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It reminds me of Game of Thrones and The Count of Monte Cristo—though not in a good way 🙃
But we’ll see.

…without its use as the dominant nitrogen fertilizer (directly or as feedstock for the synthesis of other nitrogenous compounds), it would be impossible to feed at least 40 percent and up to so percent of today's nearly 8 billion people.

Four materials rank highest on this combined scale, and they form what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia.

In well-off societies, a better way to reduce agriculture’s dependence on fossil fuel subsidies is to make appeals for adopting healthy and satisfactory alternatives to today’s excessively rich and meaty diets - the easiest choices being moderate meat consumption, and favoriting meat that can be grown with lower environmental impact. The quest for mass-scale veganism is doomed to fail.

… our food supply - be it staple grains, clucking birds, favorite vegetables, or seafood praised for its nutritious quality - has become increasingly dependent on fossil fuels.

This means that when bought in a Scandinavian supermarket, tomatoes from Almeria’s heated plastic greenhouses have a stunningly high embedded production and transportation energy cost. It’s total is equivalent to about 650 mL/kg…

… CAFOs, central animal feeding operations. In the case of chicken, this means housing and feeding tens of thousands of birds in long rectangular structures where they are crowded in dimly lit spaces (the equivalent of a moonlit night) and fed for about seven weeks before being taken away for slaughter.

Producing chicken requires energy whose total is several times higher than the energy of the edible meat.

the economic system is essentially a system for extracting, processing and transforming energy as resources into energy embodied in products and services

In her private mythology, Time was like a miller, grinding his corn in an eternal mill, funneling the events of your life into your personal sack when your turn came.

…Adam, the most rigidly honest man it was possible to find, living all his life on stolen money. … now this second will, and Aron, the most rigidly honest man a little on the self-indulgent side, living all his life on the profits from a whorehouse. Was this some kind of joke or did things balance so that if one went too far in one direction an automatic slide moved on the scale and balance was re-established?

Alf sniffed. He hardly ever believed anything simple or good about anybody. You could say good morning to Alf and he’d work it around to a password. He was convinced that everyone lived secretly and that only he could see through them.