality, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, Masdar, microservices, Minecraft, OSI model, platform as a service, pneumatic tube, ransomware, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, smart cities, smart meter, software as a service, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

There should be one big mobility platform where all mobility could be handled, where autonomous busses, ride hailing and taxis, scooters, busses and metros are all connected and interfaced and purchased through the same interface to provide the consumer with a coherent mobility layer where new solutions and offerings can plug in seamlessly regardless of vendor; a planetary mobility fabric that optimizes on the supply and demand sides continuously to get human kind from point A to point B in the smartest possible way. Recycling – Since many resources that the city needs are if not scarce then finite, a gradual move toward recycling and the circular economy has to be made. The first step is to look at waste as a resource. Collecting waste could be done by autonomous trash robots and trucks that are electric and therefore silent. They can move around in the night, with smaller ones collecting garbage in parks and on streets emptying trash cans when they signal they are full.

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As for mobility, we will be back to a situation where everything is close; there are no ride hailing services in space, so our cities have to locate everything close by and have the potential to build a coherent transportation solution from the start. We will end up with an interplanetary transportation fabric. Recycling will similarly not be a choice but a necessity. Every chip, circuit, poop, and boot will have to enter the circular economy and be reprocessed. Waste is not an option in space. Building smarter cities makes sense now and is good for the environment, economies, and lives of their residents today, but we might also use it as a stepping stone to prepare for the next frontier of civilization: the solar system and beyond.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

ReGen Villages, for example, is the brainchild of former game designer James Ehrlich, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Stanford and a teacher of “disaster resilience” for Singularity University. ReGen is a total solution for the creation of regenerative and resilient communities that are capable of producing their own organic food, sourcing clean water, and educating their young, all with renewable energy and in a circular economy. Ehrlich is getting some traction—at least, with fellow Singularitarians and some of the press—with his compelling renderings of people living in high-tech harmony with nature. They grow food in domes, live in solar-powered cottages nestled into the earth, eat fresh fruit in open community courtyards, and are surrounded by woods and animals.

…

Instead of telling them about my PhD or tenured professorship in digital economics, I simply glanced at the backdrop behind me on the stage and answered, “Blue.” I may have been unnecessarily snide, but I’ve become frustrated by this reception. So has anyone espousing basic economic sense to those so steeped in The Mindset that they’ve lost the ability to think outside its unidirectional logic. The principles for building a more circular economy that isn’t dependent on growth are straightforward. Keep resources and revenue recirculating through the community, and accessible to the working class. Leverage the power of mutual aid to lift up one member of the community at a time, each according to their need. Maintain independence from big employers and disinterested investors by owning businesses cooperatively with other workers.

A Life Less Throwaway: The Lost Art of Buying for Life by Tara Button

behavioural economics, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, Downton Abbey, Fairphone, gamification, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, Internet of things, Kickstarter, life extension, lock screen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, meta-analysis, period drama, planned obsolescence, Rana Plaza, retail therapy, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, thinkpad

Lighting LED lighting is naturally longer-lasting, but the number of hours on the box is often misleading. The main cause of bulb failure is a build-up of heat, and only a few manufacturers have actively tried to solve this. The Blume bulb is designed to last a lifetime and is upgradable and recyclable, making it the first truly circular economy lightbulb. The choices for lighting fixtures are endless and lifetime warranties abound in this section, as do upcycled, antique and recycled options. There is very little wear and tear on light fixtures, so try to get them second hand and save yourself a fortune. If you’re buying new, make sure that any metal is rustproof and the whole thing is cleanable once plugged in.

