Highlights from How the World Really Works by Vaclav Smil
Highlights from this book
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In the early 1970s, American ecologist Howard Odum explained how “all progress is due to special power subsidies, and progress evaporates whenever and wherever they are removed.”[22] And, more recently, physicist Robert Ayres has repeatedly stressed in his writings the central notion of energy in all economies: “the economic system is essentially a system for extracting, processing and transforming energy as resources into energy embodied in products and services.”[23] Simply put, energy is the only truly universal currency, and nothing (from galactic rotations to ephemeral insect lives) can take place without its transformations.
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And then comes this disarming but indubitable conclusion: It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount. It is not that way. However, there are formulas for calculating some numerical quantity, and when we add it all together it gives . . . always the same number. It is an abstract thing in that it does not tell us the mechanism or the reasons for the various formulas.
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There is no better way to answer the question “what is energy?” than by referring to one of the most insightful physicists of the 20th century—to the protean mind of Richard Feynman, who (in his famous Lectures on Physics) tackled the challenge in his straightforward manner, stressing that “energy has a large number of different forms, and there is a formula for each one. These are: gravitational energy, kinetic energy, heat energy, elastic energy, electrical energy, chemical energy, radiant energy, nuclear energy, mass energy.” And then comes this disarming but indubitable conclusion: It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount. It is not that way. However, there are formulas for calculating some numerical quantity, and when we add it all together it gives . . . always the same number. It is an abstract thing in that it does not tell us the mechanism or the reasons for the various formulas.
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There are many choices available when it comes to energy conversions, some far better than others. The high densities of chemical energy in kerosene and diesel fuel are great for intercontinental flying and shipping, but if you want your submarine to stay submerged while crossing the Pacific Ocean then the best choice is to fission enriched uranium in a small reactor in order to produce electricity.[32] And back on land, large nuclear reactors are the most reliable producers of electricity: some of them now generate it 90–95 percent of the time, compared to about 45 percent for the best offshore wind turbines and 25 percent for photovoltaic cells in even the sunniest of climates—while Germany’s solar panels produce electricity only about 12 percent of the time.
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Energy is a scalar, which in physics is a quantity described only by its magnitude; volume, mass, density, time, and speed are other ubiquitous scalars. Power measures energy per unit of time and hence it is a rate (in physics, a rate measures change, commonly per time).
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There are enormous opportunities to generate more electricity with photovoltaic cells and wind turbines, but there is a fundamental difference between systems that derive 20–40 percent of electricity from these intermittent sources (Germany and Spain are the best examples among large economies) and a national electricity supply that relies completely on these renewable flows.
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In 1995, crude oil extraction finally surpassed the 1979 record and then continued to rise, meeting the demand of an economically reforming China as well as the rising demand elsewhere in Asia—but oil has not regained its pre-1975 relative dominance.[49] Its share of the global commercial primary energy supply fell from 45 percent in 1970 to 38 percent in the year 2000 and to 33 percent in 2019—and it is now certain that its further relative decline will continue as natural gas consumption and wind and solar electricity generation keep increasing.
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Four materials rank highest on this combined scale, and they form what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia.[4] Physically and chemically, these four materials are distinguished by an enormous diversity of properties and functions. But despite these differences in attributes and specific uses, they share more than their indispensability for the functioning of modern societies. They are needed in larger (and still increasing) quantities than are other essential inputs. In 2019, the world consumed about 4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, 370 million tons of plastics, and 150 million tons of ammonia, and they are not readily replaceable by other materials—certainly not in the near future or on a global scale.
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Modern economies will always be tied to massive material flows, whether those of ammonia-based fertilizers to feed the still-growing global population; plastics, steel, and cement needed for new tools, machines, structures, and infrastructures; or new inputs required to produce solar cells, wind turbines, electric cars, and storage batteries. And until all energies used to extract and process these materials come from renewable conversions, modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on the fossil fuels used in the production of these indispensable materials. No AI, no apps, and no electronic messages will change that.
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Practical telegraph was developed during the late 1830s and the early 1840s; the first (short-lived) transatlantic link cable was laid in 1858; and by the century’s end undersea cables had connected all continents.[30] For the first time in history, trading could take into consideration the knowledge of demand and prices in different parts of the world—
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Practical telegraph was developed during the late 1830s and the early 1840s; the first (short-lived) transatlantic link cable was laid in 1858; and by the century’s end undersea cables had connected all continents.[30] For the first time in history, trading could take into consideration the knowledge of demand and prices in different parts of the world—and the availability of a new powerful prime mover could translate this information into profitable international exchanges: when the price of Iowa beef was cheaper than British beef of inferior quality and new refrigerating techniques became available, for example, the exports of frozen American meat rose rapidly—more than quadrupling between the late 1870s and the late 1900s.
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reciprocating
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asking for a risk-free existence is to ask for something quite impossible—while the quest for minimizing risks remains
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asking for a risk-free existence is to ask for something quite impossible—while the quest for minimizing risks remains the leading motivation of human progress.
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The list of these critical biospheric boundaries includes nine categories: climate change (now interchangeably, albeit inaccurately, called simply global warming), ocean acidification (endangering marine organisms that build structures of calcium carbonate), depletion of stratospheric ozone (shielding the Earth from excessive ultraviolet radiation and threatened by releases of chlorofluorocarbons), atmospheric aerosols (pollutants reducing visibility and causing lung impairment), interference in nitrogen and phosphorus cycles (above all, the release of these nutrients into fresh and coastal waters), freshwater use (excessive withdrawals of underground, stream, and lake waters), land use changes (due to deforestation, farming, and urban and industrial expansion), biodiversity loss, and various forms of chemical pollution.
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The UN projects that share rising by about 70 percent by 2050, and in better-off countries one person in four will be older than that.[52] How will we cope in 2050 with a pandemic that might be more infectious than COVID-19, when in some countries a third of the population is in the most vulnerable category? These realities disprove any general, automatic, embedded, unavoidable idea of progress and constant improvement that has been promoted by many techno-optimists.
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The latest pandemic has served as yet another reminder that one of the best ways to minimize the impact of increasingly global challenges is to have a set of priorities and basic measures for how to deal with them—but the pandemic, with its incoherent and non-uniform inter- and intranational measures, has also shown how difficult it would be to codify such principles and to follow such guidelines