【文章內(nèi)容簡介】 d faster. Shenzhen, in China, with its hundreds of skyscrapers and millions of inhabitants, was just a small fishing village barely 40 years ago. Faster and faster. In Shanghai, 3,000 towers and skyscrapers have been built in 20 years. Hundreds more are under construction. Today, over half of the world’s seven billion inhabitants live in cities. New York. The world’s first megalopolis is the symbol of the exploitation of the energy the Earth supplies to human genius. The manpower of millions of immigrants, the energy of coal, the unbridled power of oil. Electricity resulted in the invention of elevators, which in turn permitted the invention of skyscrapers. New York ranks as the 16th –largest economy in the world.American was the first to discover, exploit and harness the phenomenal revolutionary power of black gold. With its help, a country of farmers became a country of agricultural industrialists. Machines replaced men. A liter of oil generates as much energy as 100 pairs of hands in 24 hours, but worldwide only three percent of farmers have use of a tractor. Nonetheless, their output dominates the planet. In the United States, only three million farmers are left. They produce enough grain to feed two billion people. But most of that grain is not used to feed people. Here, and in all other industrialized nations, it’s transformed into livestock feed or biofuels. The pocket of sunshine’s energy chased away the specter of drought that stalked farmland. No spring escapes the demands of agriculture, which accounts for 70% of humanity’s water consumption. In nature, everything is linked. The expansion of cultivated land and singlecrop farming encouraged the development of parasites. Pesticides, another gift of the petrochemical revolution, exterminated them. Bad harvests and famine became a distant memory. The biggest headache now was what to do with the surpluses engendered by modern agriculture. But toxic pesticides seeped into the air, soil, plants, animals, rivers and oceans. They penetrated the heart of cells similar to the mother cell that is shared by all forms of life. Are they harmful to the humans that they released from hunger? These farmers, in their yellow protective suits, probably have a good idea. The new agriculture abolished the dependence on soils and seasons. Fertilizers produced unprecedented results on plots of land thus far ignored. Crops adapted to soils and climates gave way to the most productive varieties and the easiest to transport. And so, in the last century, threequarters of the varieties developed by farmers over thousands of years have been wiped out. As far as the eye can see, fertilizer below, plastic on top. The greenhouses of Almeria in Spain are Europe’s vegetable garden. A city of uniformly sized vegetables waits every day for the hundreds of trucks that will take them to the continent’s supermarkets. The more a country develops, the more meat its inhabitants consume. How can growing worldwide demand be satisfied without recourse to concentration campstyle cattle farms? Faster and faster. Like the life cycle of livestock which may never see a meadow, manufacturing meat faster than the animal has bee a daily routine. In these vast food lots, trampled by millions of cattle, not a blade of grass grows. A fleet of trucks from every corner of the country brings in tons of grain, soy meal and proteinrich granules that will bee tons of meat. The result is that it takes 100 liters of water to produce one kilogram of potatoes, 4,000 for one kilo of rice and 13,000 for one kilo of beef. Not to mention the oil guzzled in the production process and transport. Our agriculture has bee oilpowered. It feeds twice as many humans on Earth but has replaced diversity with standardization. It has offered many of us forts we could only dream of, but it makes our way of life totally dependent on oil. This is the new measure of time. Our world’s clock now beats to the rhythm of these indefatigable machines tapping into the pocket of sunlight. Their regularity reassures us. The tiniest hiccup throws us into disarray. The whole planet is attentive to these metronomes of our hopes and illusions. The same hopes, and illusions that proliferate along with our needs, increasingly insatiable desires and profligacy. We know that the end of cheap oil is imminent, but we refuse to believe it. For many of us, the American dream is embodied by a legendary name: Los Angeles. In this city that stretches over 100 kilometers, the number of cars is almost equal to the number of inhabitants.Here, energy puts on a fantastic show every night. The day seems to be no more than the pale reflection of nights that turn the city into a starry sky. Faster and faster. Distances are no longer counted in miles but in minutes. The automobile shapes new suburbs where every home is a castle, a safe distance from the asphyxiated city centers, and where neat rows of houses huddle round deadend streets. The model of a lucky few countries has bee a universal dream, preached by televisions all over the world. Even here in Beijing, it is cloned, copied and reproduced in these formatted houses that have wiped pagodas off the map.The automobile has bee the symbol of fort and progress. If this model were followed by every society, the planet wouldn’t have 900 million vehicles, as it does today, but five billion. Faster and faster. The more the world develops, the greater its thirst for energy. Everywhere, machines dig, bore and rip from the Earth, the pieces of stars buried in its depths since its creation: minerals.In the next 20 years, more ore will be extracted from the Earth than in the whole of humanity’s history. As a privilege of power, 80% of this mineral wealth is consumed by 20% of the world’s population. Before the end of this century, excessive mining will have exhausted nearly all the planet’s reserves. Faster and faster. Shipyards churn out oil tanker