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Computing a hard limit on growth

Vaclav Smil’s latest book investigates the cost of energy use on a planet with finite resources. Melanie Moses praises the result.
By
  1. Melanie Moses

    1. Melanie Moses is professor of computer science at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities Vaclav Smil MIT Press (2019)

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Nature 573, 344-345 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02716-z

This article is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 media outlets to highlight the issue of climate change.

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 17 September 2019: An earlier version of this article misstated the energy consumption of hunter-gatherers; it is 5–6 gigajoules per year. This has now been corrected.

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