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This will go to one of three places: either it will be spent on services and experiences, such as going out for dinner more regularly and enjoying hobbies, or it will be invested in companies so that they can grow and prosper, or it will be saved. More money saved means that there will more money for banks to invest in infrastructure, sustainable power and solutions to the problems we face. The brightest companies will move towards what is known as a ‘circular economy model’, where products are made using sustainable and recycled and recyclable materials, and are designed to last as long as they can and be useful to as many people as possible. Many companies may move to the rental model, as in the ‘car club’ scene and ‘Rent the Runway’ dresses. If we start now, our economy can naturally and gradually evolve, allowing industries, companies and their associated jobs to adapt over time.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

What makes the IoT a disruptive technology in the way we organize economic life is that it helps humanity reintegrate itself into the complex choreography of the biosphere, and by doing so, dramatically increases productivity without compromising the ecological relationships that govern the planet. Using less of the Earth’s resources more efficiently and productively in a circular economy and making the transition from carbon-based fuels to renewable energies are defining features of the emerging economic paradigm. In the new era, we each become a node in the nervous system of the biosphere. While the IoT offers the prospect of a sweeping transformation in the way humanity lives on earth, putting us on a course toward a more sustainable and abundant future, it also raises disturbing issues regarding data security and personal privacy, which will be addressed at length in chapter 5 and in other chapters throughout the book.

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In addition, sanctions and punishments for violating the norms and protocols are built into the governing codes, making the Commons a self-managing economic enterprise. The Commons has proven to be a relatively successful governing model in subsistence-based agricultural communities where production and consumption are primarily for use rather than exchange. They are the early archetypes of today’s circular economy. The success of the Commons is all the more impressive given the political circumstances that gave rise to them. For the most part, commons management emerged in feudal societies where powerful overlords pauperized local populations and forced them to pay tribute by either working the manorial fields or handing over part of their production in the form of a tax.

…

Yerdle doesn’t charge for each sharing transaction, but friends usually have to cover the shipping expenses. As Yerdle grows, it will allow its local networks to expand geographically, so items can be sold to strangers as well as to friends. Yerdle plans on taking a small transaction fee to cover its operational costs. The Yerdle plan, like so many others, helps advance the idea of a circular economy in which everything is recycled and reused and nothing is sent to the landfill before its time. The sustainable business logic makes perfect sense, but gets muddled when the founders try to make the case for the retailer’s buy-in. Werbach says that “if you can borrow that chain saw from the person next door, the retailer’s job is to help you with what you’re trying to do, not just sell you another chain saw.”45 Maybe . . . but likely?

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

Even the greatest post-WWII economic downturn turned out to be just a brief dip as the first two decades of the 21st century saw substantial growth of the global economic product (70% increase in constant monies), massive gains in energy supply (primary energy consumption up by about 48%; electricity generation up by 74%); and enormous increases in the use of materials (cement and aluminum output rising 2.6-fold and steel output more than doubling). Sustainable growth and circular economy are fashionable phrases but the first notion has only tenuous links to reality of the early 21st century, and the second one is a biophysical impossibility. Any truly sustainable economy would have to run solely on renewable energies and have no material leakages. But modern economies rely on massive linear flows of energy and materials and waste large shares of mobilized resources.

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And as already noted, global losses of applied fertilizer nitrogen (due to the combination of erosion, leaching, volatilization, and denitrification) average more than 50% of the nutrient’s initial inputs. Given the extent of our wasteful uses, a constant quest for more efficient economic activities (be it in terms of energy, mass, or residual output) must be encouraged but any claims that we could create a truly circular economy are delusionary. A high degree of global economic integration is yet another, now deeply embedded, economic reality that works against reducing energy and material inputs. Affordable intercontinental shipping (the result of inexpensive fuel, efficient engines, and massively sized vessels) reduced, even eliminated, distance as a limiting factor.

