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The scale of the challenge is unprecedented. The world economy is set to double in the next 20 years, while we need to cut our emissions by more than half in that time and become net-zero by mid-century. Limiting global warming to 1.5 [degrees]˚C requires monumental action. We need to change the way we live, the way we work, the way we farm and eat, and the way we consume energy. Implementing this enormous shift will require substantial new investments in low-carbon technologies and efficiency. The IPCC SR 15 report finds that if the 1.5˚C goal is to be met, investments in low-carbon energy technology and energy efficiency will need to increase by roughly a factor of five by 2050 compared to 2015 levels. But the sad fact is the world is dangerously off-track. The current trajectory, as defined by the pledges and targets that governments have made under the Paris Agreement, would limit warming to about 3.0 [degrees]°C. Global CO2 concentration hit an all-time high in 2018. This is despite the record renewable generation capacity installed and operating globally, suggesting that renewables - while part of the solution - are not the complete solution. Indeed the IEA finds that of the 38 clean-energy technologies we need to meet our climate targets, only four are currently on track. Energy efficiency improvements have slowed down, and progress on key technologies like carbon capture and storage (CCS) remains stalled. Policymakers need to respond to these challenges with urgency, enabling policies that drive investment and clean-energy deployment in the short-term, while demonstrating sustained commitment to a low-carbon environment for success in the long-term. Growth: Decarbonisation can be a driver for prosperity But what sounds daunting might well be an unprecedented opportunity for economic growth. Former heads of governments and climate leaders agree: Decarbonisation is also the growth story of the 21st century. The New Climate Economy found that bold climate action can deliver $26 trillion in economic benefits through 2030 (compared with business-as-usual), while generating more than 65 million jobs and avoiding more than 700,000 premature deaths from air pollution in 2030. These findings should not go unnoticed, and governments should be looking for ways to capture this potential and translate it into actual economic growth. Technology neutrality: Let’s not discard any solutions We need ambition - but we also need cool heads. If we continue to perceive this challenge along the lines that have divided us for so long — as a tug-of-war, in effect — we will lose as a collective. One of the key technologies that is off-track in the IEA’s clean energy monitor is carbon capture and storage (CCS), a set of technologies that prevents carbon dioxide emissions from entering the atmosphere and safely stores them deep underground in dedicated geological storage. CCS first started to gain recognition in the 2000s as a means of capturing emissions from the dirtiest source of energy: coal-fired generation. This perception, that CCS is about delivering ‘clean coal’, coupled with the fact that its deployment globally has been slower than predicted has hung an albatross around its neck. The truth is that CCS has much wider applications. It remains the only technology that can deliver deep emissions reductions in hard-to-abate industrial sectors such as steel, fertiliser and cement. Decarbonising these sectors is not simply about electrifying them with zero-carbon power; most of these processes require either carbon in their chemistry or high heat input, neither of which electricity is able to provide. As global emissions continue to rise we are likely to overshoot our climate goals, and therefore carbon dioxide will need to be permanently removed from the atmosphere and used or stored. In fact, all four scenarios outlined in the IPCC SR15 report rely on carbon removal, with three of the four scenarios foreseeing significant amounts of carbon capture and storage. CCS can also have a role to play in generating power, as most emissions linked to energy infrastructure are already essentially locked-in. Coal-fired power plants, which account for one-third of energy-related CO2 emissions today, represent more than a third of cumulative locked-in emissions to 2040. Most of these plants are in Asia, where average coal plant is just 11 years old with decades left to operate. Looking ahead, more than 200 GW of coal capacity is under construction globally with 300 new plants to come online in the next few years in India and China alone. CCS is the only technology that can truly decarbonise these facilities. In OECD countries, renewable intermittency poses a real challenge to grid operators. Zero-emission electricity is central to our future but balancing services are likely to continue to be dominated by gas-fired plants for several decades yet. CCS is necessary. High cost is often touted as the reason behind CCS’ failure to scale up. Based on ‘micro’ measurements such as the levelised cost of electricity, power generation that incorporates CCS may appear more expensive compared to other sources. However, modelling by climate organizations such as the IPCC and the UK Committee on Climate Change repeatedly demonstrates that at a ‘macro’ system level - which surely should matter more from a societal point of view - achieving deep decarbonisation would be extremely difficult and costly, if not outright impossible, without CCS. At a micro level, while the cost of CCS could be more than $100 per tonne of CO2, it can also be as low as $20 a tonne for those applications where CO2 removal is an inherent part of the production process, such as in natural gas processing. Within that range, the IEA finds that as much as 450 million tonnes of CO2 can be captured and stored with a commercial incentive as low as $40 per tonne of CO2. Harnessing these low-cost opportunities could provide a solid foundation for scaling up CCS deployment. Technology innovation will also help. In the US, an emissions-free natural gas power plant began test operations in 2018, which has carbon capture built in as part of the combustion cycle aiming to compete with conventional combined cycle generation. If proven in practice, this could be a game-changer. Justice: Investing in a fair transition and new energy economy In the past, vast changes in the economy have led to socioeconomic displacements. A successful energy transition will seek to avoid such displacements through smart policies. Carbon capture can play an integral role in enabling a just transition for workers currently employed in the energy sector. It can also be a catalyst to new energy economies – particularly CCS with hydrogen. Decarbonised hydrogen production by steam methane reforming (SMR)/gasification coupling with CCS has been at scale in commercial practice for decades with industrial applications. Turning to policymakers: What’s next? Government support for climate investments: According to the IEA, 70% of global energy investments are expected to be driven by government decisions - and so how the energy transition will pan out depends on policymakers. Sufficient investment in CCS will not happen without strong and sustained government policy. A value on carbon: Climate policies needs to reflect the externalities created by pollution through placing a value on carbon, like the tax credits in the US or the carbon tax in Norway. A value on carbon creates a business case for investment in CCS. Policy confidence: CCS requires investment in long-lived capital assets, which will not happen without having confidence in predictable and stable policies. We may still have just enough time to save the world from the disastrous effects of climate change – but only if we enact those decarbonisation policies that will enable growth and a just transition. In a technology-neutral playing field, CCS will naturally take a central role as one of the key climate solutions.

