Plot: Welcome to 2022. Welcome to a grotesquely overpopulated, resource-depleted, polluted, and impoverished world. It’s a place where practically every tree has been cut down and every person herded into cities to make room for farms that nevertheless barely make enough food for everyone, where the air is sticky and thick with toxic smog and the stench of unwashed bodies and corpses, and where the hungry masses are perpetually on the brink of rioting. There’s no joy, hope, jobs, or even real food anymore–just little processed crackers rationed to the population. It’s a place where corrupt politicians and the executives of corporations collude to protect their own power and privileges at any cost, even if it means forcing the ultimate sacrilege on humanity.
Welcome to New York City. It’s a decaying and crime-ridden cauldron that is so crowded it’s literally standing room only in many of its apartments and streets. Charlton Heston knows this city well, and keeps busy in it. He’s a homicide detective, and of such esteem that he enjoys the privilege of having his own, small apartment, which he shares with only one other person: his elderly assistant named “Sol.” Their dreary routine is interrupted one day when they are assigned to investigate the murder of one of New York’s richest people–a man named “Simonson” who was a Board member at the “Soylent” corporation.
Soylent is an enormous food processing company that controls half the world’s food supply. Their “Red” and “Yellow” products are derived from plants, and are formed into crackers or loaves. Their latest product, “Green,” is said to be derived from plankton harvested from the ocean. Soylent Red, Yellow and Green are staple foods for New Yorkers, and probably billions of people beyond.
As the investigation proceeds, Heston quickly realizes Simonson’s murder was no robbery gone bad, as it appeared at first glance. As he and Sol follow the clues, it leads them to mortal danger, a conspiracy involving some of the world’s most powerful men, and to a profoundly disturbing secret about the food supply.
Soylent Green was a laugh-out-loud inaccurate portrayal of the world in 2022. Yeah, I know we have our problems, but they don’t compare to the film’s dystopia. The fact that it was so far off the mark should be FOOD FOR THOUGHT for anyone who takes the current crop of doomsday global warming movies set in the future (e.g. – Geostorm, Snowpiercer, Interstellar) seriously.
That said, I still liked Soylent Green and think it’s worth watching so long as it isn’t taken seriously. The movie is well-paced and manages to depict a grim future without overdoing it to the point of being depressing. It’s both entertaining and serious, and at times genuinely tense. The acting is great all around, especially on the part of Charlton Heston, who is less cocky and has a slightly broader emotional range in this than in most of his other roles.
Analysis:
The world will be grossly overpopulated. At the beginning of Soylent Green, we’re told that New York City’s population has grown from roughly 8 million the year the film was released (1973) to 40 million in 2022. Population figures for other parts of the U.S. or for other countries are never given, but at one point Heston says other cities are “all like this,” implying the rest of the world is similarly overpopulated.
The U.S. population in 1973 was about 205 million, and the world population that year was 3.7 billion. If they quintupled like New York City, then in the film, the U.S. population in 2022 was 1 billion, and the world population was 18.5 billion.
Mercifully, the real figures are much lower: New York City has 8.8 million residents, the U.S. has 330 million, and the world has 7.9 billion. Soylent Green‘s prediction that Earth would be grossly overpopulated by 2022 was wrong, and the city in which it is set, New York, has only 11% more inhabitants now than it did in 1973. Instead of it being “standing room only,” the city is but marginally denser.
Ironically, a growing number of thinkers and journalists today are worried about the opposite problem: population decline. The populations of rich countries are mostly shrinking, or are only slowly expanding thanks to immigration and immigrants having kids. Even middle income countries like China, Thailand and Brazil have seen sharp drops in birthrates and have almost stopped growing. While shrinking a shrinking population has benefits (more space per person, cheaper real estate, less traffic, less pollution created), they are probably outweighed by the downsides of economic decline.
That said, it would be a mistake to simply extrapolate current demographic trends into the future indefinitely and to conclude that the human race is doomed to extinction because people will refuse to have kids. A slew of technologies that will come into existence this century will raise birthrates in various ways: Existing assisted reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization (IVF) will get cheaper, putting them within reach of lower income people. New reproduction technologies will be invented, allowing more people with fertility problems to have healthy kids. For example, post-menopausal women with no eggs will be able to have fertility labs synthesize ova for them that contain their DNA, and to insert it into themselves, younger surrogate mothers or, in the far future, artificial wombs. Robot servants will also ease household workloads, giving parents more time for child-rearing and making parenthood more appealing.