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., 255–56 cellulosic ethanol, 276 cement, 189, 247, 248f Census Bureau (US), on manufacturing sector, 177–78 centralized animal-feeding operations (CAFOs), 82–83 CH4 (methane), 112–13, 206, 240 Chad children, desired number of, 32 electrification, 139 future of food security in, 270 charcoal making, 116f Chateaubriand, François-Auguste-René, vicomte de, 7–8 cheese, lactose intolerance and, 94–95 chickens, 84, 86 children child labor, 125 infant and childhood mortality, 7–8, 15, 42, 252 nutrition and, 101–2 as old-age security, 41 China as ammonia producer, 252 consumerism, 252 generational transitions, 5–7 Han dynasty, 245 Heilbroner on, 252 inequalities, 23–24, 254–55 premodern, 2–3 summary of changes in, 260 China, agricultural and dietary transitions dietary nutrients, 98 dietary oil supply, 96–97 dietary transition, 93 famines, 100 feed crops, 83–84 fertilizer use, 290–91 food expenditures per capita, 102 food sufficiency, 246 fruit supply, 97 future food requirements and food supply, 269 leaf area gains in, 293–94 meat consumption, 92 mechanized field farming, transition to, 127 milk supply, 95 polyethylene contamination, 111 soil contamination, 110 sugar consumption, 96 China, economic transitions economic growth and development, 17, 45–46, 162–65, 163f, 166 economic inequality, 185–86 economic transition, 154 employment, 153, 171, 179 GDP growth, 161, 248–49, 294 growth rates, 159–60 household debt, 192 industrialization of, 179 manufacturing, 177, 180 material flows, 189 modernization trajectory, 160–61 premodern, lack of economic growth, 155 savings rates, 192 service sector employment, 181, 184 tourism, 196–97 traditional farming, 167 China, energy transitions air conditioners, 142–44 blast furnaces, 119–20 car electrification, 276 coal output and use, 117, 121 compound feeds, use of, 83 electrification, 139, 144–45 energy consumption, 273, 285–86 energy intensity, 150 energy sources, 117–18 material consumption, rise in, 286 motorization of, 124–25 steam-to-diesel locomotives transition, 124 wood-to-coal transition, 118 China, environmental transitions acid deposition, 229 anthropogenic land-use changes, 219–20 carbon dioxide production, 240 city growth, 210–11 croplands, 214, 216–17 deforestation and reforestation, 207, 213 forests, carbon sequestration by, 213–14 impervious surfaces, 210 large dams, 227 multicropping, 215 nitrogen efficiency, 234 ocean dead zones, impact on, 234 phosphate production, 235 plastics, pollution from, 232 soil acidification, 233 wastewater treatment, 230 wilderness area, 221 China, population transitions children, desired number of, 32 demographic burden, 56 demographic transitions, speed of, 36 fertility rates, 33, 36, 38, 40, 43 household registration system, 61–62 intranational migrations, 58–59 old-age dependency ratios, future possibilities of, 264–65 one-child policy, 36, 42, 45 per capita urban water use, 68 population aging, 264–65 population decline, 269 total dependency ratio, 45 urbanization, 61 Chittenden, Russell Henry, 97–98 Chorley, G. P. H., 157 CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center), 81 circular economy, impossibility of, 284–85 cities. See also urbanization energy needs, 275 environmental improvements to, 66 large cities, eastward shift in, 62 megacities, 8–9, 46, 64, 66–69, 209–10 urban inequalities, 66 civilizational diseases, 107–9 Civil War, impact on industrial expansion, 174 Clark, Colin, 170 Clarke, Arthur C., 250 Clean Air Act (1954, England), 228–29 climate change, 13–14, 239–43 clothes washers, 142 CO2.

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

We shouldn’t be surprised that the interests that pushed climate denialism for many years are now pushing the idea that there’s nothing we can do. That’s how powerful incumbents always react to the prospect of change. Second, I am sure it can be done. We have the technology and the resources to fix the problems we face. Humans are infinitely resourceful. If we decide to rebuild our institutions, build a completely circular economy, and halt the damage we are causing to the natural world, we can. In the course of World War II, the Russians moved their entire economy more than a thousand miles to the east—in less than a year. A hundred years ago, the idea that women or people with black or brown skin were just as valuable as white men would have seemed absurd.

