LETTER FROM THE FOUNDER
We live in a plentiful world.
Over the past 500 years, the human race has seen our global population increase 14x, while our consumption (as measured in global energy use) has grown by 115x and our production (as measured in global GDP) has increased 240x. While there are many more people on Earth, a great deal more has been made available to each of them than could have ever been imagined.
Much of the growth in production and consumption was fueled by the Industrial Revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries—cheaper, more available energy, food, medicine, and goods brought on by centralizing and automating repeatable tasks, driving massive scale and affordability. These productivity gains have given humans access to the inputs needed for survival, abundance, and, increasingly, excess.
The resulting economic prosperity is impressive. According to Maddison Project Database (2018), global GDP per capita climbed from $3,277 in 1950 to $14,574 by 2016. In fact, according to the World Bank, over just the 25 years between 1990 and 2015, the global extreme poverty rate declined from 36% of the world population to just under 10%; a remarkable achievement that translates into opportunity and prosperity for the vast majority of the world’s people.
With excess capital, we’ve invested in and realized extraordinary growth in food production. As we’ve industrialized our food systems, the cost per unit of food produced has massively reduced while our food supply has steadily climbed. Since 1961, the global supply of calories per capita has risen by nearly a third to almost 3,000 calories per person per day in 2020. As a result, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, since 1970, we have seen a decline in undernourishment in developing countries from 35% of the population to below 13% by 2015.
These gains, and other consequences of the Industrial Revolutions, have caused human life expectancy to climb to previously unimaginable spans. In 1860, the average life expectancy of a U.S. person was 40 years. By 2015, that figure was nearly 80 years, and is projected to continue scaling with no known upper limit. It is conceivable that someone alive today will live longer than 200 years.
Progress, however, has not been without cost. While humankind has realized amazing gains in livelihood and lifestyle, the rest of the planet is suffering from the consequences of our prosperity.
CO2 emissions have climbed with the industrialization of our systems of production, with most of these systems reliant on machines powered by electricity, the generation of which produces atmospheric carbon as its primary byproduct. As more nations become more prosperous, GDP per capita rises and populations demand more goods, thus further increasing CO2 output per capita. We have been riding this vicious cycle for over a century now.
Excess carbon in the atmosphere is expected to drive, and has already resulted in, myriad deleterious effects across the planet’s oceanic, atmospheric, and biological systems.
The last 5 years are the hottest ever recorded on planet Earth, and annual natural disasters have increased 10-fold since 1960. These changing weather patterns, coupled with the industrialization of the Earth’s surface for food production have resulted in a loss of ⅓ of the arable land on Earth since 1980 and a 20% decline in native species in most land habitats. The annual global species extinction rate has grown 10 to 100-fold from the baseline average of the past 10 million years.
The relationship between these two equally remarkable trends in global prosperity and climate change can be simply summarized: the Industrial Revolutions generally did not develop radically new technologies: rather, they simply scaled up ancient technologies.
An example is the production of protein for human consumption—our approach is largely the same as it has been for thousands of years: fertilizer is applied to the land, crops are grown, which are fed to animals, who are then slaughtered, whose meat is then transported to a destination for consumption. Industrialization brought us efficient synthetic fertilizers, higher-yield lower-labor farming, transportation trucks, and slaughterhouses, but we are still making protein using animals and plants in the same system we always