Along with raising birthrates, future technologies will let us grow the human population through the opposite mechanism, which is lowering mortality rates. Disease cures, therapeutic cloning of human organs, cybernetic replacements for organs and limbs, stem cell therapies that regenerate ageing tissues and organs inside the patient’s body, and many other medical advances, will slowly raise lifespans, and to such an extent that “medical immortality” will probably be available to well-resourced people by the end of this century. If people don’t die, then even a very low birthrate among them will lead to Soylent Green levels of overpopulation, though it might take centuries.
The environment will be devastated by pollution. The other aspect of Soylent Green‘s dystopian reality is severe pollution and concomitant environmental devastation. The outdoor scenes–which are already bleak-looking since they are full of derelict buildings, trash-strewn streets and crowds of poor people–are shrouded in a sickly greenish haze, which is certainly smog. New York City is devoid of trees, except a few saplings in a small, sealed arboretum (presumably necessary to protect them from air toxins) that only privileged people can enter.
The oceans are also so poisoned and overfished that plankton are the only remaining edible sea life. The Soylent company processes harvested plankton into green crackers for human consumption, and the film’s big reveal is that it has been secretly transitioning their content to human flesh because even plankton is dying out. In other words, “SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!”
This depiction of 2022 is almost totally wrong. New York City still has trees growing outdoors–notably in the massive Central Park. Additionally, the U.S. actually had more trees in 2021 than it did in 1921! The amount of global tree cover also increased by 8% from 1982 to 2016.
Instead of disappearing, global seafood harvests have risen since Soylent Green was in theaters, and there are no signs of an impending collapse of wild fisheries, though fish catches have been flat since the 1990s, suggesting we’ve reached the limit of how many wild calories the seas can sustainably provide us. Fortunately, the human race has proven itself more competent at surmounting this barrier than it was in the movie, and a large and growing share of fish are now “farmed” instead of caught wild.
New York City’s air is not full of smog, and its air quality is in fact substantially better than it was when the film was released. As just one example, sulfur dioxide (SO2) concentrations in the City’s air have sharply dropped, from an average of 155 μg/m3 from 1970-72, to a mere 6.8 μg/m3 today (January 24, 2022). (SO2 is the main component of “smog,” and has an opaque appearance. It causes respiratory problems and acid rain.) Every other type of air pollution (i.e. – PM 2.5, ozone, lead, nitrogen dioxide (NO2)) has sharply dropped in New York City, the rest of America, and the rest of the developed world over the same timeframe, meaning they breathe cleaner air today than people did when Soylent Green was in theaters. This is due to a slew of environmental laws being enacted, including the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1963 and the Clean Water Act of 1972. (U.S. air and water pollution levels had actually been trending down for a short time before Soylent Green‘s 1973 release.)
Unfortunately, those things aren’t true for the poorer half of the global population, and hundreds of millions of people in India and China endure toxic air, mostly due to weak air pollution laws or to lax enforcement of relevant laws. In fact, in November 2021, Delhi had a smog emergency lasting several days, during which the air became so poisonous that the government shut down the city’s schools. The news images of opaque air, crowded streets, poverty, and decay bear striking similarities to the dystopian New York of Soylent Green. The suffering of people in polluted places like northern India is why I judged “This depiction of 2022 is almost totally wrong.”
Winters in temperate areas will be warm thanks to global warming. Though the movie indicates it is set in the year 2022, no clues are given about the exact dates of its events. Based on the facts that most of the characters wear light clothing, and there are several scenes where they are visibly sweating, it would seem it is set in the summer. However, that assumption is upended by a remark Heston makes when contemplating whether to turn on an air conditioner (a rare luxury): “All the way up. We’ll make it cold. Like winter used to be.”
Evidently, global warming has gotten so severe that even in places with slightly cold climates like New York City are hot in the winter!
Fortunately, this prediction about 2022 also fell flat. Global warming has only had a tiny effect on the city’s temperature. According to NOAA data taken from a weather station that has been operating in Central Park since 1869, NYC’s average temperature for all of 1973 (the year Soylent Green was released) was 56.1°F, and the average for that December was 39.0°F. The average temperature for 2020 (the last year for which full data have been published) was 57.3°F, and that December’s average temperature was 39.2°F.