Carbon dioxide was “discovered,” by a Scottish physician named Joseph Black, in 1754. A decade later, another Scotsman, James Watt, invented a more efficient steam engine, ushering in what is now called the age of industrialization but which future generations may dub the age of emissions. It is likely that by the end of the nineteenth century human activity had raised the average temperature of the earth by a tenth of a degree Celsius (or nearly two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit). As the world warmed, it started to change, first gradually and then suddenly. By now, the globe is at least one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than it was in Black’s day, and the consequences are becoming ever more apparent. Heat waves are hotter, rainstorms more intense, and droughts drier. The wildfire season is growing longer, and fires, like the ones that recently ravaged Northern California, more numerous. Sea levels are rising, and the rate of rise is accelerating. Higher sea levels exacerbated the damage from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, and higher water temperatures probably also made the storms more ferocious. “Harvey is what climate change looks like,” Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist turned columnist, recently wrote. Meanwhile, still more warming is locked in. There’s so much inertia in the climate system, which is as vast as the earth itself, that the globe has yet to fully adjust to the hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide that have been added to the atmosphere in the past few decades. It’s been calculated that to equilibrate to current CO2 levels the planet still needs to warm by half a degree. And every ten days another billion tons of carbon dioxide are released. Last month, the World Meteorological Organization announced that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere jumped by a record amount in 2016. No one can say exactly how warm the world can get before disaster—the inundation of low-lying cities, say, or the collapse of crucial ecosystems, like coral reefs—becomes inevitable. Officially, the threshold is two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. Virtually every nation signed on to this figure at a round of climate negotiations held in Cancún in 2010. Meeting in Paris in 2015, world leaders decided that the two-degree threshold was too high; the stated aim of the climate accord is to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C” and to try to limit it to 1.5 °C. Since the planet has already warmed by one degree and, for all practical purposes, is committed to another half a degree, it would seem impossible to meet the latter goal and nearly impossible to meet the former. And it is nearly impossible, unless the world switches course and instead of just adding CO2 to the atmosphere also starts to remove it. The extent to which the world is counting on negative emissions is documented by the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was published the year before Paris. To peer into the future, the I.P.C.C. relies on computer models that represent the world’s energy and climate systems as a tangle of equations, and which can be programmed to play out different “scenarios.” Most of the scenarios involve temperature increases of two, three, or even four degrees Celsius—up to just over seven degrees Fahrenheit—by the end of this century. (In a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, two climate scientists—Yangyang Xu, of Texas A. & M., and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography—proposed that warming greater than three degrees Celsius be designated as “catastrophic” and warming greater than five degrees as “unknown??” The “unknown??” designation, they wrote, comes “with the understanding that changes of this magnitude, not experienced in the last 20+ million years, pose existential threats to a majority of the population.”) When the I.P.C.C. went looking for ways to hold the temperature increase under two degrees Celsius, it found the math punishing. Global emissions would have to fall rapidly and dramatically—pretty much down to zero by the middle of this century. (This would entail, among other things, replacing most of the world’s power plants, revamping its agricultural systems, and eliminating gasoline-powered vehicles, all within the next few decades.) Alternatively, humanity could, in effect, go into hock. It could allow CO2 levels temporarily to exceed the two-degree threshold—a situation that’s become known as “overshoot”—and then, via negative emissions, pull the excess CO2 out of the air. The I.P.C.C. considered more than a thousand possible scenarios. Of these, only a hundred and sixteen limit warming to below two degrees, and of these a hundred and eight involve negative emissions. In many below-two-degree scenarios, the quantity of negative emissions called for reaches the same order of magnitude as the “positive” emissions being produced today. “The volumes are outright crazy,” Oliver Geden, the head of the E.U. research division of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told me. Lackner said, “I think what the I.P.C.C. really is saying is ‘We tried lots and lots of scenarios, and, of the scenarios which stayed safe, virtually every one needed some magic touch of a negative emissions. If we didn’t do that, we ran into a brick wall.’ ”

