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

by Vaclav Smil

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. On average, humans now have unprecedented amounts of energy at their disposal.

Many people nowadays admiringly quote the performance gains of modern computing (“so much data”) or telecommunication (“so much cheaper”)—but what about harvests? In two centuries, the human labor to produce a kilogram of American wheat was reduced from 10 minutes to less than two seconds. This is how our modern world really works.

According to the FAO, the world loses almost half of all root crops, fruits, and vegetables, about a third of all fish, 30 percent of cereals, and a fifth of all oilseeds, meat, and dairy products—or at least one-third of the overall food supply.[64]

during the second decade of the 21st century, China averaged about $230 billion of foreign direct investment a year, compared to less than $50 billion for India and just around $40 billion for all of sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa).[9] China provided a combination of other attractors—above all, centralized one-party government that could guarantee political stability and acceptable investment conditions; a large, highly homogeneous and literate population; and an enormous domestic market—that made it the preferred choice over Nigeria, Bangladesh, and even India, resulting in a remarkable collusion between the world’s largest communist state and a nearly complete lineup of the world’s leading capitalist enterprises.[10]

The Clipper had no shortage of physical comforts for its 74 passengers—including a stateroom and a dining room, dressing rooms, and seats that converted into bunks—but there was no way to eliminate the noise and vibration of reciprocating engines, and the highest cruising altitude (5.9 kilometers) was still too low to put it above the most turbulent atmospheric layers. With three stops it took 15½ hours from New York to Los Angeles, and the first London to Singapore link in 1934 took eight days with 22 layovers, including Athens, Cairo, Baghdad, Basra, Sharjah, Jodhpur, Calcutta, and Rangoon.[43] But long as it was, it was a considerable improvement on the approximately 30 days needed to travel by ship from Southampton via the Suez Canal.

in affluent countries the overall risk of natural demise amounts to 1 person among 1 million dying every hour; every hour, 1 person among about 3 million dies of heart disease and 1 among roughly 70 million dies of an accidental fall. Such odds are sufficiently low not to preoccupy an average citizen of any affluent country.

Water vapor is the principal generator of the natural greenhouse effect—but water vapor is not the cause of atmospheric warming because it does not control atmospheric temperature. In fact, it is the other way around: the changing temperature determines how much water can be present as a gas (the humidity of air increases with rising temperatures) and how much it condenses to liquid (condensation increases as the temperature drops). 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.

A commonly used climate-economy model indicates the break-even year (when the optimal policy would begin to produce net economic benefit) for mitigation efforts launched in the early 2020s would be only around 2080. Should average global life expectancy (about 72 years in 2020) remain the same, then the generation born near the middle of the 21st century would be the first to experience cumulative economic net benefit from climate-change mitigation policy.[61] Are the young citizens of affluent countries ready to put these distant benefits ahead of their more immediate gains? Are they willing to sustain this course for more than half a century even as the low-income countries with growing populations continue, as a matter of basic survival, to expand their reliance on fossil carbon? And are the people now in their 40s and 50s ready to join them in order to bring about rewards they will never see?

Nobody in 1945 could have predicted a world with more than 5 billion additional people that is also better fed than at any time in history—even as it keeps wasting an indefensibly high share of all the food it grows. Nor did anybody foresee a world that relegated a number of infectious diseases (most notably polio everywhere, and tuberculosis in affluent nations) to historical footnotes, but that cannot keep economic inequality from widening even in the richest countries; a world that is at once much cleaner and much healthier yet also more polluted in new ways (from plastic in the ocean to heavy metals in soils) and, due to the ongoing biospheric degradation, also more precarious; or a world suffused in instant and essentially free information that comes at the price of massively disseminated misinformation, lies and reprehensible claims.