The Future (76 page)
Authors: Al Gore
58
capital city of Sana’a only one day in four
Lester Brown, “This Will Be the Arab World’s Next Battle,”
Guardian
, April 22, 2011.
59
declined more than 30 percent in the last four decades
Ibid.
60
“a hydrological basket case”
Ibid.
61
dramatically overminimize the future effects of choices
David Laibson, “Golden Eggs and Hyperbolic Discounting,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
112 (May 1997): 443–78.
62
more than 95 percent of the new additions will be in developing countries
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision,” 2011,
http://esa.un.org/wpp/Documentation/pdf/WPP2010_Highlights.pdf
.
63
global population will take place in cities
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Urbanization
Prospects: The 2011 Revision,” March 2012,
http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/pdf/WUP2011_Highlights.pdf
.
64
population of the world at the beginning of the 1990s
Ibid.; U.S. Census Bureau, “Total Midyear Population for the World: 1950–2050,”
http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpop/table_population.php
.
65
increased tenfold over the last forty years
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Urbanization Prospects: The 2011 Revision.”
66
see a reduction in their share of the world’s urban population
Ibid.
67
no more than 15 percent of people ever lived in urban areas
Susan Thomas, “Urbanization as a Driver of Change,”
Arup Journal
, 2008.
68
still only 13 percent at the beginning of the twentieth century
Sukkoo Kim, “Urbanization,”
The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Thomas, “Urbanization as a Driver of Change.”
69
for the first time, more than half of us lived in cities
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Urbanization Prospects: The 2011 Revision.”
70
64 percent of the population in less developed countries living in cities
Ibid.
71
in 2013, twenty-three cities will have more than that number
Ibid.
72
thirty-seven such megacities will sprawl across the Earth
Ibid.
73
a projected increase of 175 percent between 2000 and 2030
United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA),
State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth
,
http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2007/english/introduction.html
.
74
from 11 million today to just under 19 million in 2025
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Urbanization Prospects: The 2011 Revision.”
75
projected to have a population of almost 33 million people by 2025
Ibid.
76
By 2050, almost 70 percent of the world’s population will be city dwellers
Ibid.
77
roughly one out of every three inhabitants of cities
Most of us have an image of what a “slum” is, but in fact slums come in different shapes and sizes. What they share in common, according to the United Nations definition: “lacking at least one of the basic conditions of decent housing: adequate sanitation, improved water supply, durable housing or adequate living space.” UNFPA,
State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth
.
78
two billion people within the next seventeen years
Ben Sutherland, “Slum Dwellers ‘to Top 2 Billion,’ ” BBC, June 20, 2006,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/5099038.stm
.
79
growing at a rate even faster than the overall urban growth rate
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Population Monitoring: Focusing on Population Distribution, Urbanization, Internal Migration, and Development, 2009.
80
especially in developing countries—do so to earn higher incomes
David Satterthwaite et al., “Urbanization and Its Implications for Food and Farming,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
365, no. 1554 (2010): 2809–20.
81
and into the middle class—particularly in Asia
European Strategy and Policy Analysis System,
Global Trends 2030—Citizens in an Interconnected and Polycentric World
,
http://www.iss.europa.eu/uploads/media/ESPAS_report_01.pdf
.
82
growing global middle class will live in cities
Ibid., p. 19.
83
more than 80 percent of global production takes place in cities
Richard Dobbs, Jaana Remes, and Charles Roxburgh, “Boomtown 2025: A Special Report,”
Foreign Policy
, March 24, 2011.
84
significantly higher than in rural areas
David Owen,
Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability
(New York: Riverhead Trade, 2010); Qi Jingmei, “Urbanization Helps Consumption,”
China Daily
, December 15, 2009.
85
per capita consumption of meat
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, “Livestock in the Balance,”
The State of Food and Agriculture 2009
.
86
nine kilograms of plant protein are consumed
“Mankind Benefits from Eating Less Meat,” PhysOrg, April 6, 2006,
http://phys.org/news63547941.html
.
87
even as more than 900 million people
United Nations, Millennium Development Goals Report 2011.
88
by approximately twenty pounds in the last forty years
Claudia Dreifus, “A Mathematical Challenge to Obesity,”
New York Times
, May 14, 2012.
89
half the adult population of the United States will be obese by 2030, with one quarter of them “severely obese”
Eric Finkelstein et al., “Obesity and Severe Obesity Forecasts Through 2030,”
American Journal of Preventive Medicine
, June 2012; “Most Americans May Be Obese by 2030, Report Warns,” ABC News, September 18, 2012; “Fat and Getting Fatter: U.S. Obesity Rates to Soar by 2030,” Reuters, September 18, 2012.
90
steadily decreasing the number of people suffering from chronic hunger
United Nations, Millennium Development Goals Report 2011.
91
obesity has more than doubled in the last thirty years
World Health Organization Media Centre, “Obesity and Overweight,” May 2012,
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs311/en/index.html
.
92
more than a third of them are classified as obese
Ibid.
