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

by Vaclav Smil

my calculations show a 60-fold increase in the use of fossil fuels during the 19th century, a 16-fold gain during the 20th century, and about a 1,500-fold increase over the past 220 years.

An average inhabitant of the Earth nowadays has at their disposal nearly 700 times more useful energy than their ancestors had at the beginning of the 19th century.

Moreover, within a lifetime of people born just after the Second World War the rate had more than tripled, from about 10 to 34 GJ/capita between 1950 and 2020. Translating the last rate into more readily imaginable equivalents, it is as if an average Earthling has every year at their personal disposal about 800 kilograms (0.8 tons, or nearly six barrels) of crude oil, or about 1.5 tons of good bituminous coal. And when put in terms of physical labor, it is as if 60 adults would be working non-stop, day and night, for each average person; and for the inhabitants of affluent countries this equivalent of steadily laboring adults would be, depending on the specific country, mostly between 200 and 240.

Fossil energy use converted to man power

Our best data are available for the US, where, thanks to the prevalence of modern techniques and widespread economies of scale, the direct energy use in food production is now on the order of 1 percent of the total national supply.[47] But after adding the energy requirements of food processing and marketing, packaging, transportation, wholesale and retail services, household food storage and preparation, and away-from-home food and marketing services, the grand total in the US reached nearly 16 percent of the nation’s energy supply in 2007 and now it is approaching 20 percent.

If low labor costs were the sole reason for locating new factories abroad—as many people seem to erroneously believe—then sub-Saharan Africa would be the most obvious choice, and India would almost always be preferable to China.

the first transcontinental calls to San Francisco (via multiple exchanges) came in 1915; and a three-minute conversation cost about $20, or more than $500 in 2020 monies.

And we now have solid quantitative confirmation that globalization did reach a turning point in the mid-2000s. This development was soon obscured by the Great Recession of 2008, but McKinsey’s analysis of 23 industry value chains (interconnected activities, from design to retail, that deliver final products) spanning 43 countries between 1995 to 2017 shows that goods-producing value chains (still growing slowly in absolute terms) have become significantly less trade-intensive, with exports declining from 28.1 percent of gross output in 2007 to 22.5 percent in 2017.[96] What I see to be the study’s second-most important finding is that, 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. Similarly, an OECD study shows that the expansion of global value chains stopped in 2011 and since then has slightly declined: there has been less trade in intermediate goods and services.

The way Spain now eats is substantially different from the way Japan feeds itself—and, most definitely (being the continent’s top carnivore), this diet hardly resembles the frugal, near-vegetarian, and life-lengthening legendary Mediterranean diet.

Overall mortality depends heavily on the population’s average age. In 2019 the global mean was 7.6/1,000, while Kenya’s mortality (despite a lower standard of nutrition and health care) was less than half of the German rate (5.4 vs. 11.3) because Kenya’s median age of just 20 years is less than half of Germany’s 47 years.

Alas, a close reading reveals that these magic prescriptions give no explanation for how the four material pillars of modern civilization (cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia) will be produced solely with renewable electricity, nor do they convincingly explain how flying, shipping, and trucking (to which we owe our modern economic globalization) could become 80 percent carbon-free by 2030;

Point of the book

it is hard to imagine a better virus incubator than a ship with 3,000 crew, and 5,000 passengers who are often mostly elderly with many pre-existing health conditions.