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The waste industry in Norway reduces Norwegian CO2 by 7 percent, which I thought was baffling. Was that possible? We at NG collect 25 percent of all Norwegian waste and we bring 85 percent back to the industry in the form of raw materials and waste to energy. Which I thought was… incredible… I realized that our industry holds the key to achieving the circular economy—solving two global issues at the same time: the rapidly increasing global waste problem and the squeeze on the future supply of natural resources due to the projected increase in middle-class consumers around the world. Erik was acting as interim CEO for NG and interviewing candidates for the permanent position when he made the decision to apply for the job himself.

Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs by Juli Berwald

23andMe, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Floyd, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, microbiome, mouse model, ocean acidification, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Skype, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, TED Talk, the scientific method, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

Cozumel Coral Reef Restoration Program, https://www.ccrrp.org/. Jamaica’s Seascape Caribbean, https://www.seascapecarib.com/. Fragments of Hope, Belize, http://fragmentsofhope.org/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT pillars of marine stewardship: “Moving towards a Circular Economy,” Wave of Change, 2021, https://waveofchange.com/action-line/circular-economy/. “Promoting Responsible Seafood,” Wave of Change, 2021, https://waveofchange.com/action-line/responsible-seafood/. “Improving Coastal Health,” Wave of Change, 2021, https://waveofchange.com/action-line/coastal-health/. DeMarco Williams, “What Makes Iberostar’s Sustainability Charge So Special,” Forbes, October 29, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestravelguide/2018/10/29/what-makes-iberostars-sustainability-charge-so-special/#352ceb08baa2.

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

While many wrongs were enacted against black people under President Roosevelt’s New Deal, nevertheless his administration played a critical role in preventing the slide into fascism that so blighted continental Europe at that time. Of course, while there will be similarities, there will also be different, and bigger, challenges. This time, we must use every fiscal and regulatory mechanism we have to encourage and support the shift to the so-called ‘circular economy’. That means cuts in consumption, more recycling and drastic improvements to resource-use efficiency – especially of our leaky, Victorian housing stock. We must also abandon the fetish of ‘growth’ – a fetish first devised by neoliberal economists at the OECD and the Financial Times in the 1960s.

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac

3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gail Bradbrook, General Motors Futurama, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mustafa Suleyman, Nelson Mandela, new economy, ocean acidification, plant based meat, post-truth, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, the scientific method, trade route, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

But the fact is, nothing is permanent; everything is always changing, no matter how much we insist on standing still, hanging on to fleeting moments. And making desired change always demands going in an intentional direction. Our new intentional direction must move us beyond defeatism to optimism, beyond extraction toward regeneration, beyond linear toward circular economies, beyond individual benefit toward the common good, beyond short-term thinking toward long-term thinking and acting. By cultivating the three mindsets, we give clearer, stronger direction to our lives and to our world, setting the necessary foundation for us to collectively co-create the world we want.

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

During the Renaissance, the primacy of the city-state of people was surrendered to the politically determined nation-state, an invented concept. The transition from cities to nations transformed people from members of a community to citizens of a state. Localities were disempowered—along with their currencies and circular economies—as resources and attention were directed upward, first to monarchs and then to corporations. Our local peer-to-peer interactions, solidarity, and collective concerns were replaced by a large-scale, abstracted democratic process that couldn’t help but become more like the expression of brand affinities than of human needs.

Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change by Ronald Cohen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, benefit corporation, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, diversification, driverless car, Elon Musk, family office, financial independence, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, minimum viable product, moral hazard, performance metric, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, zero-sum game

amt=9690000&comp=weight&unit=tns&searchTerm= 9690000+tons 110 https://news.globallandscapesforum.org/32098/ikea-assembles-plan-to-reduce-emissions-in-the-atmosphere-by-2030/ 111 Ibid. 112 https://www.ft.com/content/da461f24-261c-11e9-8ce6-5db4543da632 113 Ibid. 114 https://www.ft.com/content/da461f24-261c-11e9-8ce6-5db4543da632 115 Ibid. 116 https://www.dwell.com/article/ikea-gunrid-air-purifying-curtains-81cf8714 117 https://www.ikea.com/ms/en_AU/this-is-ikea/people-and-planet/sustainable-life-at-home/index.html 118 http://highlights.ikea.com/2017/circular-economy/index.html 119 https://www.fastcompany.com/90236539/ikea-is-quickly-shifting-to-a-zero-emissions-delivery-fleet 120 https://www.consciouscapitalism.org/heroes/b-lab-founders 121 http://b-analytics.net/content/company-ratings 122 George Serafeim, DG Park, David Freiberg, T. Robert Zochowski “Corporate Environmental Impact: Measurement, Data and Insights” Harvard Business School Working Paper, Forthcoming March 2020.

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

In contrast, open design communities, such as these of the Wikispeed car, the Wikihouse, and the RepRap 3D printer, do not have the same incentives, so the practice of planned obsolescence is alien to them. Fifth, and relatedly, open cooperatives reduce waste. The lack of transparency and penchant for antagonism among closed enterprises means they will have a hard time creating a circular economy—one in which the output of one production process is used as an input for another. But open cooperatives can create ecosystems of collaboration through open supply chains. These chains can enhance the transparency of the production processes and enable participants to adapt their behavior based on the knowledge available in the network.

The Ages of Globalization by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, circular economy, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Commentariolus, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, European colonialism, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, out of africa, packet switching, Pax Mongolica, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rewilding, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

With nearly 8 billion people on the planet, and with population projected to rise to around 9.7 billion by 2050, and the massive environmental dangers ahead—climate change, loss of biodiversity, mega-pollution—we have not yet shown that we can sustain the progress to date. To do so will require not only stabilizing the global population but also ending the massive environmental harms we are now causing. We must still make the transitions to renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, and a circular economy that safely recycles its wastes. Until those transitions are accomplished, Malthus’s specter will continue to loom large. The Gradual Transformation to Urban Life Across the ages of globalization, we have seen not only an increase in scale—of the human population, of economic production, and of politics—but also a decisive shift from rural to urban life.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Lo, Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). Reframing the economy: For a fascinating reframing of economics through the lens of Claude Shannon’s information theory, see: George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How It Is Revolutionizing our World (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2013). The idea of a “circular economy” is another example, viewing products in terms of a life cycle. On being open-minded and curious: A good resource is David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (New York: Riverhead, 2019). On Rousseau’s social contract: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans.

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

Jules concluded, “I know we are capturing some pretty massive mainstream sentiments around empowerment, making, entrepreneurship, and a forceful rejection of the same-old-ways big businesses have operated.” The Grommet is still probably too consumption-oriented for my taste. It hasn’t embraced the circular economy; most of the stuff purchased will still find its way into landfills eventually and not be used up. But The Grommet does embody the values that I think we need to embrace and which the Peers Inc model excels at: giving consumers a much better understanding of the supply chain, giving them more visibility into the products they are buying, letting them make purchases based more on values they care about and less on marketing shortcuts and retail distribution chains that are making the decisions for them.

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato

Apple II, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, circular economy, clean tech, computer age, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demand response, deskilling, dual-use technology, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, green transition, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, information retrieval, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, linear model of innovation, natural language processing, new economy, offshore financial centre, Philip Mirowski, popular electronics, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

‘Business Growth and Innovation: The Wider Impact of Rapidly-Growing Firms in UK City-Regions’. NESTA research report, October. Massey, D., P. Quintas and D. Wield. 1992. High-Tech Fantasies: Science Parks in Society, Science and Space. London: Routledge. Mathews, J. et al. 2011. ‘China’s Move to a Circular Economy as a Development Strategy’. Asian Business and Management 10, no. 4: 463–84. Mazzoleni, R. and R. R. Nelson. 1998. ‘The Benefit and Costs of Strong Patent Protection: A Contribution to the Current Debate’. Research Policy 27, no. 3: 273–84. Mazzucato, M. 2000. Firm Size, Innovation and Market Structure: The Evolution of Market Concentration and Instability.

