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the first significant human use of fossil fuels—coal— arose during the Song dynasty (960–1279) in China [36,37]. Drawn from mines in the north, the Chinese coal industry, developed primarily to support its iron industry, grew in size through the eleventh century to become equal to the production of the entire European (excluding Russia) coal industry in 1700.

the European coal industry, primarily in England, was beginning its ascent in the thirteenth century. The use of coal grew as did the size of London, and became the fuel of choice in the city because of its high energy density.

energy constraints provided a strong bottleneck for the growth of human numbers and activity. The discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels shattered that bottleneck. Fossil fuels represented a vast energy store of solar energy from the past that had accumulated from tens or hundreds of millions of years of photosynthesis. They were the perfect fuel source—energy-rich, dense, easily transportable and relatively straightforward to access. Human energy use rose sharply. In general, those industrial societies used four or five times as much energy as their agrarian predecessors, who in turn used three or four times as much as our hunting and gathering forebears [52].

Over the past 15 years, China has come to dominate the global market for solar energy. Nearly every solar panel on the planet is made by a Chinese company. Even the equipment to manufacture solar panels is made almost entirely in China. The country’s solar panel exports, measured by how much power they can produce, jumped another 10 percent in May over last year.

But China’s solar panel domestic industry is in upheaval.

Wholesale prices plummeted by almost half last year and have fallen another 25 percent this year. Chinese manufacturers are competing for customers by cutting prices far below their costs, and still keep building more factories.

We must replace our old linear industrial model with a new – and circular – industrial model.

Similarly, BioGen in Britain has a renew and restore strategy where it produces renewable energy (biogas) from food waste and in turn use the waste slurry as bio-fertilizer, which has been shown to produce higher crop yields compared with chemical fertilizers.

Similarly, the Dutch company aWEARness has created the first true “circular” clothing items. WearEver suits are made from 100per cent recyclable polyester, giving the total life of the suit between 40 and 50 years.

the culture of intelligence has been in free-fall since the financial crisis of 2008. While people may be pretending to follow intelligence, impostors in both the analyst and executive camps actually follow shallow, fake processes that justify their existing decisions and past investments.

three trends are making this harder

the explosion of cheap capital from Wall Street has led major industries to consolidate. Where a sector such as pharmaceuticals or telecommunications (and, of course, banking) might have had dozens of big players a couple of decades ago, now it has closer to five. When I began in the intelligence industry 15 years ago, I did projects for Compaq, Amoco, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, and Cingular -- all of which have since been rolled into the conglomerates of Hewlett Packard, British Petroleum, Pfizer, and AT&T. There are fewer firms for an intelligence analyst to track, and their behavior has to be understood on totally different terms than when this discipline was created.

by the standards of today’s Republican Party, the Cheney report was enlightened, even left-leaning. One whole chapter was devoted to conservation, another to renewable energy. By contrast, recent speeches by Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio — still the most likely Republican presidential nominees — barely address either topic. When it comes to energy policy, the G.O.P. has become fossilized. That is, it’s fossil fuels, and only fossil fuels, all the way.

renewables have become major industries in their own right, employing several hundred thousand people in the United States. Employment in the solar industry alone now exceeds the number of coal miners, and solar is adding jobs even as coal declines.

renewables account for essentially all recent growth in electricity generation capacity in advanced countries.

The history of an era often seems defined by a particular commodity.

The 18th century certainly belonged to sugar. The race to cultivate it in the West Indies was, in the words of the French Enlightenment writer Guillaume-Thomas de Raynal, “the principal cause of the rapid movement which stirs the Universe.”

In the 20th century and beyond, the commodity has been oil: determining events from the Allied partitioning of the Middle East after World War I to Hitler’s drive for Balkan and Caspian wells to the forging of our own fateful ties to the regimes of the Persian Gulf.

The history of labor shows that technology does not usually drive social change. On the contrary, social change is typically driven by decisions we make about how to organize our world. Only later does technology swoop in, accelerating and consolidating those changes.

