How humans dominated the Earth
(9 mins) The root cause of climate change & unmistakable trends for the 21st century
We previously covered trends in our climate & what the future may hold. But how did we get here in the first place?
What happened in the 20th century?
Since the dawn of civilization ~6000 years ago, life for most people looked something like this:
People toiling over soil hoping to grow enough food to live and praying the local tax collector or rival tribe doesn’t try to take it from them. It’s hard to overstate our complete reliance on agriculture for the majority of human history. Good harvests meant well-fed people, armies & aristocracies to fund the arts. Bad harvests meant deprivation and anarchy.
It’s just in the last 150 years that we flipped the script. Famines are rare. International conflict is infrequent. People are living longer than ever before. All of these trends seemed to hit a breaking point around 1900. So what happened?
The Ascension of Humanity
Life was brutally hard for humans for the vast majority of our history. Death was omnipresent. It was common for babies to die during birth, kids to die from disease, and adults to succumb to a small cut.
But in just the last two centuries, we’ve found ways to beat death, ballooning the number of humans on Earth by 8x. Our ascension is expected to continue to ~10B humans by 2050 before leveling off. It’s impossible to talk about climate change without discussing this elephant in the room: human global domination. So how did we do it?
Our domination is only possible because the last 200 years have been a renaissance of creation: Electricity. Vaccines. Antibiotics. Plastics. Computers. Synthetic fertilizers. Modern life is impossible without these inventions. They have enabled the population to surge in a remarkably short amount of time and for quality of life to improve for many.
The secret ingredient underpinning our ascension is leverage. During the industrial revolution, we harnessed machines to increase the physical output of the individual. No longer did we need 100 people to harvest crops when a single combine could do the job.
Similarly, we’re in the midst of the information revolution which dramatically increases the cognitive output of the individual. A single computer program can collect & distribute orders for 1000s of businesses. Never in human history have we had such incredible leverage.
While the west has enjoyed a 200 year head start, the rest of the world is quickly catching up. Agricultural advances propagating throughout the world are improving yields and decreasing labor requirements, freeing people up to do other things in the economy.
No longer needed on the farm, people disproportionately move to cities in search of opportunities from industrialization. Once there, cIties are efficient at transforming labor into value with a shocking 80% of GDP being generated in urban areas.
If New York & London come to mind, think again. The vast majority of this growth will occur in emerging cities like Dhaka & Lagos, which are expected to grow twice as fast. China’s dominance in manufacturing in the last 30 years is a prime example of a country navigating an industrial transition.
Rising GDP from industrializing provides incredible benefits to billions. A wealthier country is able to invest in better education & healthcare for citizens which pays dividends in lifetime earnings making the next generation wealthier as well. This is measured by the ‘Human Development Index’ and it’s strongly correlated with GDP.
A growing economy paired with sufficient social equality provides basic rights to citizens. Vaccination. Stable nutrition. Access to healthcare. All table stakes to help more kids survive childhood and live healthy lives. Healthy kids means smaller families & population growth stabilizes to replacement rate.
These trends were not guaranteed by ‘progress’. For all of human history, we were stuck in the Malthusian trap of resource scarcity. 2 major changes cleared the way for human domination to sweep the globe.
How We Fed Billions
To grow a population you need to feed a population.
Before Great Britain could muster an enormous industrial workforce, they needed to lure people off the farms and into the factory. This didn’t happen until the late 1700’s when centuries of agricultural improvements (crop rotation, farm tools, cross breeding) came together to improve yields & supply sufficient food for the growing population.
On the contrary, population growth in the developing world during the 20th century preceded our ability to feed them. Deployment of life-saving technology (e.g. antibiotics) collapsed the death rate; more people lived in places without an adequate means of feeding them. We urgently needed to drastically scale food production to avoid mass starvation. This was not a given; rather, numerous researchers concluded that the world would be gripped by famine by 2000.
The only reason we were able to dodge this bullet was because of 2 factors: the green revolution & a shit load of farmland.
As the population ballooned, we needed to create more food & fast. The easiest, most reliable way of doing this is simply planting more food. Around 1900, we began cultivating enormous tracts of wild land to grow crops for millions of hungry mouths.
Clearing billions of hectares wasn’t enough; we also needed to improve efficiency. If you were alive in the mid-1800’s, the future looked bleak. The world was quickly exhausting natural fertilizers (like manure) and had no easy way to synthetically produce nitrogen, a vital ingredient for crop production.
Between 1909-1914, German scientists found a way to synthesize ammonia to create fertilizer at an industrial scale. Fortunately for the world, the allies confiscated & distributed the Haber-Bosch process after WW1 to enable the mass production of cheap fertilizers. The only downside is that it requires a potent greenhouse gas, methane... more on that later.
With this new tech, the 1940-60s became a golden age for agriculture known as ‘The Green Revolution’. Several agricultural technologies reached widespread adoption around the world: mechanical harvesters, irrigation, high yield seeds, and (most importantly) chemical fertilizer.
These innovations collectively boosted crop yields globally by more than 3x (with fertilizer contributing more than 50% of the gains), providing the necessary calories for the humans to continue on their path of world domination.