The Wood Age: How One Material Shaped the Whole of Human History by Roland Ennos

British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, Easter island, experimental subject, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, place-making, rewilding, three-masted sailing ship, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

There is a rapid expansion of green woodworking, carpentry, and wood turning that is producing furniture, oak buildings, and all manner of the useful tools and items that would have been familiar to our ancestors. The woodlands are starting to act once again as the foundations of a small-scale circular economy. Meanwhile, the rewilding movement is starting to reclaim large areas of marginal farmland for natural forests and scrub. Trials are showing that this can have huge benefits even in the heavily modified countryside of Britain. On a relatively small scale, discontinuing plowing of heavy clay soils in lowland areas, as at the Knepp Estate in Sussex, England, has allowed the regrowth of scrub and deciduous woodland, while stocking the land with low densities of cattle and pigs is re-creating the wood pasture of medieval times.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

It’s similar to the principle, explored above, of using price signals to optimize a solar microgrid. If tokens allow us to set prices for goods and services for which there was previously no alternative source of demand, producers might be able to make much better resource decisions. This is why many people believe that the concept of a “circular economy”—where there is as much recycling as possible of the energy sources and materials in production—will hinge on the transparency and information flows that blockchain systems allow. The principal challenge remains scaling. Open-to-all, permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin’s and Ethereum’s simply aren’t ready for the prime time of global trade.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, collaborative consumption, Corn Laws, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial independence, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, future of work, Gail Bradbrook, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, hive mind, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jevons paradox, land reform, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, post-industrial society, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Rutger Bregman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Perhaps the enthusiasm for commons in alternative economic thinking arises more from a commitment to human solidarity in the face of contemporary crises and the cold workings of modern property markets, and less from a detailed interest in how commons practically work. I readily endorse that commitment to human solidarity, but I worry that contemporary interest in the collaborative commons, circular economies, and open source solutions sometimes overplays an enthusiasm for collaborative work simply because it is collaborative, at the expense of carefully analysing whether it generates successful long-term social relations. Usufruct and the Small Proprietor Many of us today live surrounded by our personal possessions in small urban residential units.

The Deepest Map by Laura Trethewey

9 dash line, airport security, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, circular economy, clean tech, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, job automation, low earth orbit, Marc Benioff, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, sparse data, TED Talk, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

It is also home to microbial communities that play a little-understood role in cycling carbon through the ecosystem.68 If large tracts of seafloor are mined over long periods of time, there could be serious implications for mitigating climate change as well.69 In 2022, thirty ocean experts published a paper voicing their concerns about the unknown impacts of deep-sea mining, noting that changing climate scenarios and extensive mining operations could make the damage exponentially severe.70 Simply put, if we were to lose or even diminish the ocean’s ability to sequester or cycle carbon at this delicate moment in time, when the international community is already struggling to lower its carbon emissions, we may risk tipping the scales toward climatic chaos. Rather than ending resource extraction and sustaining the circular economy, deep-sea mining appears to swap one form of extraction for another. The Metals Company, along with its Swiss partner Allseas, is in the midst of converting a mega drill ship once owned by the Brazilian oil corporation Petrobras to a nodule collector.71 Some of the same technology and operating procedures developed by the offshore oil and gas industry will simply be transferred to deep-sea mining.72 The mining ships will run on heavy fuel oil during their long transits to and from remote sites and during heavy extraction periods in the middle of the Pacific.73 No one can say exactly how many emissions deep-sea mining might produce because commercial extraction hasn’t begun yet, but one hypothetical operation in the Pacific producing 3 million dry tons of manganese nodules could emit up to 482,000 tons of CO2,74 equivalent to the emissions produced by the energy use of 55,079 American homes in one year.75 The profits to be gained from this experimental new industry do not seem all that worth it.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