This insight is crucial for anyone concerned about the insecurity and other shortcomings of the gig economy. For it reminds us that far from being an unavoidable consequence of technological progress, the nature of work always remains a matter of social choice. It is not a result of an algorithm; it is a collection of decisions by corporations and policymakers

In the industrious revolution, however, manufacturers gathered workers under one roof, where the labor could be divided and supervised. For the first time on a large scale, home life and work life were separated. People no longer controlled how they worked, and they received a wage instead of sharing directly in the profits of their efforts.

both Frum and D’Souza changed since the 1980s, but they have tacked in different directions.

Frum still identifies as a conservative. But he opposed Barack Obama without thinking of him as un-American or the devil incarnate. For that act of moderation, he lost some affiliations but cemented his status as a heterodox public intellectual during a time when folks only wanted to hear from partisan thought leaders.

So is this merely a tale of one intellectual losing power while drifting toward the center while another intellectual is gaining power by becoming more partisan? No, because there are few tidy endings in “The Ideas Industry.”

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.

Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.

It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

After the end of the Cold War, the United States forged a new world. The driving, animating idea behind this new world was the belief that global trade integration would restrain international conflict.

We didn’t just pay lip service to this theory; we bet the entire world on it. The U.S. and Europe championed the admission of China into the World Trade Organization, and deliberately looked the other way on a number of things that might have given us reason to restrict trade with China (currency manipulation in the 00s, various mercantilist policies, poor labor and environmental standards). As a result, the global economy underwent a titanic shift. Whereas global manufacturing, trading networks, and supply chains had once been dominated by the U.S., Japan, and Germany, China now came to occupy the central place in all of these:

As of 2021, China’s manufacturing output was equal to that of the U.S. and all of Europe combined.

He did not favor making outlaws of people for enjoying a drug that is less injurious than alcohol or tobacco. But he worried that a robust commercial marketplace would inevitably lead to much more consumption.

Today the most interesting and important question is no longer whether marijuana will be legalized — eventually, bit by bit, it will be — but how.

He has not come to believe marijuana is harmless, but he suspects that the best hope of minimizing its harm may be a well-regulated market.

Mr Mankiw begins with a thought experiment: "Imagine a society with perfect economic equality...Then, one day, this egalitarian utopia is disturbed by an entrepreneur with an idea for a new product. Think of the entrepreneur as Steve Jobs as he develops the iPod, J.K. Rowling as she writes her Harry Potter books, or Steven Spielberg as he directs his blockbuster movies." Everyone wants to buy the entrepreneur's product, which results in a hugely unequal distribution of income. Should the government shift to a progressive tax system to reduce the inequality?Obviously Mr Mankiw discovers that the answer is "no", because that's the answer he has built his analogy to produce.

Mr Mankiw's analogy sneaks in his conclusion by implying that greater inequality is the price we pay for more invention and creativity. But his own choices of hero-entrepreneurs make it clear that there's no evidence to support this claim.

Of the three Mr Mankiw proposes, only Steve Jobs plausibly had an irreducible, unique effect on material culture and the structure of an industry. Mr Spielberg and Ms Rowling are acclaimed artists, but their startling wealth and prominence are entirely due to the increasing power of network effects in mass culture over the past several decades. Mr Spielberg happened to be directing his first movies just as Hollywood was beginning to stage coordinated marketing blitzes that created round-the-block lines for top-grossing films. Ms Rowling hit the bookshelves just as a similar superstar phenomenon was taking over publishing, with sales increasingly concentrated on individual mega-bestsellers rather than spread across a few dozen authors and titles. Mr Jobs is an unusual figure in that his ability to combine engineering, aesthetics, and a vision of how users might interact with the digital universe has created a kind of integrated multi-product entity that might not otherwise have existed; it's not clear that BlackBerry, Nokia or Samsung would have been up to the task. But even in Mr Jobs's case, much of the power that accrued to Apple was due to the gradual sorting of the consumer information-technology world into integrated ecosystems

13-month high of 5.7%

retail inflation slowed to a 25-month low in Decembe

The manufacturing sector rose 5.5% in November compared to a decline of 4.6% in November 2015 while mining rose an annual 3.9% compared to 1.7% in the year earlier period. The capital goods sector, which is seen as a key gauge of industrial activity, rose 15% in November compared to a decline of 24.4% in November 2015. The consumer durables sector rose 9.8% compared to a growth of 12.2%. The electricity sector grew 8.9% in November compared to 0.7% expansion in November 2015.

Trump’s policy style represents a sharp break from that of his predecessors. It is highly personalized and temperamental. It relies on threats and bullying. It is prone to boasting, exaggeration, and lies about actual successes.

It is ironic that the same people who extol Chinese gains from globalization are often alarmed that a US administration may copy the Chinese approach and explicitly endorse industrial policies.

. On the other hand, his policymaking-by-tweet suggests he doesn’t have much interest in building the institutionalized dialogue, with all the required safeguards, that sound industrial policy requires

Demand continues to outpace supply, and major retailers and users persist in their scramble for warehouse and distribution space nearer to customers

“I think 2017 is still going to see rising rents and supply-demand imbalance that will lead to shrinking vacancies, but the magnitude will get a bit smaller this year,” Egan said.

The Industrial Revolution that occurred in the 19th century was of great importance to the economic future of the United States. Three industrial developments led the way to industrialization in America:

College fraternities—by which term of art I refer to the formerly all-white, now nominally integrated men’s “general” or “social” fraternities, and not the several other types of fraternities on American campuses (religious, ethnic, academic)—are as old, almost, as the republic.

While the system has produced its share of poets, aesthetes, and Henry James scholars, it is far more famous for its success in the powerhouse fraternity fields of business, law, and politics. An astonishing number of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, congressmen and male senators, and American presidents have belonged to fraternities

They also have a long, dark history of violence against their own members and visitors to their houses, which makes them in many respects at odds with the core mission of college itself.

Narratives are inevitably moralistic; they are never created spontaneously from “the facts” but are rather stories imposed upon a range of phenomena that always include implicit ideas about what’s right and what’s wrong

sustainability-minded thinkers question whether the Industrial Revolution has jeopardized humankind’s ability to live happily and sustainably upon the Earth. Have the fossil-fueled good times put future generations at risk of returning to the same misery that industrialists were in such a rush to leave behind?

in many ways, the ecological crisis of the present day has roots in the Industrial Revolution.

Every other rich country also needs to make similar cuts, immediately. The developed nations with large emissions (Saudi Arabia, Canada, Germany, Japan, Britain and others) can afford their own Green New Deals; perhaps they can be persuaded to do their parts, if we do.

developing nations — such as India, Pakistan, Ecuador and Malaysia — aren’t going to unilaterally constrain their own economies. If carbon-based energy sources help them compete in the global marketplace, that’s what they’ll use — unless, economists say, they get financial help to develop sustainably, with industrialization powered by renewable energy instead of oil, gas and coal. And there’s only one place they can get that help: from wealthy countries like ours. Giving them cash needs to be part of any Green New Deal.

In the poorest developing countries, where many people live without electricity or other basic necessities, it is unrealistic to expect emissions to drop from their already low rates in the next decade. Some of these countries, including India, Indonesia and the Philippines, are very populous, and their industrialization could cause emissions to skyrocket.

High power prices, continued coal dependency and a “poor CO2 emissions record” mean Germany is falling behind other countries in shifting away from fossil fuels, according to McKinsey’s new global Energy Transition Index

In Europe, 11 countries including Sweden, Austria, Denmark, the U.K. and France do better in cutting coal dependency and greening their energy systems.

The European Commission’s latest country assessment, published earlier this month, found that Germany is at “considerable risk” of missing its national energy efficiency target of 20 percent by 2020. For now, it is still expected to meet its 2020 renewable energy target of 18 percent,