The very rough gist is that there is historical evidence of pre agrarian humans starving to death with stomachs full of lean meat. In a nomadic lifestyle where they chase down prey protein costs too much energy to digest and convert into usable energy.
The wording of "less than half the volume of construction materials" mined each year seems hand wavy as a justification that this is possible. If I'm reading the chart right that would suggest we'd need a roughly 25% increase in the amount of global mineral extraction.
I understand the concern but as someone who grew up in Boulder, and now works at Google Boulder I feel like people are giving off this incorrect impression of Boulder. It's a small town (~120k people w/ students) but it was never a particularly affordable place. Unfortunately there's not a whole lot that can be done to shield a desirable small town from becoming more expensive as more people become aware of it's existence. You can keep Boulder small with minimal development and get the skyrocketing housing prices or you can attempt to remedy this by building significantly more housing. For a long time now it's been evident that the city council has chosen the first option.
The new office has been open for 3 months and Google has had a presence in Boulder for a decade. Google is pretty far from "dictating...how they want want the neighborhood and city to be structured". The city council has promoted low growth and high housing prices for decades and will continue to do so.
I always get slightly sad when I hear the complaints against Google in Boulder as I honestly believe the effect it has had on housing prices has been overstated. For some context, I'm a Boulder native, I grew up here, went to preschool through college here, and am fortunate enough to get a job that pays me enough to stay here. And for what it's worth Google has had an office in Boulder for about 10 or 11 years now. I'm more than happy to discuss this more thoroughly here, through pms, or over coffee :)
The very rough gist is that there is historical evidence of pre agrarian humans starving to death with stomachs full of lean meat. In a nomadic lifestyle where they chase down prey protein costs too much energy to digest and convert into usable energy.