Their process is essentially low-energy, low-waste bio-manufacturing at industrial scale, built on AI and biotech. Another company, LanzaTech, harnesses genetically modified bacteria to convert waste CO2 from steel mill production into widely used industrial chemicals. This kind of synthetic biology is helping to build a more sustainable “circular” economy. Next-generation DNA printers will produce DNA with an increasing degree of precision. If improvements can be made in not only expressing that DNA but then using it to genetically engineer a diverse array of new organisms, automating and scaling the processes, a device or set of devices could, theoretically, produce an enormous range of biological materials and constructions using only a few basic inputs.

Paper: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, circular economy, clean water, computer age, Edward Snowden, Great Leap Forward, invention of the telephone, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, lone genius, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, moveable type in China, paper trading, planned obsolescence, trade route, Vannevar Bush

You should avoid wastefulness.” What worries the World Wildlife Fund is that the amount of land available for tree farming might not be able to keep up with the demand for paper. “There is a growing population,” said Neyroumande. “Where are we going to grow our crop? The planet is not big enough. We need a circular economy so that we use everything. If we made all our paper from forest the planet is not big enough.” According to a World Wildlife Fund study, paper use will triple by the year 2050 because of increasing population. Most people in the paper industry, however, do not find this statistic credible. It could happen, but there is no way to know.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

“Remaking a Neglected Megacity: A Civic Transformation in Lagos State, 1999–2012.” Princeton Project on Innovations for Successful Societies, July 2014. Kurlantzick, Joshua. Democracy in Retreat: The Revolt of the Middle Class and the Worldwide Decline of Representative Government. Yale University Press, 2014. Lacy, Peter and Jakob Rutqvist. Waste to Wealth: The Circular Economy Advantage. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Lake, David. “Beyond Anarchy: The Importance of Security Institutions.” International Security 26, no. 1 (Summer 2001). Lambert, Douglas M., James R. Stock, and Lisa M. Ellram. Fundamentals of Logistics. McGraw-Hill, 1998. Landes, David F. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor.

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made by Gaia Vince

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, bank run, biodiversity loss, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, climate change refugee, congestion charging, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, driverless car, energy security, failed state, Google Earth, Haber-Bosch Process, hive mind, hobby farmer, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Late Heavy Bombardment, load shedding, M-Pesa, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, microdosing, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, supervolcano, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology

The US carpet manufacturer Interface, for example, which is the world’s biggest producer of floor coverings, is aiming for zero carbon emissions through closed-loop manufacture. The company’s founder Ray Anderson has promised to eliminate any negative impacts they have on the environment by 2020. In a circular economy – in contrast to the linear manufacturing route: mining materials, fabricating, selling, throwing them away – products would be more easily disassembled, so that the resources can be recovered and used to make new products, keeping them in circulation. A report by McKinsey into the idea found that the benefits to Europe’s economy alone could be $630 billion, based on cycling just 15% of materials in 48% of manufacturing and just one cycle.

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power by Michel Aglietta

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, secular stagnation, seigniorage, shareholder value, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stochastic process, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, the scientific method, tontine, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, Washington Consensus

The member states are not themselves able to take on this responsibility, caught up as they are in the European obligation to clean up their budgets. The combination of climate emergency and the threat of stagnation offers the EU countries the opportunity to develop a common policy able to feed investment across a vast terrain, ranging from energy to transport, renovating buildings and regenerating territory through the circular economy. Whether this means establishing a European treasury or developing the existing European budget, the essential thing is to arrive at a fiscal union that stands above the banking union that is on its way to being realised today. The Incompleteness of the Euro A banking union, complemented by an eventual union of capital markets, would allow the unification of the European financial space.

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

A growing movement focuses on limiting the use of plastic straws and single-use plastic bags, especially owing to ocean pollution and the debris washing up on beaches. In Washington, D.C., “straw cops” hand out fines to restaurants that covertly use plastic straws, which are now banned. Recyclability to replace single-use plastics has become a priority. This is seen as part of the “circular economy,” where products are reused, recycled, or remade at the end of their lives—instead of going into landfills.5 But the plastic waste problem is largely not in the developed world. The United States generates less than 1 percent of the plastic waste in oceans. About 90 percent of river-sourced plastic pollution in the oceans comes from uncontrolled dumping into ten rivers in Asia and Africa, which, if properly managed, could dramatically reduce the wastage.

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

But we must all do everything we can to decarbonize industry, taking steps which include using next-to-zero-carbon fuels to replace fossil fuels and implementing more efficient production processes to reduce the impact of everything we make. Above all, we need to consume less, derive economic value in different ways and replace the constant throughput of materials and products with a circular economy. / 4.15 The Technical Hitch Ketan Joshi Spend even a moment looking over the climate and sustainability documents of the world’s high-emitting industries and you will be met with a wall of content that tries to bully you into feeling optimistic. An onslaught of glossy PDFs packed with stock photography of warmly smiling engineers and very serious businesspeople gives you the impression that there is a plan for the future and that high-emitting industries are very much in control.

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Jamis MacNiven: Just before the crash, John Mumford at Crosspoint Ventures, who had raised a billion-dollar fund, said, “You know, I can’t responsibly invest, so I am not going to do my fund, I am going to give my investors their money back.” And all these other VCs are going, “No! No! You can’t give the money back! That wrecks the whole game!” That’s when the money dried up and the ideas stopped and everything ground to a halt. Chris Caen: Also, people started realizing that it was kind of a circular economy. That it was the VCs funding companies that invested in other companies that were bought by other companies… Jeff Rothschild: I was skeptical about the valuation of these companies, because, you know, I thought about it and said, “Well, the only way that they could continue to be this valuable is if other people were acquiring them, and that can’t go on forever, you eventually don’t have any more bigger fish.”

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl, Thomas Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, future of work, George Floyd, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, job automation, junk bonds, Kibera, lab leak, liberal world order, lockdown, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, one-China policy, open borders, open economy, Paris climate accords, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey, zoonotic diseases

Stimulus and recovery funding can either reinforce the dangerous climate status quo or provide the United States and other nations enormous opportunities to lean into a “green recovery.” Investing in renewable energy such as solar and wind power; technology and infrastructure for low- and zero-emission vehicles, aviation, trains, and ships; the promotion of “circular economy” models that drastically reduce resource use and eliminate waste; low-carbon retrofitting and construction; urban redesign; new programs for forest conservation, ecosystem restoration, and sustainable agriculture; and projects to enhance the climate resilience of vulnerable communities—all of this is a potential win-win.

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

Ward et al. (2016, 10) confirmed this truism when they used historical data and modeled projections to conclude “that growth in GDP ultimately cannot plausibly be decoupled from growth in material and energy use, demonstrating categorically that GDP growth cannot be sustained indefinitely.” This makes it highly misleading to advocate any growth-oriented policies assuming that such a decoupling, and continued GDP growth, is possible. And it is similarly misleading to talk about any imminent practice of circular economy. Modern economies are based on massive linear flows of energy, fertilizers, other agrochemicals, and water required to produce food, and on even more massive energy and material flows to sustain industrial activities, transportation, and services. Circularization of the two key flows is impossible (reusing spent energy would require nothing less than abolishing entropy; reusing water used in cropping would require the capture of all evapotranspiration and field runoff), and (with the exception of a few metals in some countries) high-intensity (>80% of total flows), mass-scale recycling of materials (above all construction waste, plastics, and electronic waste) remains elusive.