Rachelle's Reviews > The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here

Highlights:

Page 6: "Convincing people to examine their energy use is like trying to get them to quit smoking or to eat more healthfully: they already know that they should do it, but there's a billion-dollar industry working round-the-clock, inventing new ways to make sure that they don't."

Page 12: "What is clear that societies that feature a low gender gap are also populated by women who give birth, on average, half as often as women who live in societies with a high gender gap."

Page 49-50: "If every American cut their red meat and poultry intake by half - down from four to two pounds a week - it would free up 150 million tons of grain. (...) And the grain not used to make unnecessary meat for America would increase the world's food-grain supply by a respectable 15 percent."

Page 59: "To get one pound of salmon, you need three pounds of fish meal. To get a pound of fish meal, you need to grind up to five pounds of fish. Thus, each pound of cage-raised salmon 'costs' fifteen pounds of fish from the ocean."

Page 76: "America, which makes up 4 percent of the world's population, generates 15 percent of the world's organic waste."

Page 88: "If all the fuel and electricity in use today were redistributed equally to each of the seven-plus billion people on planet Earth, each person's energy use could be equal to the average consumed by people living in Switzerland during the 1960s. (...) all of the want and suffering in the world - all of it - arises not from the earth's inability to produce buy from our inability to share. (...) Use Less and Share More."

Page 90-91: "If, instead of flying, all two hundred of us escaped from the plane into two hundred separate cars and drove, individually, from New Jersey to Minnesota, we would have collectively burned 40 percent less fuel than we ended up using for that one plane by flying all together. If instead of using separate cars we had boarded a single passenger train, the total journey would have required only half as much fuel as was required for the gas-guzzling airplane that saved each one of us fourteen hours of travel time. (...) The average American car gets about thirty miles to the gallon; the average airplane gets something like four hundred feet to the gallon."

Page 99: "Americans bought still more cars and kept driving them, and today they travel twice as far by car each year as they did in 1970. As a result, America's twenty-first-century dependence on foreign oil is higher than it has ever been, while its relations with the countries of OPEC are perhaps the worst we've known. The road not taken was also a Story of Enough, but when given the choice, we recommitted ourselves to the Story of More: America thoroughly offset any oil independence it could have gained from the miracle of renewed fuel efficiency during the 1970s and 1980s by doubling down, making more automobiles, and proceeding to use them harder."

Page 104-105: "As we have seen, the last fifty years is a Story of More - more cars, more driving, more electricity, and more manufacturing; because of this, it should come as no surprise that it is also a Story of More fossil fuel use. During the last five decades, global fossil fuel use has nearly tripled. (...) The world's total proven oil reserves constitute a fifty-year supply, given today's rate of oil use; similarly, the total proven reserves of natural gas would also last fifty years if burned at today's rate. The world's proven coal reserves are much larger: they would take about 150 years to burn through at the current rate of use. Of course, all those numbers are much too high if fossil fuel use continues to increase each year, as it has done during the last several decades. (...) If we want human society to outlast the finite resource that it is dependent upon, then any movement away from fossil fuels is a step in the right direction, and one that can't happen too soon."

Page 106: "America has left no stone unturned and no promise unmade in its desperate and luckless search for a way out of dependence on foreign oil - well, except one: burning less fuel."

Page 107: (Regarding ethanol) "This means that tens of millions of acres around the world are planted, irrigated, and fertilized, pesticides and herbicides are applied, picked, and processed - all for the purpose of mashing and fermenting the harvest into fuel. It's terribly inefficient from a resource standpoint: fossil fuel-powered tractors drive millions of miles and apply tons of chemicals to make it happen, and the whole process has been subsidized to the tune of $40 billion, just to make the farmers' ends meet."

Page 108-109: "To some extent, this is working, at least for Brazil, which is able to support itself while importing one-tenth the amount of oil imported by the United States. The United States, on the other hand, imports exactly as much oil as it did in the 1990s, before biofuel technologies really took off. Like most energy innovations of the last one hundred years, development of the corn-ethanol biofuel has simply been used to facilitate increased fuel consumption. (...) Biofuels are considered 'renewable' because every year that we renew the world's agriculture, we get the option of taking a portion of the harvest, mutilating it, and then setting it on fire. Biofuels do not, however, present a realistic alternative to petroleum at today's level of consumption: if the United States gave up fossil fuels cold turkey and relied 100 percent on biofuels, its current annual biofuel production would last about six days. The story is worse for the European Union: they'd last three days. Brazil could go a little longer - about three weeks, by my calculation. (...) Today, 20 percent of the gran grown on planet Earth is converted to biofuel - that's a huge fraction for a planet that is also home to eight hundred million starving people, though biofuel enthusiasts are quick to point out that the raw material for biofuel production can and sometimes does include both edible and inedible portions of the plant."

Page 111: "When we talk about energy, be it fossil fuels or renewable, it is easy to get tangled up between percentages and total amounts, and I've seen both politicians and scientists engage in this sleight of hand. (Smoking example) (...) When I want to minimize the significance of cigarettes in Brian's life, I emphasize that the percentage of his salary that he devoted to the purchase of cigarettes decreased dramatically during the twenty years that passed. When I want to maximize the significance of cigarettes in Brian's life, I emphasize that the total number of cigarettes he smoked each week increased by a factor of seven over that same time period. Both of these statements are factually correct, but when they are presented in isolation, they tend to give different impressions of Brian's habit."

