Global Migration To Cities Speeds Electrifying Everything As Climate Solution
Rural dwellers continue to stream to urban areas, enabling more rapid electrification of transportation
While we will electrify everything everywhere all at once as a major lever of climate action, our exploration in this series starts with how we will move ourselves and the goods we depend on around. And that story starts with the global movement to cities, a megatrend that is continuing.
As our population has exploded in the past century, our countryside has depopulated. Once, 95% of a country’s population were involved in agriculture and now in the developed world it’s 2%. Coal miners in the USA’s eastern coal region numbered 750,000 at the turn of the 20th Century when the population was vastly smaller and now fewer than 60,000 workers produce as much coal per year as more than a century before.
Automation has freed the vast majority of people from lifetimes in agriculture and resource extraction. And it’s enabled a once relatively rare circumstance — living in cities — to become dominant.