While we’ve made impressive progress, the world is not famine free. An estimated 88 million people still suffer from famine but not because we don’t have enough food. Conflict is the cause. It tears families apart, destroys infrastructure, and razes farms to the ground. If we care about food security, we need to first solve the root causes of conflict.. a topic much much much too complicated to cover here.
Looking ahead, we already grow enough food to feed over 10B people, we *just* need to allocate calories effectively (eat more plants) & stop wasting so goddamn much (1/3rd of all food is wasted). A topic for a later time...
Our Energy Addiction
All of this growth comes at a price. The currency used to purchase a modern economy is energy. Energy is used as leverage to increase the output of the individual. As GDP increases, so does energy use.
For millennia, a society's wealth was directly dependent on agricultural output. The only way to increase wealth was to grow more food to feed more people or animals to then create more wealth. Agriculture was energy. Humanity was plagued by this growth trap as evidenced by a long history of land conquests and wars.
This all changed in the 1800s when we invented engines to unlock the power from cheap, high-density energy stored underground in coal, oil, and gas. Suddenly, a country no longer needed land to grow energy, they could simply dig into the Earth, extract, and burn it.
Unsurprisingly, the countries that were able to harness the power of engines sooner had a massive advantage in their ability to build robust, electrified economies that provide luxuries like cars, climate control, food abundance, and computers for its citizens.
Consider the energy required for something as mundane as driving to work for a western office worker… the car must be manufactured, filled with a refined oil product, driven on a paved road to a large, well lit, climate controlled building in an urban office center… you get the idea.
Where do we go from here?
Playing these trends out, we can map out a potential future for the industrialized world of 2050: a wealthier, more populous developing world that lives mostly in cities and consumes much more energy.
Overall, this is good news for humanity! Billions of people are quickly approaching modern living standards as longevity increases and extreme poverty decreases.
Conservative estimates predict we’ll need ~270,000 TWh by 2050. It previously took 45 years to increase our generation by the same amount ... so we’re already behind schedule. This is bad news for the environment. Our surging energy demand is being met almost entirely by non-renewable, dirty sources.
Shocking no one, feeding 8x more humans also takes quite a toll on Earth’s ecosystems. Destroying forests to grow food, synthesizing fertilizers from methane, and maintaining an enormous entourage of animals to be eaten (among other things) really messes with the carbon cycle.
So we know that burning fossil fuels & feeding billions is causing the world to warm & the consequences will be felt for centuries. If we want to limit our future climate risk (and we should), we need to find ways to minimize these emissions.
You know what they say about assumptions…
For these trends to hold up, a few things need to be true:
Society doesn’t break down: Not to be dramatic, but the relative peace of the 20th century is a historic anomaly. Most of human history is characterized by incentives to exploit violence for personal gain. We like to think we’re in a permanent golden age of peaceful global empire, but as the Romans knew: "Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too." The past doesn’t look pleasant.
People will always want more stuff: as we saw, wealthier people tend to want more stuff & therefore need more energy. While this may be true in the individualistic West, this may not be the case for the developing world. However, I have a hard time imagining 2 billion people enduring 100F+ weather not wanting AC.
Developing countries don’t leapfrog urbanization: computers now make it possible to work from anywhere (with Internet, not to be taken for granted). Much like how several countries skipped landlines, it’s possible that they may skip cities & factories in favor of remote work. Similarly, digital goods have minuscule energy footprints vs physical goods. To make this leap, countries will need to make significant investments into education- something I believe will take 1-2 generations.
The most exciting time to be alive
We’re in uncharted territory. Never in the history of our species have we had the opportunity to dramatically improve the living standards of all humans in such a short amount of time. However, as I hope I’ve shown, it comes at a cost.
The challenge of our generation is to navigate the transition to a prosperous world in a sustainable way. I can’t emphasize this enough- it boils down to a single generation of humans to figure this shit out.
Steered correctly, billions of humans live a better life for generations. If we fail, we may lose centuries of progress- it’s happened before. So let’s fucking do it.
Next, we’ll explore a framework for how we can right the ship.
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Thanks for coming,
Logan
Want more?
Our World in Data has an exceptional overview of many of these topics (as evidenced by all of their graphs I use). Check it out if you want to dig deeper. I also enjoyed Vaclav Smil’s excellent books for macro-thinking.
Chomping at the bit for more climate change content? Here are some of my favorites:
The Carbon Curve: Learning about the frontiers of carbon dioxide removal and carbon tech - and how to scale it up
Going Green: What problems need to be solved on the path to a carbon-free economy (digital and physical)?
🤷🏽♂️ Not My Problem: Startups across the world that are working towards improving the health of the planet
Evergreen: The main climate challenges and opportunities in front of us. Breaking down the particular causes of emissions within our economy and what solutions will get us to net zero.
Climate Money: How climate and money (finance, currencies, market opportunities) intersect
Climatic Thoughts: Solutions towards keeping the world under 2 degrees of warming
Climate Pioneers: Exploring low- and high-tech climate solutions.
Usual disclaimers: I’m not an expert and will never claim to be. I’ll probably be lacking context, too vague, or flat-out wrong frequently & I hope folks will hold me accountable. After all, the fastest way to find the right answer is to post the wrong answer visibly on the Internet. Lastly, there is a ton of great information online already (e.g. Drawdown, Breakthrough Energy playbooks). I will synthesize and cite as I go.