There are a number of factors that could lead to discontinuous changes in this metric. For example, a global economic downturn could lead to sharp reductions in development aid that could threaten any improvements in governance that had been made with the benefit of that assistance. Alternatively, a major jump in global energy costs could induce widespread fiscal crises similar to those of the 1970s and 1980s, ultimately leading to reduced state capacity. The branch scenario in red projects essentially no improvements in state capacity over the period in question, so larger changes would entail the rapid erosion of the capacity of states that are already relatively capable. Such changes are certainly possible, but they would constitute an example of nonlinear disruptive change. On balance, our projection is that state capacity is likely to continue to improve, which will tend to exert a downward pressure on the likelihood of intrastate conflict. Prevalence of Consolidated Democracies Consolidated democracies are less likely to fight one another and to be involved in internal conflict. While this correlation is clear, the mechanism by which democracies reduce conflict is more contested. The literature on interstate conflict has focused on the greater transparency and consistency of democratic regimes that allow them to credibly commit to peaceful solutions to disputes and the possibility that domestic norms and greater political accountability may make democratic states less likely to pursue violent conflicts.8 There are fewer arguments that the greater ability of consolidated democracies to resolve grievances within the political system leads to less intrastate conflict.9 We note, however, that partial democracies or the process of democratization itself may not be particularly peaceful and may even be associated with an increase in conflict.10 Given the importance of consolidated democracy in the literature on conflict, there is already a great deal of work in the academic literature on measurement of democracy. Several aggregate measures of democracy have been developed that include the competitiveness of elections; the state’s respect for civil, political, and minority rights; and freedoms of the press and religion. The most widely used measure of consolidated democracy, and the one we employ, comes from the Polity project. By coding a wide range of regime characteristics, such as political 8 Arend Lijphart, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-One Countries, New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1984; Peter Liberman, Does Conquest Pay? The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996; Charles Lipson, Reliable Partners: How Democracies Have Made a Separate Peace, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. 9 Håvard Hegre, Tanja Ellingsen, Scott Gates, and Nils Petter Gleditsch, “Toward a Democratic Civil Peace? Democracy, Political Change, and Civil War, 1816–1992,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 95, No. 1, March 2001, pp. 33–48; Christian Davenport, State Repression and the Domestic Democratic Peace, New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 10 Hegre et al., 2001; Lars-Erik Cederman, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, and Simon Hug, “Elections and Ethnic Civil War,” Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 46, No. 3, 2012, pp. 387–417. 49 competition and constraints on the executive, an aggregate “Polity score” is produced, ranging from –10 to 10. Values of 6 or higher are typically used to identify the presence of a democracy, with a more conservative measurement of 8 or higher often used to identify consolidated democracies. We use this metric to calculate the percentage of all states that are consolidated democracies, with the historical values denoted by the black line in Figure 3.2. Figure 3.2. Prevalence of Consolidated Democracies SOURCE: Historical data: Monty G. Marshall and Keith Jaggers, Polity IV Data Set [Computer file; version p4v2012], College Park, Md.: Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland, 2002; projections calculated by authors. We projected the baseline scenario by fitting a trend line to the historical data and calculating the future values.11 This projection is represented in the figure by the gray line. We calculated the two branch scenarios as one standard deviation above and below the baseline projection; they are shown in the figure by the blue and red lines, respectively. Discontinuous growth in the prevalence of democracies could result from various tippingpoint effects. If a high