Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies

by Geoffrey West

The process of burning fossil fuels releases energy stored in chemical bonds that hold the atoms and molecules of coal, oil, or gas together. All molecules, whether they are the building blocks of your body, your brain, your house, or your computer, are held together by the forces of electromagnetism and, as such, are characterized by energies whose magnitude is in the range of electron-volts (eV), which is the unit conventionally used to measure them. An electron-volt is infinitesimal on the scale of the energies we have been considering: 1eV is equivalent to only about a three hundred trillion trillionth of a kilowatt-hour (1eV = 3 × 10-26 kWh), so in terms of these atomic units, the amount of energy we consume each year is about 5 × 1039eV.