Vaclav Smil has a new book out on materials. Can't think of the name at this moment but look him up. Smartest guy around. He says efficient use of materials offers a lot of options for the future, but we will also have to simply reduce consumption overall. Efficiencies can't get us to an ecological footprint of 1.0…

That is beyond me. I visited Tokyo, the biggest city at around 30 million, it works quite well. I visited urban farms there that run as co-ops with all the neighbours owning shares. They use the straw mats from their apartments to make composts when they wear out. Closed loops. Very cool.

Great experiment underway in Helsink using smart phones and multiple transport modes to organize transport. They plan to largely eliminate private vehicles int he mid-2020s.

Or how about going underground? Cities should become more dense, but that doesn't necessarily mean mega structures. Follow the Golden Mean, as in three-four story building as is found in many dense European cities.

Actually, agroecology and other sustainable approaches such as Holistic Resource Management and urban and peri-urban production offer opportunities to produce all the food that will be needed. In the book I talk about how Russia and Ukraine switched to garden culture to provide food after the fall of the Soviet…

The projections show annual growth in population falling from over 1% today to about 0.1 % by 2100, which will bring us more or less to peak population. Problem is the population will be 50% above where it is now, by then