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

by Vaclav Smil

The road to the modern world began with inexpensive steel plows and inorganic fertilizers, and a closer look is needed to explain these indispensable inputs that have made us take a well-fed civilization for granted.

Almería province are the world’s largest covered area of commercial cultivation of produce: about 40,000 hectares (think of a 20 km × 20 km square) and easily identifiable on satellite images—look for yourself on Google Earth. You can even take a ride on Google Street View, which offers an otherworldly experience of these low-elevation, plastic-covered structures. Under this sea of plastic, the Spanish growers and their local

How many vegans enjoying the salad are aware of its substantial fossil fuel pedigree?

Capturing such plentiful pelagic (living near the surface) species as anchovies and sardines or mackerel can be done with a relatively small energy investment—indirectly

you want to eat wild fish with the lowest-possible fossil carbon footprint, stick to sardines. The

Unfortunately, the marine species that people prefer to eat (salmon, sea bass, tuna) are carnivorous, and for their proper growth they need to be fed protein-rich fish meals and fish oil

(in 2018 it was 82 million tons compared to 96 million tons of wild-caught species)—has

the most common)—have a low energy cost, typically less than 300 mL/kg. But, traditional Christmas Eve dinners in Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, and Poland aside, carp is quite an unpopular culinary choice in Europe and it is barely eaten in North America, while demand for tuna, some species of which are now among the most endangered top marine carnivores, has been soaring thanks to the rapid worldwide adoption of sushi.

our food supply—be it staple grains, clucking birds, favorite vegetables, or seafood praised for its nutritious quality—has become increasingly dependent on fossil fuels. This fundamental reality is commonly ignored by those who do not try to understand how our world really works and who are now predicting rapid decarbonization. Those same people would be shocked to know that our present situation cannot be changed easily or rapidly: as we saw in the preceding chapter, the ubiquity and the scale of the dependence are too large for that.

in the US reached nearly 16 percent of the nation’s energy supply in 2007 and now it is approaching 20 percent.[48]

While we could reduce our dependence on synthetic ammonia by eating less meat and wasting less food, replacing the global input of about 110 megatons of nitrogen in synthetic compounds by organic sources could be done only in theory.

Global crop cultivation supported solely by the laborious recycling of organic wastes and by more common rotations is conceivable for a global population of 3 billion people consuming largely plant-based diets, but not for nearly 8 billion people on mixed diets: recall that synthetic

we could reduce our crop and animal production—and the attendant energy subsidies—if we wasted less food.

the well-documented global food losses have been excessively high, mostly because of an indefensible difference between output and actual

Reducing food waste might seem to be much easier than reforming complex production processes, and yet this proverbial low-hanging fruit has been difficult to harvest.

In well-off societies, a better way to reduce agriculture’s dependence on fossil fuel subsidies is to make appeals for adopting healthy and satisfactory alternatives to today’s excessively rich and meaty diets—the easiest choices being moderate meat consumption, and favoring meat that can be grown with lower environmental impact. The quest for mass-scale veganism is doomed to fail.

The idea that billions of humans—across the world, not only in affluent Western cities—would willfully not eat any animal products, or that there’d be enough support for governments to enforce that anytime soon, is ridiculous.

Meat consumption in Japan, the country with the world’s highest longevity, has recently been below 30 kilograms per year;

there is no near-term prospect for substantially reducing the global dependence on synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers.

They will depend on inexpensive renewable electricity generation backed up by adequate large-scale storage, a combination that is yet to be commercialized

nitrogen-fixing

and puerile apps.

silicon crystals that are cut into wafers is a complex, multi-step, and highly energy-intensive process: it costs two orders of magnitude more primary energy than making aluminum from bauxite, and

cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia.[4]

As a result, global production of these four indispensable materials claims about 17 percent of the world’s primary energy supply, and 25 percent of all CO2 emissions

The challenge was to ensure that humanity could secure enough nitrogen to sustain its expanding numbers.

half of the world’s population could not be sustained without synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers.

We could also reduce our dependence on nitrogenous fertilizers by cutting our food waste (as we saw earlier) and by using the fertilizers more efficiently.

nitrogen-fixing

Global production rose from only about 20,000 tons in 1925 to 2 million tons by 1950, 150 million tons by the year 2000, and about 370 million tons by 2019.[42]

PVC is now the primary component in more than a quarter of all health-care products, and

Moreover, as far as microfibers go, it is wrong to assume, as so many do, that most of their presence in ocean water derives from the wear and tear of synthetic textiles. Those polymers now account for two-thirds of global fiber output, but a study of seawater samples showed that oceanic fibers are mainly (>90 percent) of natural origin.[46]

Steels (the plural is more accurate as there are more than 3,500 varieties) are alloys

aluminum melts at 660°C, copper at 1,085°C, steel only at 1,425°C.

Stainless steel (10–20 percent chromium) was made for the first time only in 1912 for kitchenware, and is now widely used for surgical instruments,

Steel determines the look of modern civilization and enables its most fundamental functions.

(guyed masts)

(R/P) ratio

By far the most challenging recycling operation is the dismantling of large ocean-going vessels, done mostly on beaches in Pakistan (Gadani, northwest

Karachi), India (Alang in Gujarat), and Bangladesh (near Chittagong). Stripped hulls made of heavy steel plates must be cut by gas and plasma torches—dangerous and polluting work done too often by men working without proper protective gear.[70]

Steel scrap has become one of the world’s most valuable export

This means that primary steelmaking still dominates, producing more than twice as much hot metal every year as is recycled—almost

Given the industry’s dependence on coking coal and natural gas, steelmaking has been also a major contributor to the anthropogenic generation of greenhouse gases.

But steel is not the only major material responsible for a significant share of CO2 emissions: cement is much less energy-intensive, but because

Roman cement was a mixture of gypsum, quicklime, and volcanic sand,

But the preparation of modern cement was patented only in 1824 by Joseph Aspdin, an English bricklayer. His hydraulic mortar was made by firing limestone and clay at high temperatures: lime, silica, and alumina present in these materials are vitrified or transformed into a glass-like substance, whose grinding produced Portland cement.[84] Aspdin chose that name (still widely used today) because once hardened, and after reacting with water, the glassy clinker

Wright’s most famous interwar concrete designs were Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel, finished just before the 1923 earthquake leveled the city and damaged the new structure, and Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, completed in 1939. The Guggenheim Museum in New York was his last famous concrete design, completed in 1959.[90] The tensile strength of reinforcing

Sydney Opera House (built between 1959 and 1973) is perhaps the world’s most famous pre-stressed concrete strucuture.

For example, Canada’s longest runway (4.27 kilometers, in Calgary) required more than 85,000 cubic meters of concrete and 16,000 tons of reinforcing steel.

Perhaps the most stunning outcome of this rise is that in just two years—2018 and 2019—China produced nearly as much cement (about 4.4 billion tons) as did the United States during the entire 20th century