percentage of the world’s population were governed through democracy, other forms of government may come to be seen as illegitimate, and greater international pressure may be brought to bear to remove them. Within the time frame of our study, a dramatic reversal in the prevalence of consolidated democracies appears to be less likely. The reversion of 11 The trend line was fit using a generalized linear model linked to a binomial logit function. The resulting projections are therefore bounded between 0 and 1 (in this case, 0 and 100 percent). The model used in Figure 3.2 has a Pearson statistic (1/df) of .0037, suggesting a high degree of fit with the data. 50 consolidated democracies to autocracies historically has been extremely rare and is unlikely in the absence of extreme economic decline, the conquest of democracies by more powerful autocracies, or both. Either of these potential paths is likely to lead directly to increases in future conflict levels as well. Degree of Ethnic and Sectarian Polarization The academic literature generally agrees that a high level of ethnic and sectarian polarization is not sufficient by itself to cause conflict either within or between states. However, there is also agreement that in the intrastate context, where group mobilization occurs along ethnic lines, identity can become a significant contributing factor for violence, especially when strengthened by socioeconomic and sociopolitical grievances. Consequently, we identified the degree of ethnic and sectarian polarization as one of the primary factors likely to affect the level of intrastate conflict in the future. Evidence also shows that while ethnicity may not lead to conflict by itself, it may work to prolong conflicts and increase the intensity of violence in those conflicts that are already occurring.12 Such effects will most likely be strengthened if ethnic groups are deliberately disadvantaged by the state or if they are territorially based and have secessionist or separatist demands.13 Scholars tend to agree that ethnic and sectarian polarization, while a strong predictor for increased levels of intrastate conflict, is not a strong driver for conflicts between states. However, if regional and international actors become involved in intrastate conflicts, or if conflicts spread across borders, such polarization could also affect levels of interstate conflict. Such a scenario is especially likely where ethnic kin-groups in neighboring states become involved with secessionist movements.14 Quantifying ethnic and sectarian polarization is inherently difficult. While various measures have been tried, such as linguistic differences (e.g., ethno-linguistic fractionalization) or religious preferences, they are often criticized for not capturing the cleavage that gives rise to political mobilization. For example, different ethnic groups may share the same religion, and one ethnic group may speak multiple languages. It can also be difficult to determine when certain identities in a society are increasing in salience, and when they are becoming less relevant. One prominent 12 Rajat Ganguly and Raymond Taras, Understanding Ethnic Conflict: The International Dimension, Longman Publishers, 2002; Fearon and Laitin, 2003; and Daniel Bar-Tal, “Sociopsychological Foundations of Intractable Conflicts,” American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 50, No. 11, 2007. 13 Gurr, 1970; Stephen M. Saideman, and William R. Ayres, “Determining the Causes of Irredentism: Logit Analyses of Minorities at Risk Data from the 1980s and 1990s,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 62, No. 4, November 2000, pp. 1126–1144; Monica Duffy Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence: Identity, Interests, and the Indivisibility of Territory, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. 14 John A. Vasquez, and Brendan Valeriano, “Territory as a Source of Conflict and a Road to Peace,” in Jacob Bercovitch, Viktor Kremenyuk, and I. William Zartman, eds., The Sage Handbook of Conflict Resolution, Los Angeles, Calif.: SAGE, 2009, pp. 193–209. 