93
obese and overweight than from conditions related to being underweight
Ibid.
94
suffering from diabetes die from either stroke or heart disease
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Diabetes Statistics, 2011,
http://diabetes.niddk.nih.gov/dm/pubs/statistics/
.
95
almost 17 percent of U.S. children are obese today
Tara Parker-Pope, “Obesity Rates Stall, but No Decline,”
New York Times
, Well blog, January 17, 2012,
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/obesity-rates-stall-but-no-decline/
.
96
almost 7 percent of all children in the world
ProCor, “Global: Childhood Obesity Rate Higher Than 20 Years Ago,” September 28, 2010,
http://www.procor.org/prevention/prevention_show.htm?doc_id=1367793
.
97
will continue to grow in the future, both in the U.S. and globally
Parker-Pope, “Obesity Rates Stall, but No Decline.”
98
trigger brain systems that increase the desire to eat more
Tara Parker-Pope, “How the Food Makers Captured Our Brains,”
New York Times
, June 23, 2009.
99
“salt and sugars but low in vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients”
World Health Organization Media Centre, “Obesity and Overweight.”
100
separated more people from reliable sources of fresh fruit and vegetables
“If You Build It, They May Not Come,”
Economist
, July 7, 2011.
101
calories per gram in sweets and foods abundant in starch
David Bornstein, “Time to Revisit Food Deserts,”
New York Times
, Opinionator blog, April 25, 2012,
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/time-to-revisit-food-deserts/
.
102
while prices of fats declined by 15 percent and sugared soft drinks by 25 percent
Ibid.
103
knowledge necessary for food preparation both also play a role
Ibid.
104
threw the healthier food away
Vivian Yee, “No Appetite for Good-for-You School Lunches,”
New York Times
, October 5, 2012.
105
introduction of American fast food outlets and climbing obesity rates
Jeannine Stein, “Wealthy Nations with a Lot of Fast Food: Destined to Be Obese?,”
Los Angeles Times
, December 22, 2011.
106
Consequently, food prices went down significantly
Charles Kenny, “The Global Obesity Bomb,”
BloombergBusinessweek
, June 4, 2012.
107
precisely with the large average weight gains and increased obesity
Dreifus, “A Mathematical Challenge to Obesity.”
108
skimpily clad sex symbol washing a car
Eric Noe, “How Well Does Paris Sell Burgers?,” ABC News, June 29, 2005,
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=893867&page=1#.UGMPQI40jdk
.
109
equivalent of adding an extra one billion people
Matt McGrath, “Global Weight Gain More Damaging Than Rising Numbers,” BBC, June 20, 2012.
110
first national circulation magazines and the first silent films
Johannes Malkmes,
American Consumer Culture and Its Society: From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920s Modernism to Bret Easton Ellis’ 1980s Blank Fiction
(Hamburg: Diplomica, 2011), p. 44.
111
new products like automobiles and radios
Jeremy Rifkin,
The End of Work
(New York: Putnam, 1995), p. 22.
112
70 percent of U.S. homes by the end of the 1920s
Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon, “The Greatest Century That Ever Was: 25 Miraculous Trends of the Past 100 Years,” Cato Policy Analysis No. 364, Cato Institute, December 15, 1999,
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa364.pdf
, p. 20.
113
manufacturers and merchants in the emerging science of mass marketing
Rifkin,
The End of Work
, pp. 20–22.
114
industry entered a new and distinctly different role
Daniel Pope, “Making Sense of Advertisements,” History Matters: The U.S. Survey on the Web,
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/ads/ads.pdf
.
115
many of the other most prominent intellectuals in America
Russell Jacoby, “Freud’s Visit to Clark U,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, September 2009.
116
American Psychoanalytic Society was founded two years after Freud’s visit
Leon Hoffman, “Freud’s Adirondack Vacation,”
New York Times
, August 29, 2009.
117
Committee on Public Information
Woodrow Wilson: Executive Order 2594—Creating Committee on Public Information, April 13, 1917, American Presidency Project,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=75409
.
118
set out to introduce the techniques into mass marketing
Institute for Studies in Happiness, Economy, and Society, Alternatives and Complements to GDP-Measured Growth as a Framing Concept for Social Progress, 2012.
119
in order to avoid using the word “propaganda”
I explain the history of the word “propaganda”—and its meaning in the United States—in a previous book. See
The Assault on Reason
(New York: Penguin Press, 2007), pp. 93–96.
120
by Germany to describe its mass communications strategy
Sam Pocker,
Retail Anarchy: A Radical Shopper’s Adventures in Consumption
(Philadelphia: Running Press, 2009), p. 122.
121
in their subconscious minds that might be relevant
Larry Tye, “The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of P.R.,” PR Watch, 1999,
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/1999Q2/bernays.html
.
122
“Man’s desires must overshadow his needs”
Paul Mazur, as quoted in
Century of the Self
, BBC Four, April–May 2002.
123
“It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind”
Edward Bernays,
Propaganda
(New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), p. 38.