<
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2020/03/how-a-circular-economy-could-save-the-world-feature/>
"The “circularity gap,” as de Wit and his colleagues dubbed it when they
presented their report at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2018, is
relatively new in human history. It dates to our industrial use of
fossil fuels in the 18th century. Until then, most of what humans did
was done with muscle power, whether human or animal. Growing things,
making things, shipping things took hard labor, which made them
valuable. Our limited physical energy also restricted how big a dent we
could put in the planet. It kept most of us very poor, however.
Cheap fossil energy, concentrated by geologic time and pressure in seams
of coal or pools of oil, changed all that. It made it easier to extract
raw materials anywhere, ship them to factories, and send the merchandise
everywhere. Fossil fuels exploded our possibilities—and the process
keeps intensifying. In the past half century, while the world’s
population has more than doubled, the amount of material flowing through
the economy has more than tripled."
An excellent and thought-provoking article!
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://www.xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
http://www.glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
http://www.sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