51 attempt to quantify relevant ethnic identities is the Minorities at Risk data set at the University of Maryland, which identifies minority groups by their “at risk” status—that is, by the extent to which they are disadvantaged in their relationships with other groups in the state in which they reside. However, the Minorities at Risk data identify such “at risk” groups somewhat subjectively, and the project does not claim to be comprehensive. An alternative, objective measure is to look for the degree of formal discrimination against ethnic, religious, or linguistic groups. The creation or removal of official laws providing for formal discrimination can help to identify states where identity-based grievances may become more or less salient. For capturing the degree of ethnic and sectarian polarization, therefore, we looked at the percentage of states with formal discrimination against minorities, where such minority groups make up at least 5 percent of the state’s population. We used the Ethnic Power Relations data set (EPR), which tracks the extent of access to state power for all politically relevant ethnic groups in every country of the world from 1946 to 2013. It includes annual data on more than 733 groups and codes the degree to which their representatives held executive-level state power—from total control of the government to being formally barred from holding political office. While the disadvantage of such a proxy may be that it potentially fails to capture some of the unofficial social discrimination that can lead to group mobilization, the advantage is that it allows for a more objective measure of sectarian tension. The overall levels of ethnic or sectarian polarization in the figure below may therefore be understated, but we can have more confidence in the general trend line than we could with more subjective data sources. We projected the baseline scenario by fitting an exponential trend line to the available historical data and calculating the future values.15 The projection is shown by a gray line in Figure 3.3. We calculated the two branch scenarios as one standard deviation above and below the baseline projection; they are shown by a red and blue line, respectively. 15 The exponential trend line fit to the data has the equation: y = 0.3098e-0.012x. The trend line has a high degree of fit with the data, with an R² of 0.85. 52 Figure 3.3. Percentage of States with Discriminated Minorities SOURCE: Historical data: Andreas Wimmer, Lars-Erik Cederman, and Brian Min, “Ethnic Politics and Armed Conflict: A Configurational Analysis of a New Global Data set,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 74, No. 2, 2009, pp. 316–337; projections calculated by authors. Discontinuous change in this variable may occur as a result of several factors. Historically, ethnic and sectarian factors often have increased in relevance after the breakup of larger states and empires, including the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, or the end of colonialism in the 1960s. The breakup of other large, multiethnic states in the future could result in a similar outcome. Extremely high levels of resource stress because of population pressures also could prompt increased ethnically based conflict within states. Ethnic and sectarian polarization and grievances are latent in many societies, and may become politically important in order to mobilize groups to violence under conditions of severe resource or economic privation. Rate of Economic Growth Economic growth affects the prevalence of conflict in several ways. While territorial expansion traditionally has been a major cause of interstate war, states with higher levels of economic development may be less motivated to pursue such expansion because of the lower relative value of land inputs in an industrialized economy. Moreover, their reliance on international capital markets may increase the potential costs of disruptions from serious 53 international crises.16 At the intrastate level, economic growth (if broadly shared) reduces grievances, bolsters the capacity of the state to handle security challenges, and increases the population’s opportunities for licit employment, thus raising the opportunity costs of participating in rebellions or insurgencies.17 Growth benefits that accrue along ethnic or sectarian lines, however, might increase the potential for intrastate conflict, as discussed in the previous section, and sharp declines in the rate of economic growth could be associated with an increased risk of internal conflict as well.18 Therefore, there are at least two different concepts that any operationalization of this factor should attempt to capture: the overall level of economic development and changes in the rate of economic growth. Over the short term, wealthy countries tend to remain wealthy and poor countries tend to remain poor, and their degree of wealth may have a strong effect on their overall likelihood of being involved in conflict. In addition, sharp declines in the rate of growth for a range of states may increase their likelihood of intrastate conflict in particular.

