Crash Course
Humanity’s unceasing ingenuity is generating vast economic gain
Humanity’s unceasing ingenuity is generating vast economic gain for billions of people with goods unavailable to even kings and queens throughout most of history. Over the past millennium (1000 to 2000), global population increased 28-fold (250 million to 7 billion), total world real GDP rose 1161-fold ($35 billion to $41 trillion in 1990$), and per capita income increased 49-fold.
Crash Course
Rise in wealth, assets, and well-being has occurred for a number of factors
This phenomenal rise in wealth, assets, and well-being has occurred for a number of factors, with access to cheap fossil fuels being a primary driver this past century. Fossil fuels have admirably served humanity in this capacity, fueling the engine of economic activity, especially access to cheap oil over the past century. Cheap energy, in turn, made access to water and natural resources cheaper, resulting in an 8-fold increase in materials use this past century.
Most economists assume global average annual per capita growth rates of 2 to 3% in the 21st century. This implies a nearly 10- to 20-fold increase in world GDP over a century. Earth scientists, however, are far less sanguine. A prodigious accumulation of scientific observations, measurements, gathered evidence and findings indicate serious instabilities throughout the biosphere. These intensifying risks pose cataclysmic threats to undermine, disrupt, and collapse humanity’s vulnerable socioeconomic systems in the years, decades, centuries, and millennium ahead. Until very recently, with the quick succession of mega weather disasters – hurricanes, floods, severe droughts, prolonged wildfires, spread of deadly infectious diseases — most people simply did not reflect on or take heed of even more frequent and severe catastrophes projected for the decades ahead.
Until very recently, with the quick succession of mega weather disasters – hurricanes, floods, severe droughts, prolonged wildfires, spread of deadly infectious diseases — most people simply did not reflect on or take heed of even more frequent and severe catastrophes projected for the decades ahead.
In deriving and consuming multi-trillion dollar quantities of fossil energy resources, their use have unwittingly become a primary driver of most of the global risks and threats confronting humanity:
- Fossil fuels are the primary driver of climate destabilization
- Fossil fuels are the primary driver of marine acidification.
- Fossil fuels are the primary driver of acid rain.
- Fossil fuels are the primary driver of smog, particulates, and air pollution.
- Fossil fuels are a primary driver of water and land contamination.
- Fossil fuels are responsible for large releases of mercury, heavy metals and toxic chemicals.
- Fossil fuels are a major contributor to illness, premature morbidity and mortality.
- Fossil fuels (oil) are a primary driver of international wars and conflicts, which are contributing to ethnocide and genocide.
- Fossil fuels are major extractors of freshwater for their operations
Taxpayers pay good money for accelerating all of this destruction of the planet — a staggering $700 billion to $1 trillion per year in subsidies. These debilitating impacts are quite like that of humans paying good money to ingest enormous quantities of solids and liquids known to trigger debilitating and deadly diseases. The diagnosis and prognosis from humanity’s “medical community” of planetary physicians— earth scientists — is a wake-up call for humanity to change its consumption habits.
Just one assessment among a number profiled in succeeding chapters reveals this in damning details. According to a comprehensive analysis by Harvard Medical School, the externality costs of coal use in the U.S. amounts to upwards of $500 billion per year. If these costs were factored into the delivered price of electricity consumers would be paying upwards of 37 cents per kWh. That is 12 to 40 times more expensive than end-use efficiency improvements, six times more costly than wind power, and more than two to three times the price of solar PV delivered electricity.
A recent global analysis prepared for large-scale institutional investors estimates economic losses from environmental externalities exceed $6 trillion per year, of which fossil fuel consumption accounts for a majority of the costs.
Revealingly, more than 50% of company earnings could be at risk from environmental costs in an equity portfolio weighted according to the MSCI All Country World Index.
Addressing that complex question is the focus of ASSETs for Life
The more commanding question, of far greater importance, is whether there are more benign ways to deliver humanity’s gargantuan appetite for energy and materials for delivering a virtually infinite diversity of goods and services? Addressing that complex question is the focus of ASSETs for Life, which is now under development and not yet launched. The site’s purpose is to provide a platform for catalyzing a results-driven collaboration innovation network (COIN). ASSETs is an acronym standing for “Apps for Spurring Solar and Efficiency Tech-knowledgies.”
Free (open source) COIN ASSETs is self-organized, grown and maintained by an ad hoc group of users in localities worldwide. The content and activity is focused on promoting acceleration of communities and cities becoming highly energy, water and resource efficient as well as 100% solar powered. There is abundant evidence and accumulated experience showing immense win-win-win benefits, value and accruing assets from such a transformation process.
Confronting Humanity Around The Demand Substantiation
As with the bold claims regarding the unprecedented challenges of global and historial magnitude confronting humanity that demand substantiation and compelling evidence, so are the bold claims on efficiency and solar technologies are substantiated in other sections of this web site.