And on the day I analyzed this prediction (January 26, 2022), New York City’s high temperature was 29°F, and it was bracing for a major snowstorm.
There will be tablet computers. Though we never get a good look at them or see how they work, there appear to be simple tablet computers and PDAs in the film. Heston keeps one of them in his apartment, and in the film’s first scene, Sol reads notes about criminal cases off of it. The device is a piece of transparent plastic, about the size and shape of a magazine, with an opaque layer embedded within it bearing written characters.
It is strongly reminiscent of an actual tablet computer that lets users handwrite digital notes on its screen by using metal styluses. This prediction about 2022 was right.
People will have computer game machines in their homes. Early in the film, there’s a scene set in Simonson’s luxury condo suite. There we see an arcade-style video game. To be exact, it is “Computer Space,” which was the first commercially successful video game in history, and only made its debut two years before Soylent Green was released.
In 2022, it is very common for people to have video game consoles in their homes and to play games on their computing devices. If anything, the film’s prediction is too conservative since it depicts video games as being only available to rich people, whereas in reality, even a teenager working a part-time job today could afford a quality console and several games.
The government will ration essential goods. Due to dwindling natural resources, an excessive population, and widespread poverty that leaves most people unable to afford anything, the government rations essential goods, notably food and water. Citizens visit government offices where clerks give them their allotments of money or ration cards, which they exchange with other people in New York to get essential goods. In other scenes, we see private merchants selling Soylent food products in an open-air market, and men in official uniforms using an outdoor water tap to fill the jugs belonging to people who need their daily water rations. The film also implies that other basics, like soap, writing paper, and pencils, are also very hard to get.
For the U.S. and the developed world more broadly, this is inaccurate. Staple foods, potable water, and everyday items like soap are very cheap. For example, by cooking their own meals at home, an adult could easily get their food budget under $10 per day, and by drinking only tap water or some type of beverage mix like “Tang,” get their daily drink budget below $1. A bar of personal soap cost $1.50, and will last a person for weeks.
A visit to a typical American grocery store in 2022, even in poorer parts of the country, will reveal a cornucopia of food and merchandise at low prices. Additionally, thrift stores are practically everywhere, and are bursting with wide varieties of decent-quality secondhand goods at very low prices. Electronic resources like Craigslist.org, Facebook Marketplace, and Freecycle are also major sources of cheap or even free items available locally. If anything, most of the world is now contending with a surfeit of essential goods, which too often are wasted, thrown out, or allowed to accumulate as unused clutter. Growth of the self-storage industry bears further testimony to this reality. People, Americans in particular, have too much stuff, not too little.
Prostitution will be legal. One of Soylent Green’s main characters is “Shirl” (pronounced almost the same as “Cheryl”), a young woman prostitute who is compensated with free housing and amenities in Mr. Simonson’s luxury condo. The arrangement is legal and accepted as normal, and it is later revealed that the condo building has several other prostitutes, euphemistically termed “furniture,” living in other units. Having a live-in prostitute is an expensive marker of high status, and Heston’s suspicions are raised when, while investigating Simonson’s death, he discovers the latter’s bodyguard has “furniture” in his own apartment in spite of a salary that should be insufficient.
In real life, prostitution is illegal in New York City, and in the rest of the U.S. except Nevada. There, it is confined to a small number of heavily regulated brothel houses. With varying restrictions, prostitution is legal in about 15 countries, mostly in Europe. Nevertheless, as the revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s high-end prostitution ring–which included sex parties at his luxury Manhattan townhouse–show, it’s still easy for rich men to buy sex in New York.
A small number of industrial food companies will control the global food supply. “Soylent” is clearly the dominant food producer in the U.S., and perhaps the world. As Sol says after researching it: “Soylent controls the food supply for half the world.” It’s unclear who produces the other half, but other big companies and government agricultural agencies probably dominate it.
