Quotes from Charles C. Mann

Smartphones can relay patients' data to hospital computers in a continuous stream. Doctors can alter treatment regimens remotely, instead of making patients come in for a visit.

The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors.

A smartphone links patients' bodies and doctors' computers, which in turn are connected to the Internet, which in turn is connected to any smartphone anywhere. The new devices could put the management of an individual's internal organs in the hands of every hacker, online scammer, and digital vandal on Earth.

So many wells have been dug in Changzhou that its groundwater has been over-exploited, and the local ground level has sunk by two feet. The city has officially banned new wells and mandated the installation of pollution controls, but China's endemic corruption ensures that neither measure has much meaning.

Big Water makes an argument straight out of Economics 101. The best way to deliver water to people's homes efficiently, the water barons argue, is to put the process in the hands of the market. If water is scarce, then raise the price - let the law of supply and demand take over!

The human propensity is to believe that flukes of good fortune will never come to an end.

Some Western states have collaborative water agreements with Indian tribes - Washington state, for instance, monitors a number of its rivers to protect spawning salmon, which are promised to native peoples under 19th-century treaties.

Cash-strapped cities in nations from Argentina to Albania have begun to turn over their municipal water systems to Big Water, often under lease arrangements that can continue in force for decades.

Rather than forcing local factories to clean up after themselves, Changzhou decided to outsource the job of managing its water supply to a French company named Veolia - one of a handful of corporate giants now scrambling to take over city water systems around the planet, especially in the often polluted and water-short developing world.

Prediction is a mug's game, but taking the side of water polluters has not been a winning political strategy for 50 years. Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II all undertook to weaken water regulations in the name of economic growth. They left office; the regulations remained.

By the 1980s, businesses had realized that environmental issues had a price tag. Increasingly, they balked. Reflexively, the anticorporate Left pivoted; Earth Day, erstwhile snow job, became an opportunity to denounce capitalist greed.

The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.

Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering.

Historically, large-scale global trade has served two functions: 1) the exchange of goods between willing sellers and buyers described in Econ 101 textbooks; 2) as a tool of state aggrandizement, in which the private parties are stand-ins for governmental interests.

Americans are willing to cheer on politicians who denounce bureaucratic overreach and job-killing red tape in abstract terms. But they turn out to like specific regulations against toxic chemicals in their drinking water.

Canceling the climate pact will loudly demonstrate Trump's willingness to fight - an important step for the White House because, on a concrete level, few tools are available to revive the coal industry.

You know how in movies the new president comes in and promises to perform sweeping actions with a stroke of a pen? The Administrative Procedure Act is designed to thwart this sort of maneuver.

Under the Paris agreement, every one of the 147 signatories issues what is called an 'intended nationally determined contribution' (INDC), which amounts to a promise that the nation will take certain actions to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by a certain date.

All parents remember the moment when they first held their children - the tiny crumpled face, an entire new person, emerging from the hospital blanket.

There are serious worries about unconventional gas and oil, especially those concerning the environment.

The Paris pact was correctly described by its opponents - greens and anti-greens alike - as toothless. But it was also the first time that nations around the world had officially agreed that climate change was a problem and that concrete steps should be taken to avoid its worst effects.

A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now.

Artificial lighting, air-conditioning, and automobiles, all powered by fossil fuels, swaddle us in our giddy modernity. In our ergonomic chairs and acoustical-panel cubicles, we sit cozy as kings atop 300 years of flaming carbon.

Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter.