How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

by Vaclav Smil

There can be no doubt that America’s post-2000 loss of some 7 million (formerly well-paying) manufacturing jobs—with most of that loss attributable to globalization, as most of that production moved to China—has been the principal reason of these deaths of despair, largely attributable to suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-induced liver disease.

contrary to common perception, only about 18 percent of the global goods trade is now driven by lower labor costs (labor arbitrage), that in many chains this share has been declining throughout the 2010s, and that global value chains are becoming more knowledge-intensive and rely increasingly on highly skilled labor.

But as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, a remarkable lineup of institutions began to publish analyses and appeals for the reorganization of global supply chains. The OECD looked at the policy options to build more resilient production networks that would rely less on imports from distant places and that could better withstand global trade interruptions.

Questioning and criticizing globalization has gone beyond narrowly ideological arguments, and the COVID-19 pandemic provided additional powerful arguments based on irrefutable concerns about the state’s fundamental role in protecting the lives of its citizens.

Such dependence might fulfill an economist’s dream of mass output at the lowest possible unit cost, but it makes for extremely irresponsible—if not criminal—governance when doctors and nurses have to face a pandemic without adequate PPE, when states dependent on foreign production engage in dismaying competition for limited supplies, and when patients around the world cannot renew their prescriptions because of the slowdowns or closures in Asian factories.

One sweeping, simplifying way to describe the advances of modern civilization is to see them as serial quests to reduce the risks that come from us being complex and fragile organisms trying to survive against many odds in a world abounding with dangers.

But given the complexity of our bodies, the enormity and unpredictability of natural processes, and the impossibility of eradicating all human errors made when designing intricate machines and when operating them, it is not at all surprising that risks continue to abound in the modern world.

Yes, the world is full of constant or episodic risks, but it is also replete with wrong perceptions and irrational risk appraisals.

Among the world’s more than 200 nations and territories, Japan has had the highest average longevity since the early 1980s, when its combined (male and female) life expectancy at birth surpassed 77 years.

But there is a major gap in terms of average fat intake, with American males consuming about 45 percent more and women 30 percent more than the Japanese. And the greatest disparity is in sugar intake: among US adults it is about 70 percent higher. When recalculated in terms of average annual differences, Americans have recently consumed about 8 kilograms more fat and 16 kilograms more sugar every year than the average adult in Japan.[15]

If we were to stake longevity (accompanied by healthy and active life) solely on the prevailing diet—which, however important, is but one element of a bigger picture that includes your inherited genes and surrounding environment—then Japanese eating has a slight edge, but an only slightly inferior outcome can be had by eating as they do in Valencia.

When people think that they are in control (a perception that may be incorrect but that is based on previous experiences and hence on the belief that they can assess the likely outcome), they engage in activities—climbing

And most people have no problem engaging daily and repeatedly in activities that temporarily increase their risk by significant margins:

In some cases this disparity between tolerating voluntary risks and trying to avoid wrongly perceived risks of involuntary exposures becomes truly bizarre, as people refuse to have their children inoculated (voluntarily exposing them to multiple risks of preventable diseases) because they consider government requirements to protect their children (an involuntary imposition) as unacceptably risky—and have been doing so on the basis of repeatedly discredited “evidence” (most notably linking vaccination to a higher incidence of autism) or rumored perils (the implanting of microchips!).

And the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic elevated these irrational fears to a new level. Humanity’s best hope to end the pandemic was mass-scale vaccination, but long before the first vaccines were approved for distribution, large shares of the population were telling pollsters that they would not get inoculated.

This is why many researchers have argued that there is no “objective risk” waiting to be measured because our risk perceptions are inherently subjective, dependent on our understanding of specific dangers (familiar vs. new risks) and on cultural circumstances.

involuntary risks are often associated with the dread of new, uncontrollable, and unknown hazards; voluntary hazards are more likely to be perceived as controllable and known to science.

The strong inverse relationship between the risk and overall participation in an activity is obvious: large numbers of people are willing to risk a dislocated shoulder or a sprained ankle while skiing downhill on a groomed run; very few are into launching themselves into the void from precipices.

Very few inhabitants of America’s tornado-swept states are aware of this rate but they recognize—as do people in other areas subject to recurrent natural catastrophes—that the probability of being killed by a tornado is sufficiently small, and hence the risk of continued living in such regions remains acceptable.

Widely broadcast images of destruction left by powerful tornadoes make viewers living in atmospherically less violent regions wonder why people say that they will rebuild on the same spot. But such decisions are neither irrational nor recklessly risky, and because of them millions of people continue to live in the Tornado Alley that extends from Texas to South Dakota.

Again, these low average fatality exposure rates help to explain why entire countries come to terms with the ever-present risks of earthquakes.

The World Economic Forum’s ranking of top global risks, prepared annually between 2007 and 2015, led with asset price collapse, financial crisis, and major systemic financial failure eight times (obvious echoes of 2008) and water crises once, while pandemic threat did not appear among the top three risks even once.

it is astonishing how many people do not reduce even the most easily—and inexpensively—reducible risks.

Moreover, most people and most governments find it difficult to deal properly with low-probability but high-impact (high-loss) events.

But it is difficult, if not impossible, to avoid many exposures, because (as already noted) in some cases there is no clear dichotomy between voluntary and involuntary risks. And most risks are beyond our control.

Because that is clearly impossible on an increasingly crowded planet, the only way to improve the odds of survival under those conditions is to take precautions—earthquake-proof

Another set of truisms applies to our risk assessment. We habitually underestimate voluntary, familiar risks while we repeatedly exaggerate involuntary, unfamiliar exposures. We constantly overestimate the risks stemming from recent shocking experiences and underestimate the risk of events once they recede in our collective and institutional memory.

As COVID-19 demonstrated yet again (and on scales that must have surprised even those who do not expect any good news), we are repeatedly caught ill-prepared for dealing with recurrent high-impact but relatively low-frequency risks such as viral pandemics that take place once in a decade, once in a generation, or once in a century.

And the lessons we derive in the aftermath of major catastrophic events are decidedly not rational. We exaggerate the probability of their recurrence, and we resent any reminders that (setting the shock aside) their actual human and economic impact has been comparable to the consequences of many risks whose cumulative toll does not raise any extraordinary concerns.

Public reaction to risks is guided more by a dread of what is unfamiliar, unknown, or poorly understood than by any comparative appraisal of actual consequences. When these strong emotional reactions are involved, people focus excessively on the possibility of a dreaded outcome (death by a terrorist attack or by a viral pandemic) rather than trying to keep in mind the probability of such an outcome taking place.

There is no better illustration of neglected low-cost measures to save lives than the American attitude to gun violence: not even the most shocking iterations of familiar, all-too-well-known mass murders (I always think first of the 26 people, including 20 six- and seven-year-old children, shot in 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut) have been able to change the laws,

the quest for minimizing risks remains the leading motivation of human progress.

if our species is to survive, never mind to flourish, for at least as long as high civilizations have been around (that is, for another 5,000 or so years), then we will have to make sure that our continuing interventions do not imperil the long-term habitability of the planet—or, as modern parlance has it, that we do not transgress safe planetary boundaries.[4]

Oxygen, after all, is the most acutely limiting resource for human survival. Our species, like all other chemoheterotrophs (organisms that cannot internally produce their own nutrition), requires its constant supply.

As well as there being absolutely no danger of people or animals appreciably reducing this level through breathing, there is also no danger of too much oxygen being consumed by even the greatest conceivable burning (rapid oxidation) of the Earth’s plants.

The Earth’s terrestrial plant mass contains on the order of 500 billion tons of carbon and even if all of it (all forests, grasslands, and crops) were burned at once, such a mega-conflagration would consume only about 0.1 percent of the atmosphere’s oxygen.

