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

by Vaclav Smil

Yet another astounding statistic is that the world now consumes in one year more cement than it did during the entire first half of the 20th century. And (both fortunately and unfortunately) these enormous masses of modern concrete will not last as long as the Pantheon’s coffered dome. Ordinary construction concrete

In affluent countries with low population growth, the main need is to fix decaying infrastructures. The latest report card for the US awards nothing but poor to very poor grades to all sectors where concrete dominates, with dams, roads, and aviation getting Ds and the overall average grade just D+.[102] This appraisal gives an inkling of what China might face (mass- and money-wise) by 2050. In contrast, the poorest countries need essential infrastructures and the most basic need in many homes in Africa and Asia is to replace mud floors with concrete floors in order to improve overall

Two prominent examples illustrate this unfolding material dependence.

Multiplying these requirements by the millions of turbines that would be needed to eliminate electricity generated from fossil fuels shows how misleading any talks are about the coming dematerialization of green economies.

Electric cars provide perhaps the best example of new, and enormous, material

450 kilograms contains about 11 kilograms of lithium, nearly 14 kilograms of cobalt, 27 kilograms of nickel, more than 40 kilograms of copper, and 50 kilograms of graphite—as well as about 181 kilograms of steel, aluminum, and plastics. Supplying these materials for a single vehicle requires processing about 40 tons of ores, and given the low concentration of many elements in their ores it necessitates extracting and processing about 225 tons of raw materials.[108] Again, we would have to multiply this by close to 100 million units, which is the annual worldwide production of internal-combustion vehicles that would have to be replaced by electric drive.

Lithium battery

cobalt (a large share of it now coming from Congo’s perilously hand-dug deep shafts and from widespread child labor),

Generating smoothly rising forecasts of future electric vehicle ownership is one thing; creating these new material supplies on a mass global scale is quite another.

Reality

And until all energies used to extract and process these materials come from renewable conversions,

modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on the fossil fuels used in the production of these indispensable materials. No AI, no apps, and no electronic messages will change that.

Apple’s American-designed iPhones are assembled in a Taiwanese-owned factory (Hon Hai Precision, trading as Foxconn) in Shenzhen,

parts coming from more than a dozen countries,

Travel for leisure has reached such levels that in many cases the pre-pandemic label of “overtourism” was but a mild description of what was taking place in Rome’s San Pietro, where the basilica was jammed with

overtourism

major companies advertised new megaship cruises for 2021 (such is modern restlessness!).

Statistics concerning money movements greatly underestimate the real (including massive illegal) flows.

And numbers describing global information flows are many orders of magnitude higher than these money transfers—not just in terabytes or petabytes but in exa (1018) and yotta (1024) bytes of data.[6]

“the growing interdependence of the world’s economies, cultures, and populations, brought about by cross-border trade in goods

Perhaps the greatest misconception about globalization is that it is a historical inevitability preordained by economic and social evolution. Not so—globalization is not, as a former US president claimed, “the economic equivalent of a force of nature, like wind or water”; it is just another human construct, and there is now a growing consensus that, in some ways, it has already gone too far and needs to be readjusted.[8]

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]

reduce the number of people living in extreme poverty by 94 percent between 1980 and 2015.[11] But these gains

labor arbitrage

Cheap labor

immiseration.

documented by the German transition: by 1873, sailing ships had lost the competition on the intra-European routes, while on the intercontinental routes sails had the advantage until 1880 but lost it rapidly afterwards with the adoption of more efficient engines.[28]

calling distances expanded gradually (a call from New York to Chicago could be made only in 1892); 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. The first

intercontinental call—from the US to the UK—came only in 1927,

The year grandma was born

autarkic

The American market opened up first to Volkswagen’s Beetle (the first car imported already in 1949) and then to small Japanese designs (the Toyopet since 1958, Honda N600 since 1969, and Honda Civic

The prototype took off less than three years after Pan Am’s order for 25 of the 747s, and the first commercial flight left New York for London on January 21, 1970.

Europe remains the main tourist destination, accounting for half of the total arrivals—with France, Spain, and Italy being the continent’s

most visited countries. For generations the US led overall tourist expenditures, but it was surpassed by China in 2012 and five years later Chinese tourists were spending twice as much as Americans. The rather sudden multiplication of arrivals and their disproportionate concentration in several major cities (Paris, Venice, Barcelona) has led to complaints by their permanent residents and to the first moves to limit the numbers of daily or annual visitors.[80]

And the progress continued: the 108 mark was surpassed in 2003, 109 in 2010, and by the end of 2019 AMD released its Epyc CPU with 39.5 billion transistors.[84] This means that between 1971 and 2019 microprocessor power increased by seven orders of magnitude—17.1 billion times, to be exact.

MarineTraffic website and watching cargo vessels (green icons) converging on Shanghai and

see tankers (red)

tugs and special craft (turquoise) serving the oil and gas production rigs in the North Sea, and fishing vessels (light brown) roaming the central Pacific (and there are many more ships there and elsewhere that do not show on the screen, because...

A great deal of accreted globalization, especially many changes that unfolded during the past two generations, is here to stay. Too many countries now rely on food imports, and self-sufficiency in all raw materials is impossible even

no country possesses sufficient reserves of all minerals needed by its economy. The

Basic challenge

Shenzhen suddenly ceased to function as the world’s most important manufacturing

but the pro-globalization sentiment has been weakening for some time. The accelerated deindustrialization of North America, Europe, and Japan, and the shift of manufacturing to Asia in general and to China in particular, has been the leading reason for this reappraisal.

grotesque transactions as Canada, the country with per capita forest resources greater than in any other affluent nation, importing toothpicks and toilet paper from China,

But the switch has also contributed to tragedies, such as the rising midlife mortality among America’s white non-university-educated men. 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.[95]

only about 18 percent of the global goods trade is now driven by lower labor costs (labor arbitrage),

protecting the lives of its citizens. That role is hard to play when 70 percent of the world’s rubber gloves are made in a single factory, and when similar or even higher shares

we may have seen the peak of globalization, and its ebb may last not just for years but for decades to come.

being complex and fragile organisms trying to survive against many odds in a world abounding with dangers.

And despite the impression created by media reporting, the worldwide frequency of violent conflicts and the total number of their casualties have been declining for decades.[5] But

it is not at all surprising that risks continue to abound in the modern world.

chemophobia

Very usedful word

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

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