The Rising Influence of Rising Affluence

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Sustainability needs to be in there. The limit of the thesis of every country gets a middle class with increasing living standards has always been access to cheap energy. I think the only modification to the thesis needed is the source of that cheap energy. Fossil fuels have obvious limits as we are experiencing. Cheap energy must be sustainable so renewables are the future. And the resources and technology to make the energy storage systems are critical paths. Fossil fuels are a storage medium for solar energy that is super inefficient to extract and use and should really be viewed as carbon storage for the way the planet works in terms of livability. There is also the conventional economic thinking that growth requires ever increasing populations. That's also unsustainable.