Twenty years ago, Lawrence Summers came up with a particularly graphic analogy for market crises: airplane crashes.

Jets, the former US treasury secretary explained, make travel faster, more efficient and safer, although the odd accident is far more stunning and deadly than one that befalls other forms of transport. “In the same way,” Summers said, “modern global financial markets carry with them enormous potential for benefit, even if some of the accidents are that much more spectacular.”

It is well established that there is a strong correlation between famine and economic development or growth. Economic growth leads to development and reduction in poverty and famine. Real economic growth embracing and benefiting all the citizens of a country produces safety mechanisms which are of vital importance in alleviating or avoiding displacements and live destruction emanating from famine. The suffering and significant loss of lives resulting from persistent famines which are hitting Ethiopia could not be avoided or even mitigated owing to the shrinking economy or increasing poverty in the country. On the other hand, one can can not avoid but face the irony of Ethiopia failing to be self sufficient and feed its population despite possessing all the potential to do so. Thus a critical examination of the major stumbling block or factor acting as a bottleneck and preventing the country from eradicating or even coping with famine is necessary.

For 30 years, diplomats and policymakers have called for decisive action on climate change—and for 30 years, the climate crisis has grown worse. There are a multitude of reasons for this failure. The benefits of climate action lie mostly in the future, they are diffuse and hard to pin down, and they will accrue above all to poor populations that do not have much of a voice in politics, whether in those countries that emit most of the world’s warming pollution or at the global level. The costs of climate action, on the other hand, are evident here and now, and they fall on well-organized interest groups with real political power. In a multipolar world without a responsible hegemon, any collective effort is difficult to organize. And the profound uncertainty about what lies ahead makes it hard to move decisively.

These political hurdles are formidable. The good news is that technological progress can make it much easier to clear them by driving down the costs of action. In the decades to come, innovation could make severe cuts in emissions, also known as “deep decarbonization,” achievable at reasonable costs. That will mean reshaping about ten sectors in the global economy—including electric power, transportation, and parts of agriculture—by reinforcing positive change where it is already happening and investing heavily wherever it isn’t.

A third fatal defect of socialism is its disregard for the role of private property rights in creating incentives that foster economic growth and development. The failure of socialism around the world is a “tragedy of commons” on a global scale. The “tragedy of the commons” refers to the British experience of the 16th century when certain grazing lands were communally owned by villages and were made available for public use. The land was quickly overgrazed and eventually became worthless as villagers exploited the communally owned resource.

When assets are publicly owned, there are no incentives in place to encourage wise stewardship. While private property creates incentives for conservation and the responsible use of property, public property encourages irresponsibility and waste. If everyone owns an asset, people act as if no one owns it. And when no one owns it, no one really takes care of it. Public ownership encourages neglect and mismanagement.

Faster growth will mean higher consumption of resources and more pressure on habitat, which is bad for other species. But as North Korea’s experience shows, the combination of economic stagnation and poverty is even worse. Growth can benefit biodiversity, so long as it is combined with regulation and investment to protect other species. That has happened to some extent; whether it happens enough to prevent biodiversity being drastically reduced depends largely on governments in emerging markets.

But the biggest question of all for other species is what happens to land use. With habitat loss the principal threat to biodiversity, and agriculture taking up two-fifths of land compared with 3% for urban areas, the demand for food, and how it is met, will determine how much land is left for other creatures.

There are concerns that the financial crisis has already hit tuberculosis control, which has global ramifications, says Robertson.“There are already indications that funding for TB diagnosis and management is decreasing in  and a surge of new cases there may flow onto the US and other countries,” he says.Healthcare in developed countries will also suffer if budgets are cut and incomes fall. Fewer people are accessing private health services in the USA, which will increase the burden on public health services.Resources for disease surveillance are often cut back during difficult economic times, jeopardising the systems we rely on to identify and deal with emerging diseases - including the current swine flu epidemics.The 1995 economic crisis in Mexico led to 27,000 excess deaths in that country alone - but the effect of this far greater, global downturn is currently “impossible to quantify,” according to Robertson.

At its most fundamental level, the starting point is the Enlightenment ideal of increasing human control over nature. As human society develops it becomes better able to control the natural world. Humans have increasingly become better able to control disease, curb the impact of the seasons and minimise the impact of natural disasters. Economic growth plays a central part in such progress. It gives humanity the means and resources to acquire a better life. Rather than being a problem-maker, the development of the economy provides humanity with the ability to overcome its difficulties.