Page 123: "Most of the Americans I meet don't realize that their iPhone runs off of fossil fuel. (...) This is true as well for the electric car that you sometimes think about buying. Tethered to fossil fuels through an umbilical cord made of lead, nickel, cadmium, or lithium, an electric vehicle emits its smog on the other side of town, allowing us to imagine it as clean and green."

Page 129: "Every single scientist I know is freaked out by the steep increase in carbon dioxide of the last fifty years. But we are more freaked out by the fact that our governments are not as freaked out about it as we are."

Page 131: "In short, the carbon dioxide molecule has a unique shape that intercepts and then absorbs heat. Add just a little carbon dioxide to a chamber of air, then let the sun shine through it, and the whole thing will heat up much more than a chamber without the extra carbon dioxide."

Page 135: "Minnesota, along with the rest of the Midwest, has become downright balmy since I was a kid, and more and more of what used to be snow now comes down as rain. The season when there's snow on the ground is two full weeks shorter than it was in 1972; the ice covering Lake Superior thaws three weeks earlier than it did in 1905. For a whole bunch of reasons, including too-thin ice, kids don't skate on the ponds in my hometown anymore, but they do sneeze out ragweed pollen for an additional fifteen days compared to when I was a kid. (...) As carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation, hot pockets of air get hotter. This causes the contrast between warm and cold pockets to get bigger and incites faster evaporation from the ocean, which puts more moisture into the air that eventually has to fall back out somewhere."

Page 136: "The average global surface temperature has increased more than 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit during the last one hundred years"

Page 137: "the UNFCCC produced the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement between industrialized countries and the rest of the world to reduce carbon dioxide emissions back to below 1990 levels. The United States signed the protocol but never ratified it, and Canada withdrew once it became clear that the decrease was not happening. Both the European Union and Russia signed the agreement and then allowed their carbon dioxide emissions to rise regardless. Emissions also increased in China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Japan, and several other countries that signed but never specified a target for reduction. It was a very nice idea that everyone basically agreed to and then completely blew off."

Page 138: "Donald Trump announcing that the United States will not comply with the terms of the Paris Agreement is like me announcing that I will not rule England after Queen Elizabeth dies, but the international media still reported it as news. (...) The problem is that there's no way to enforce a cultural aspiration posing as an international agreement; so far, nations have gone to war in order to secure fossil fuels, not to desecure them. There's also no short-term economic incentive for stuffing the fossil fuel genie back into its bottle, or even for trying. Fiscal cycles turn much faster than biogeochemical cycles, and there is no industrial profit to be made in pushing a Story of Less."

Page 140: "My own goal is to inform you, not to scare you, because teaching has taught me to know and respect the difference. I've found that fear makes us turn away from an issue, whereas information draws us in. Thinking logically, in light of the above, it is clear that to avoid warming and upheaval beyond what we've already experienced will require a transformative approach to energy use, rather than the incremental changes supplicated within the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement.

Page 144: "of the twenty-three sites that have hosted the Winter Olympic Games since 1926, almost half can no longer accommodate the skiing, skating, and snowboarding conditions for the games today."

Page 150: "The ocean's creatures have been thrown for a loop by this warming of seawater: off the coast of North America, the average fish has moved forty miles north and forty feet deeper in search of cooler waters. Of course, this has also changed the business of fishing: the average lobster has moved a hundred miles north since 1970, and many lobster boats have had no choice but to follow."

Page 151: "Incidentally, the people of Bangladesh produced far less than 1 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere during the last fifty years, yet they are poised to pay the highest price incurred by its effects. This is a common trend: the people benefiting from the use of fossil fuels are not the people who suffer the most from its excess."

Page 160: "The current rate of global species extinction is almost one thousand times higher than the background rate seen in the rock record of fossils. If we project from today's rate of loss, the year 2050 will put us close to a total of 25 percent extinction of species; that's a third of the way to the 70 percent mark that characterizes a mass extinction."

Page 168: "I mentioned back in chapter 10 that if all the fuel and electricity in use today were redistributed equally across the earth's population, global per capita energy use would be equal to the average consumed in Switzerland during the 1960s. If, instead of waiting for this imaginary redistribution, the countries of North America, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand reduced their energy use to that level now, total global energy use would plummet by at least 20 percent, as would carbon dioxide emissions. (...) Each American would need to forgo four out of every five plane rides and travel using mass transportation at least fifty times farther each year than they do now. The United States as a whole would have to get rid of at least 30 percent of its motor vehicles, and the resultant effect on the trucking industry would require that we eat and shop from an entirely different set of goods."

Page 169: (2017 Global Happiness Council report) "analyses from more than 150 different countries determined six factors that form the social foundations of the cross-cultural concept of happiness: social support, freedom to make life choices, generosity, absence of corruption in government, health life expectancy, and per capita income."

Page 170: "Each one of us must privately ask ourselves when and where we can consume less instead of more, for it is unlikely that business and industry will ever ask on our behalf. (...) All measure of conservation (...) are worth pursuing"

Page 170-171: "An effort tempered by humility will go much further than one armored with righteousness."

Page 172: "Look at your own life: Can you identify the most energy-intensive thing that you do? Are you willing to change? We will never change our institutions if we cannot change ourselves. (...) Do not be seduced by lazy nihilism. It is precisely because no single solution will save us that everything we do matters. Every meal we eat, every mile we travel, and every dollar we spend presents us with a choice between using more energy than we did last time or less."

Page 187: "For most homes and apartments around the world, it is by far the electric water heater that uses the most energy; having hot water usually amounts to about half of the total electricity used in your home."