The world is certainly full of large, highly profitable food processing companies, but none is so big that it controls anywhere near half of the global food supply. Consider the top ten food and drink companies of 2020, along with their food sales for that year:
- PepsiCo, Inc. – $70.3 billion
- Nestle – $67.7 billion
- JBS – $50.7 billion
- Anheuser-Busch – $46.9 billion
- Tyson Foods – $43.2 billion
- Mars – $37.0
- Archer Daniels Midland – 35.4 billion
- The Coca-Cola Company – $34.3 billion
- Cargill – $32.4 billion
- Danone – $26.9 billion
If we assume that these ten companies produced all the calories consumed by all humans in 2020, and use revenues as a proxy for calories each produced, then the largest, PepsiCo, only controls 15.8% of the food supply.
Of course, the top 10 food processing companies aren’t really the only ones in existence. The source from which I got the above data actually lists revenue figures for the top 100 companies in the sector. If we include them in the calculation (BTW, rank #100 goes to the “Kewpie Corporation,” which made $3.6 billion in 2020 selling mostly mayonnaise, salad dressing, and baby food in Japan), then big companies sold $1,316 billion of food and beverages in 2020, and the biggest one, PepsiCo, only controls 5.3% of the global market. The top ten combined only control 33.8%.
Additionally, sustenance farming and the consumption of food made by small, local farms still provides most of the calories for large fractions of the population in Africa and southern Asia. These people eat little or nothing made by the big food processing companies, meaning PepsiCo’s control over global calories should be even lower than the paltry 5.3%.
In rich countries with declining culinary traditions, like the U.S., it is probably common for people to get most of their daily calories from processed foods. However, the foods are still made by several different, competing food processing companies, so there is no monopoly and hence no real-world equivalent to “Soylent.” Even if the biggest one of those companies decided to start secretly blending calories derived from corpses into its food products, only a minority of the U.S. population would end up eating it.
New York City’s population will be 90% white. All of Soylent Green‘s main characters and seemingly 90% of its extras are white. This includes rich, working-class, and poor people.
The reality is very different. The U.S. Census estimated that, in 2021, only 32.1% of New Yorkers were both white and non-Hispanic. Blacks were 24.3%, Asians were 14.1%, and multiracial people were 3.6%. It is surely one of the most racially diverse cities on Earth.
There will be mass unemployment. In the first scene, Heston remarks “There are 20 million guys out of work in Manhattan alone.” Even if this is exaggerated and the real number is only half that figure, and even if “guys” refers to both sexes, it would indicate a staggeringly high unemployment rate.
To be generous, let’s assume that Soylent Green‘s New York had an excellent dependency ratio of 80, meaning 80% of its population was in good health and able to work (children, old people, and disabled people comprise the other 20%). For comparison, NYC’s actual dependency ratio in 2021 was 54.7, and dependency ratios in the 80s have only happened after periods of extraordinary population growth, such as when the post-WWII baby boom generations in India and South Korea hit adulthood.
Eighty percent of 40 million is 32 million, meaning there were 32 million potential adult workers in the city. If 10 million of them (half of Heston’s figure) couldn’t find jobs, that equates to a 31.25% unemployment rate. To put that into perspective, during the Great Depression, the U.S. national unemployment rate peaked at 24.9%. Remarkably, even with optimistic assumptions, the job picture was worse than it had ever been in real life!
What happens if we adjust the calculations to be more bleak? For example what if we lower the dependency ratio to 65 (many of the New Yorkers looked unhealthy and seemed to have motivation problems, both of which would leave them unable to work) and accept Heston’s “20 million guys out of work” figure?
We get a 76.9% unemployment rate, which is unheard of. I can’t imagine a situation where that many willing people wouldn’t be able to find jobs, except maybe the first few weeks following a massive nuclear war. That said, I foresee a day when 76.9% of healthy adults won’t have gainful jobs due to machines doing the work for them, but most of those people won’t be “unemployed” since they’ll embrace (or at least, deal with) the new reality by devoting their time to things other than work, like socializing, video gaming, doing drugs, traveling, or indulging in personal hobbies and niche interests. You don’t count as “unemployed” if you’re not interested in working.
Oh, and what’s New York City’s actual unemployment rate? In December 2021, it was 8.8%, which is high by real-world U.S. standards, but absolutely stellar by Soylent Green‘s.
There will be mass homelessness. Along with lacking jobs, most of the people in the film seem to lack homes. Every morning, Heston has to literally jump over poor people who sleep on the staircase of his apartment. Many of New York’s streets are clogged with broken-down cars that people live in, and sleeping people literally cover the whole floor of his local church at night. Most of the city’s population might be chronically homeless.