Changes in travel and trade and the disruption of economic and cultural norms have accelerated and made it much more difficult to control the emergence and spread of infectious diseases, as described in Chapters 1 and 2 of this report. Even as progress is made, the public health community will likely encounter further setbacks, such as growing antimicrobial resistance. Yet there is a positive side to these developments as well. While globalization intensifies the threat of infectious disease, it also results in stronger tools for addressing that threat. From technological advances in information dissemination (e.g., the Internet) to the growing number of bidirectional infectious disease training programs that are bringing clinicians, scientists, and students from both sides of the equator together, the opportunities made available by globalization appear as endless as the challenges are daunting. At the same time, the opportunities afforded by globalization do not necessarily come easily. Workshop participants identified obstacles that, if not addressed, may prevent or retard the ability to take full advantage of some of these new global tools. Global surveillance capabilities made possible by advances in information and communications technologies, for example, are still fraught with numerous challenges. This chapter summarizes the workshop presentations and discussions pertaining to some of these opportunities and obstacles. One of the most enthusiastically discussed opportunities made available by our increasingly interconnected world is the type of transnational public health research, training, and education program exemplified by the Peru-based Gorgas Course in Clinical Tropical Medicine. This program not only benefits its northern participants, but also helps build a sustainable public health capacity in the developing world. Historically, the goal of many tropical disease training programs was to strengthen the northern country’s capacity for tropical disease diagnosis and treatment. The trend toward a bidirectional, more egalitarian approach that benefits the developing-country partner as much as its northern collaborator reflects a growing awareness that a sustainable global public health capacity can be achieved only with the full and equal participation of the developing world. Thus, not only are the Gorgas Course and other, similar programs becoming more popular, both politically and among students, but their nature is also changing in significant and telling ways. The shifting focus of many of the international training programs of the Fogarty International Center (FIC) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) further reflects the increased awareness, funding, and efforts needed to strengthen bidirectional international training in epidemiology, public health, and tropical medicine in particular.

There is no shortage of examples of dematerialization. I chose the ones in this chapter because they illustrate a set of fundamental principles at the intersection of business, economics, innovation, and our impact on our planet. They are:

We do want more all the time, but not more resources. Alfred Marshall was right, but William Jevons was wrong. Our wants and desires keep growing, evidently without end, and therefore so do our economies. But our use of the earth’s resources does not. We do want more beverage options, but we don’t want to keep using more aluminum in drink cans. We want to communicate and compute and listen to music, but we don’t want an arsenal of gadgets; we’re happy with a single smartphone. As our population increases, we want more food, but we don’t have any desire to consume more fertilizer or use more land for crops.

Why the U.S. Is Unlikely to be Headed Towards a Structural Regime Break

Though the path from the crisis we’re in now to either depression or debt crisis is not impossible, it’s not easy or natural, if we examine each of the four paths in regards to the current situation:

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), universal carbon dioxide-greenhouse gas related emissions shows some stability in 2015 at approximately 32.1 Gt for the second year in a row, validating the decoupling of global greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth (Enerdata, 2015; Itskos et al., 2016). The stalling of global emissions is no surprise, as this is in line with the slowing trend in annual emission growth over the past three years, starting from 2.0% in 2013 to 1.1% in 2014 and further down to 0.1% in 2015. A similar trend of declining growth in global emissions could also be seen from 2010 to 2012, starting from 5.7% down to 0.7%. It is debatable whether the plateaued emission level will continue and results from structural changes (Jackson et al., 2016; Qi et al., 2016; Green and Stern, 2016). In 2009, a stronger global downward trend of 1.0% was recorded, compared to 2008 levels, but this was due to the global economic downturn. Stalling in emissions is not coupled with the GDP trend, as global GDP kept up with an annual growth of 3.0% in 2015 compared to 2014. A more structural change with a shift away from carbon-intensive activities, particularly in China but also in the United States, contributed considerably to this trend. This achievement was made possible through the global investment in energy efficiency which increased by 6% in 2015 (IEA, 2010) and the rise in the proportion of renewables in the generation of power. It is estimated that the share of renewables was around 90 percent of the latest power generation in year 2015, with power from wind alone responsible for over 50 percent.

The past 30 years have seen immense progress in improving the quality of life for much of humanity. Extreme poverty — the number of people living on less than $1.90 per day — has fallen by nearly two-thirds, from 1.9 billion to around 650 million. Life expectancy has risen in most of the world, along with literacy and access to education, while infant mortality has fallen. Despite perceptions to the contrary, the average person born today is likely to have access to more opportunities and have a better quality of life than at any other point in human history. Much of this increase in human wellbeing has been propelled by rapid economic growth driven largely by state-led industrial policy, particularly in poor-to-middle income countries.

