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and affluent economies now consume annually about 150 billion joules (150 gigajoules) of primary energy per capita (for comparison, one ton of crude oil is 42 gigajoules); while Nigeria, Africa’s most populous (and oil- and natural gas–rich) nation, averages only 35 gigajoules.
Abundant anthropometric data available for 200 countries show an average gain over the 20th century of 8.3 centimeters for adult women and 8.8 for men.
We are the superstars of sweating, and we need to be. An amateur running the marathon at a slow pace will consume energy at a rate of 700–800 watts, and an experienced marathoner who covers the 42.2 kilometers in 2.5 hours will metabolize at a rate of about 1,300 watts.
eventually, it dissolved so easily; it lasted from the first week of November 1917 to the last week of December 1991—74 years and a month, an average European male lifetime.
Undoubtedly, in less than a year a well-sited and well-built wind turbine will generate as much energy as it took to produce it. However, all of it will be in the form of intermittent electricity—while its production, installation, and maintenance remain critically dependent on specific fossil energies. Moreover, for most of these energies—coke for iron-ore smelting; coal and petroleum coke to fuel cement kilns; naphtha and natural gas as feedstock and fuel for the synthesis of plastics and the making of fiberglass; diesel fuel for ships, trucks, and construction machinery; lubricant for
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Exploring likely limits of commercial capacity is more useful than forecasting specific maxima for given dates. Available wind turbine power is equal to half the density of the air (which is 1.23 kilograms per cubic meter) times the area swept by the blades (pi times the radius squared) times the cube of wind velocity. Assuming a wind velocity of 12 meters per second and an energy conversion coefficient of 0.4, then a 100-megawatt turbine would require rotors nearly 550 meters in diameter.
Containers come in different sizes, but most are the standard twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU)—rectangular prisms 6.1 meters (20 feet) long and 2.4 meters wide. The first small container ships of the 1960s carried mere hundreds of TEUs; now four ships launched in 2019 and belonging to MSC Switzerland (Gülsün, Samar, Leni and Mia) hold the record, at 23,756 TEUs each. When they travel very slowly (16 knots, in order to save fuel) these ships can make the journey from Hong Kong to Hamburg (via the Suez Canal)—more than 21,000 kilometers—in 30 days.
The conclusion is obvious. To have an electric ship whose batteries and motors weighed no more than the fuel (about 5,000 tons) and the diesel engine (about 2,000 tons) in today’s large container vessels, we would need batteries with an energy density more than 10 times as high as today’s best Li-ion units.
By 2015, Germany’s combined solar and wind capacity of nearly 84 gigawatts had surpassed the total installed in fossil fuel plants, and by March 2019 more than 20 percent of all electricity came from the new renewables—but electricity prices had more than doubled in 18 years, to €0.29/kWh. The EU’s largest economy thus has the continent’s second-highest electricity prices: only in heavily wind-dependent Denmark (in 2018, 41 percent of its generation was from wind) is the price higher, at €0.31/kWh.
The first United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was held in 1992. In that year, fossil fuels (using the conversion of fuels and electricity to a common denominator favored by BP in its annual statistical report) provided 86.6 percent of the world’s primary energy. By 2017, they supplied 85.1 percent, a reduction of a mere 1.5 percent in 25 years.
In contrast, several key economic sectors depend heavily on fossil fuels and we do not have any non-carbon alternatives that could replace them rapidly and on the requisite massive scales. These sectors include long-distance transportation (now almost totally reliant on aviation kerosene for jetliners, and diesel, bunker fuel, and liquefied natural gas for container, bulk, and tanker vessels); the production of more than a billion tons of primary iron (requiring coke made from coal for smelting iron ores in blast furnaces) and more than 4 billion tons of cement (made in massive rotating kilns
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So, a simple balancing machine consisting of two equally sized wheels, a minimal metal frame, and a short drive chain emerged more than a century after Watt’s improved steam engines (1765), more than half a century after the introduction of mechanically far more complex locomotives (1829), years after the first commercial generation of electricity (1882)—but concurrently with the first designs of automobiles. The first light internal combustion engines were mounted on three- or four-wheel carriages by Karl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler, and Wilhelm Maybach in 1886.
By the time it was ready for production, in 1938, Hitler had other plans, and the car’s assembly didn’t begin until 1945, in the British-occupied zone. German production ended in 1977, but the original VW Beetle continued to be assembled in Brazil until 1996 and in Mexico until 2003. The last car, made in Puebla, was number 21,529,464.
But in 2020, just over 60 percent of global electricity will originate in fossil fuels; about 12 percent will come from wind and solar; and the rest from hydro energy and nuclear fission.
EV creates three times as much toxicity as that of a conventional vehicle.
Today’s jet fuel—the most common formulation of which is called Jet A-1—has a number of advantages. It has a very high energy density, as it packs 42.8 megajoules into each kilogram (that is slightly less than gasoline but it can stay liquid down to –47°C), and it beats gasoline on cost, evaporative losses at high altitude, and risk of fire during handling. No real rivals yet exist.
A good harvest of Dutch wheat (9 tons per hectare) will contain about 10 percent protein or 140 kilograms of nitrogen, but only about 35 kilograms each of phosphorus and potassium.
Because crops now supply about 85 percent of all food protein (with the rest coming from grazing and aquatic foods), this means that without synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, we could not secure enough food for the prevailing diets of just over 3 billion people
Evolution has produced complex patterns of these traits, with lactase-deficient populations surrounded by milk drinkers (such as the horse milk-drinking Mongolians and yak milk-drinking Tibetans north and west of the non-milk-drinking Chinese), or even with the two societies intermingled (cattle pastoralists and slash-and-burn farmers or hunters of sub-Saharan Africa).
The latter mass translates into the slaughter of at least 12 million elephants.