In reality, no more than 1% of New York City’s population is truly homeless, meaning they either sleep in public spaces or in homeless shelters. And unlike in Soylent Green, most of them only go without proper housing for brief lengths of time, and aren’t “chronically” homeless.
New York City will have epidemic levels of violent crime. Soylent Green begins with a murder, later in the film there’s a street riot where several police officers are attacked and people are shot, and in one scene, the police chief says there were 137 murders in the city over the previous 24 hours. In short, New York City is extremely violent. How accurate was this depiction?
If we assume 137 murders a day is typical, that’s equivalent to 50,005 per year, and a homicide rate of 125 per 100,000 residents. In reality, New York City had 485 murders for all of 2021, meaning its homicide rate is a mere 5.5 per 100,000 residents.
Among big American cities, the most murderous is Louisville, Kentucky, which had 188 murders in 2021, equating to a homicide rate of 30 per 100,000. That means no major urban area in the U.S. comes close to being as violent as Soylent Green‘s New York was.
That said, there are cities outside the U.S. that approach its heights of murder. In 2020, three Mexican cities–Celaya, Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez–had the highest murder rates in the world, at 109, 105, and 103 murders per 100,000 residents, respectively. So if the movie had been Soylent Verde and set just one country away, it would have been grimly accurate in this regard.
People will have battery banks in their homes. The small apartment that Heston and Sol share has a bank of what look like car batteries for storing electricity. A stationary bicycle connected to the batteries can be pedaled to recharge them. It’s unclear whether the battery bank is their sole source of electricity, or if it’s merely a backup power source in case of grid failures, and it’s also unclear how common the batteries are in other homes.
Batteries are much cheaper and more energy-dense today than they were when Soylent Green was in theaters. However, home battery banks remain uncommon due to the reliability of the electric grid and because the batteries are still too expensive to be worth it.
For example, a typical American home consumes 30 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per day. A person who valued efficiency could reasonably reduce that to 24 kWh / day by buying high-efficiency appliances and by doing things like wearing sweaters instead of turning the heat up so high in the winter. A typical home storage battery such as the “Growatt 6 KW,” costs $4,490 and can only store 6 kWh of electricity, so four of the batteries would be needed to store just one day’s worth of power, for a total cost of $17,960, plus installation costs. The batteries’ storage capacities also degrade with time, meaning they usually need to be replaced after 10-15 years.
A better option for backup power is a gas-powered generator. While portable generators with wheels are the most familiar versions of the machines, the types generally used for residential backup power are stationary and look like large boxes right outside the houses they provide power to. One high-quality standby generator capable of meeting the 24 kWh / day requirement is the “Generac 72101,” and it costs $5,997 plus more for installation. It is connected to the house’s natural gas plumbing and automatically turns on whenever it detects an electrical grid outage. Best of all, if properly maintained and not overused, such a generator can last 20 years or more before needing replacement.
This means a home battery backup system costs three times more than an equivalent backup gas generator. Battery prices will need to drop by 66% to achieve parity. Such an improvement might be possible: Between 2010 and 2019, lithium-ion battery pack prices dropped 87%. However, the rate of yearly cost-improvement declined over that period and continues to do so, suggesting we’ve picked the low-hanging fruits for improving battery cost-performance, so don’t expect another 87% decline over the next 10 years. To get our 66% improvement, which might cause battery banks to become common in houses and apartments, I think 20 years or more of research and industrial efficiencies will be needed.
Assisted suicide will be legal. Discovering the awful truth about Soylent Green pushes Sol–already an old and world-weary man–over the edge, so he signs up for assisted suicide, which is euphemistically called “Going home.” Not only is it legal, it is barely regulated, and Sol merely has to walk into the nearest euthanasia clinic and sign a form to have it done. There’s no wait time, no “cool down period,” and no requirement for suicide requests to be vetted by a court, doctors, mental health specialists, or the applicant’s family.
This depiction of 2022 was partly accurate. Physician-assisted suicide is legal in 10 American states and Washington, DC. While the laws only allow their residents the right of suicide, it is easy for people from other parts of America to satisfy the requirement by moving in and living there for a short period of time.
Additionally, in those 10 states and DC, the applicant must provide medical evidence that he probably has six months or less to live thanks to poor health, and there are processes for adjudicating that evidence. (In effect, legal doctor-assisted suicide is available to anyone in the U.S. who can prove he has six months or less to live.) Professing that one is sick of living–even if the person can prove they are sincere–is insufficient. This means Sol, were he alive in the real world of 2022, would not be able to commit assisted suicide.
The procedure is also not legal in New York, though it is in neighboring New Jersey, and it’s possible the euthanasia clinic in the film was in the latter state. Less than a mile of water separates Manhattan from Jersey City, and Sol could have easily made the journey.
Cannibalism will be widespread. Like “Luke, I am your father,” the line “Soylent Green is people” has long been in our cultural consciousness, and is known even to those who haven’t seen the latter film. With that in mind, I feel no guilt exposing the movie’s climactic reveal: the Soylent company has been secretly turning corpses into crackers that millions (possibly billions) of unsuspecting people have been eating.
Again, and very fortunately, this prediction was wrong. Cannibalism is not widespread in 2022, or even practiced by anything but a miniscule number of disturbed people. It is probably as culturally taboo as it was in 1973, and even in rare cases where a person voluntarily allows themselves to be killed and eaten by a cannibal, the latter is arrested and charged with a crime.
However, as I’ve predicted, in vitro meat technology should be advanced enough by 2100 to let us grow human flesh and organs in labs, which would provide people a legal way to indulge in “cannibalism” without breaking laws related to murder or desecration of a corpse. As a result, a small number of people will eat human flesh, mostly for novelty, like how people try weird meats like alligator today, but some will eat it routinely because they like the taste or have a cannibal fetish.
Links:
- U.S. tree cover was higher in 2021 than it was in 1921.
https://www.treehugger.com/more-trees-than-there-were-years-ago-its-true-4864115 - Globally, tree cover rose by 8% from 1982 to 2016.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0411-9 - New York City had several smog crises during the mid 20th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_New_York_City_smog
- “The Relation of Air Pollution to Mortality” (1976) determined that New York City’s average SO2 concentration from 1970-72 was 155 μg/m3.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/45002384 - Delhi’s 2021 smog emergency
https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/delhi-smog-high-levels-of-so2-no2-ozone-7618922/ - NOAA webpage featuring data from the weather station in Central Park, which has been operating since 1869. It shows how little average temperatures have risen in NYC since 1972.
https://www.weather.gov/okx/CentralParkHistorical - In the U.S., the self-storage industry has been growing at a healthy rate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/business/self-storage-roars-back.html - The top 100 food processing companies of 2020 by revenue
https://www.foodengineeringmag.com/2021-top-100-food-beverage-companies - The FAO’s “World Food and Agriculture Statistical Pocketbook” for 2018 contains data on sustenance farming.
https://www.globalagriculture.org/fileadmin/files/weltagrarbericht/Weltagrarbericht/10B%C3%A4uerlicheIndustrielleLW/Pocketbook2018.pdf - South Korea’s dependency ratio was 83.3 in 1970, and India’s was 81.2 in 1965.
https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/3aGTvnsOvqfu22cfQbS4KN/Making-Indias-demography-its-destiny.html - On any given day, about 1% of New Yorkers are homeless, meaning they spent the night sleeping in public or in a homeless shelter.
https://www.bowery.org/homelessness/ - New York City had 485 murders in 2021.
https://nypost.com/2022/01/01/nyc-recorded-485-murders-in-2021/ - Rankings of most murderous cities, 2020
https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/nacion/mexico-con-el-top-6-en-el-ranking-de-ciudades-mas-violentas-del-mundo-informe - In 2019, the typical American home used 30 kWh of electricity per day.
https://blog.constellation.com/2021/02/25/average-home-power-usage/ - Residential backup batteries typically wear out after 10 – 15 years.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/09/23/how-long-do-residential-storage-batteries-last/ - Between 2010 and 2019, lithium-ion battery pack prices dropped 87%.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/l6qr9x1zhvc4yq7/Naam%20Clean%20Energy%20Revolution%20-%20Chinese%20Edition%20-%20Shareable%20-%20Jan%202022.pdf?dl=0 - Doctor-assisted suicide is legal in 10 states and Washington, DC.
https://euthanasia.procon.org/states-with-legal-physician-assisted-suicide/