Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

by Vaclav Smil

The Paris Agreement of 2015 was lauded as the first accord containing specific national commitments to reduce future emissions. But actually, only a small number of countries made specific promises, there is no binding enforcement mechanism, and even if all those targets were met by 2030, carbon emissions would still rise to nearly 50 percent above the 2017 level. According to the 2018 study by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, the only way to keep the average world temperature rise to no more than 1.5°C would be to put emissions almost immediately into a decline steep enough to bring them to zero by 2050. That is not impossible—but it is very unlikely. Reaching that goal would require nothing short of a fundamental transformation of the global economy on scales and at a speed unprecedented in human history, a task that would be impossible to do without major economic and social dislocations. The greatest challenge would be how to lift billions from poverty without relying on fossil carbon. The affluent world has used hundreds of billions of tons of it to create its high quality of life, but right now we do not have any affordable non-carbon alternatives that could be rapidly deployed on mass scales in order to energize the production of enormous quantities of what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization—ammonia, steel, cement, and plastics—which will be needed in Africa and Asia in the decades to come. The contrasts between the expressed concer...