This misinformation also illustrates a far wider problem—namely why are we not relying on well-established scientific facts, and instead, why do we let assorted tweets drive public opinion?

Most obviously, lungs do not produce oxygen, they process it: the function of lungs is to enable gas exchange as atmospheric O2 enters the bloodstream and CO2, the most voluminous gaseous product of metabolism, leaves it.

The amount of land used in food production could be reduced with the combination of better farming practices, reduced food waste, and the widespread adoption of moderate meat consumption.

the elimination of many wasteful practices could produce higher yields even with reduced fertilizer or pesticide use.

And any longer-term assessment of the three existential necessities—atmospheric oxygen, water availability, and food production—must consider how their provision could be affected by the unfolding process of climate change, a gradual transformation that will leave its mark on the biosphere in myriad ways:

the abundance of fossil fuels and their increasingly more efficient conversions have been the dominant energizers of modern economic growth, bringing us the benefits of greater longevity and richer lives—but also concerns about the long-term effects of CO2 emissions on the global climate (commonly referred to as global warming).

We are concerned about too much of something without which we could not be alive: the greenhouse effect. This existential imperative is the regulation of the Earth’s atmospheric temperature by a few trace gases—above all by carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). Compared to the two gases that make the bulk of the atmosphere (nitrogen at 78 percent, oxygen at 21 percent), their presence is negligible (small fractions of a percent) but their effect makes the difference between a lifeless, frozen planet and a blue and green Earth.

The Earth’s atmosphere absorbs the incoming (short-wave) solar radiation and radiates (longer waves) to space. Without it, the temperature of the Earth would be -18°C, and hence our planet’s surface would be perpetually frozen. Trace gases change the planet’s radiation balance by absorbing some of the outgoing (infrared) radiation and raising the surface temperature. This allows for the existence of liquid water, whose evaporation puts water vapor (another gas that absorbs outgoing infrared, invisible waves) into the atmosphere. The overall result is that the Earth’s surface temperature is 33°C higher than it would be in the absence of trace gases and water vapor, and the global mean temperature of 15°C supports life in its many forms.

The Earth’s natural warming is controlled by trace gases whose concentration is not affected by the ambient temperature—that is, they do not condense and precipitate as temperatures decline. But the relatively small warming they cause increases evaporation and raises atmospheric water concentrations, and this feedback results in additional warming.

Human actions began to affect the concentrations of several trace gases—creating an additional, man-made (anthropogenic) greenhouse gas effect—thousands

But the impact of these anthropogenic emissions became significant only with the increasing pace of industrialization. Rising CO2 emissions, which cause an accelerated anthropogenic greenhouse gas effect, have been driven primarily by the combustion of fossil fuels and by the production of cement. Methane emissions (from rice fields, landfills, cattle, and natural gas production) and nitrous oxide (originating mostly from the rising application of nitrogenous fertilizers) are the other notable anthropogenic sources of greenhouse gases.

The continued rise of greenhouse gas emissions will eventually lead to temperatures high enough to cause many negative environmental impacts, engendering considerable social and economic costs.

But while our latest monitoring and modeling are certainly more advanced, there is nothing new either about our understanding of the greenhouse effect or about the consequences of steadily increasing emissions of greenhouse gases: in principle, we have been aware of them for more than 150 years, and in a clear and explicit manner for more than a century!

And yet, so far, the only effective, substantial moves toward decarbonization have not come from any determined, deliberate, targeted policies. Rather, they have been by-products of general technical advances (higher conversion efficiencies, more nuclear and hydro generation, less wasteful processing and manufacturing procedures) and of ongoing production and management shifts (switching from coal to natural gas; more common, less energy-intensive, material recycling) whose initiation and progress had nothing to do with any quest for reduced greenhouse gas emissions.[52]