your internal caloric consumption, but, alas, no instinctive throttle on your exosomatic impulses. You use your industrial base to combine fossil carbon with minerals and resources into stuff, and the stuff into brain rewards and waste. So, you build bigger yachts, faster cars, and taller buildings because they’re cool (and you can). You throw things away because new things are more stimulating. You ignore the world in which you evolved because for now you have air conditioning, pizza delivery and video games. Humans will probably continue to use exosomatic energy as long as you’re human, there will just be less of it because your wands will find fewer and fewer things around to burn.
The Bottom Line: Each American consumes the equivalent of >400 Big Macs per day of primary energy.
Energy Part 3 – The 5 Pools of Carbon
The Bountiful Presents from the Past
Summary: Though our hunter-gatherer ancestors had no way of knowing this, the planet that lay before them at the dawn of agriculture was both largely empty of people and replete with gifts from Earth ’s past. For hundreds of thousands of years, they only needed to access the solar energy embodied in the animals and fish and plants they encountered in their daily travels.
But by tilling the soil, using first human labor, then via harnessing draft animals, the energy and nutrients stored in the deep virgin topsoil were
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