However, this growth has come at a cost: between 1990 and 2019, global emissions of CO2 increased by 56%. Historically, economic growth has been closely linked to increased energy consumption — and increased CO2 emissions in particular — leading some to argue that a more prosperous world is one that necessarily has more impacts on our natural environment and climate. There is a lively academic debate about our ability to “absolutely decouple” emissions and growth — that is, the extent to which the adoption of clean energy technology can allow emissions to decline while economic growth continues.

*The Nine Planetary Boundaries Brook Et Al. Refer Too Are, “Land-Use Change, Rate of Biodiversity Loss, Phosphorus Cycle, Global Freshwater Use, Ocean Acidification, Climate Change, Stratospheric Ozone Depletion, Atmospheric Aerosol Loading, Chemical Pollution, Terrestrial Net Primary Production, and Biodiversity Intactness”

As living standards, technological capacities,

In a new working paper, economists Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University look at the relationship between an aging population and aggregate economic growth. After running several regression analyses that account for initial GDP levels, they find that there isn’t a negative relationship between an older population and GDP growth. In fact, some of the results indicate a positive relationship between aging and economic growth, though this relationship is weaker when they look at only high-income countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Given the expectations that an aging population should stifle growth, what could explain this lack of a negative relationship? The answer that Acemoglu and Restrepo offer is technology. The economists hypothesize that as populations age businesses are more likely to adopt technology that helps boost productivity. They show preliminary results from upcoming work that shows a relationship between aging and the adoption of robots.

Second, pessimists, who recognize that the human population may actually shrink in the future, worry that free enterprise will continue to drive human consumption of resources to higher and higher levels.[6] Again, the data do not agree. In our response to Katherine Trebeck and Dirk Philipsen, we already mentioned McAfee’s 2019 book, More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources―and What Happens Next. Sophisticated economies, McAfee found, are currently producing ever more goods and services, while at the same time using ever fewer resources. That is a result of a sustained transition in advanced countries from industry to less resource-intensive economic activities that deal with services and information.

To that process we may also add dematerialization, which refers to declining consumption of material and energy per unit of gross domestic product (GDP). According to Jesse Ausubel from Rockefeller University and Paul E. Waggoner from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, “If consumers dematerialize their intensity of use of goods and technicians produce the goods with a lower intensity of impact, people can grow in numbers and affluence without a proportionally greater environmental impact.”[7]

Unpacking this argument, it is perhaps useful to first recognize that, stable as the Holocene may have seemed from a human perspective, life was always vulnerable to a number of cosmic risks, such as bolide collisions, risks that only advanced technologies can mitigate. Similarly, the Black Death of the 14th century should serve as a powerful reminder of the extreme vulnerability of pre-industrial societies at a microbiological level. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to think of the Holocene as providing a relatively stable baseline against which the ecological effects of technological interventions could hypothetically be evaluated. With most human activities being distinctively local, nature would for the most part “bounce back” (even if the deforestation of the Mediterranean basin during the Roman period is an example of that not always being the case) while larger geophysical processes, such as the carbon cycle, remained entirely beyond human intentional control. Even if there has been some debate about what influence human activities had on the preindustrial climate (Ruddiman 2007), anthropogenic forcing was in any case both marginal and gradual.

All this changed with the onset of the Great Acceleration by which humans came to overwhelm the great forces of nature, causing untold damage to fragile ecosystems and habitats everywhere, forever altering the trajectory of life on the planet (Steffen et al. 2011b). In a grander perspective, humanity may one day become an interplanetary species and thus instrumental in safeguarding the long-term existence of biological life, but for the moment, its impact is ethically dubious at best as the glaciers melt, the oceans fill up with plastics, and vast number of species are driven to extinction.

Capitalism is not, Monbiot is forced to admit, a fragile system that will easily be replaced. Bolstered by huge supplies of oil, it is here to stay. Industrial civilization is, as far as he can now see, unstoppable. Gaia, that treacherous slut, has made so much oil and gas that her faithful acolytes today cannot protect her from the consequences of her own folly.

Welcome to the New Green Doom: an overabundance of oil and gas is going to release so much greenhouse gas that the world is going to fry. The exploitation of the oil sands in Alberta, warn leading environmentalists, is a tipping point. William McKibben put it this way in an interview with Wired magazine in the fall of 2011: