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

by Vaclav Smil

Why then do most people in modern societies have such a superficial knowledge about how the world really works? The complexities of the modern world are an obvious explanation: people are constantly interacting with black boxes, whose relatively simple outputs require little or no comprehension of what is taking place inside the box.

The proverbial best minds do not go into soil science and do not try their hand at making better cement; instead they are attracted to dealing with disembodied information, now just streams of electrons in myriads of microdevices. From lawyers and economists to code writers and money managers, their disproportionately high rewards are for work completely removed from the material realities of life on earth. Moreover, many of these data worshippers have come to believe that these electronic flows will make those quaint old material necessities unnecessary.

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.

In real terms, crude oil was so cheap that there were no incentives to use it efficiently: American houses in regions with a cold climate, increasingly heated by oil furnaces, were built with single-glazed windows and without adequate wall insulation; the average efficiency of American cars actually declined between 1933 and 1973; and energy-intensive industries continued to operate by using inefficient processes.

In 1900, less than 2 percent of the world’s fossil fuel production was used to generate electricity; by 1950 that share was still less than 10 percent; it now stands at about 25 percent.

And what about countries that have not pushed renewables at extraordinary expense? Japan is the foremost example: in the year 2000 about 83 percent of its primary energy came from fossil fuels; in 2019 that share (due to the post-Fukushima loss of nuclear generation and the need for higher fuel imports) was 90 percent![82] And while the US has greatly reduced its dependence on coal—replaced by natural gas in electricity generation—the country’s share of fossil fuels in primary energy supply was still 80 percent fossil in 2019. Meanwhile China’s share of fossil fuels fell from 93 percent in the year 2000 to 85 percent in 2019—but this relative decline was accompanied by a near tripling of the country’s fossil fuel demand. The economic rise of China was the main reason why the global consumption of fossil fuels rose by about 45 percent during the first two decades of the 21st century, and why, despite extensive and expensive expansion of renewable energies, the share of fossil fuels in the world’s primary energy supply fell only marginally, from 87 percent to about 84 percent.

In more productive regions, population densities could rise to as many as 2–3 people per 100 hectares (equal to about 140 standard soccer fields).[2] The only foraging societies with high population densities were coastal groups (most notably in the Pacific Northwest), who had access to annual fish migrations and plentiful opportunities to hunt aquatic mammals: reliable supply of high-protein, high-fat food allowed some of them to switch to sedentary lives in large communal wooden homes, and left them with spare time to carve impressive totem poles. In contrast, early agriculture, where the just-domesticated crops were harvested, meant that more than one person per hectare of cultivated land could be fed.

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.

We get this high energy cost, in large part, because greenhouse tomatoes are among the world’s most heavily fertilized crops: per unit area they receive up to 10 times as much nitrogen (and also phosphorus) as is used to produce grain corn, America’s leading field crop.[38] Sulfur, magnesium, and other micronutrients are also used, as are chemicals protecting against insects and fungi. Heating is the most important direct use of energy in greenhouse cultivation: it extends the growing season and improves crop quality but, inevitably, when deployed in colder climates it becomes the single largest user of energy.

Every day we would have to feed and water our animals, regularly remove their manure, ferment it and then spread it on fields, and tend the herds and flocks on pasture. As seasonal labor demands rose and ebbed, men would guide the plows harnessed to teams of horses; women and children would plant and weed vegetable plots; and everybody would be pitching in during harvest and slaughter time, stooking sheaves of wheat, digging up potatoes, helping to turn freshly slaughtered pigs and geese into food. I do not foresee the organic green online commentariat embracing these options anytime soon. And even if they were willing to empty the cities and embrace organic earthiness, they could still produce only enough food to sustain less than half of today’s global population.

Animal manures applied to fields, mainly from cattle, pigs, and chickens, contain almost 30 megatons; a similar total is introduced by leguminous crops (green manure cover crops, as well as soybeans, beans, peas, and chickpeas); and irrigation water brings about 5 megatons—for a total of about 105 megatons of nitrogen per year. Synthetic fertilizers supply 110 megatons of nitrogen per year, or slightly more than half of the 210–220 megatons used in total. This means that at least half of recent global crop harvests have been produced thanks to the application of synthetic nitrogenous compounds, and without them it would be impossible to produce the prevailing diets for even half of today’s nearly 8 billion people. 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.

And in China, the world’s largest consumer of nitrogen fertilizer, only a third of the applied nitrogen is actually used by rice; the rest is lost to the atmosphere and to ground and stream waters.

Ironmaking is highly energy-intensive, with about 75 percent of the total demand claimed by blast furnaces. Today’s best practices have a combined demand of just 17–20 gigajoules per ton of finished product; less efficient operations require 25–30 GJ/t.[76] Obviously, the energy cost of secondary steel made in EAFs is much lower than the cost of integrated production: today’s best performance is just above 2 GJ/t. To this must be added the energy costs of rolling the metal (mostly 1.5–2 GJ/t), and hence the representative global rates for the overall energy cost may be about 25 GJ/t for integrated steelmaking and 5 GJ/t for recycled steel.[77] The total energy requirement of global steel production in 2019 was about 34 exajoules, or about 6 percent of the world’s primary energy supply.

But these early exchanges had limited economic impact, as they never reached beyond the small segments of people who benefited from the new ventures. The countryside was left with its traditional ways. This was just an incipient, selective, and limited globalization without any substantial nationwide impacts, to say nothing about truly global consequences. For example, economist Angus Maddison estimated that in 1698–1700 commodity exports from the East Indies accounted for just 1.8 percent of the Dutch net domestic product, and that the Indonesian export surplus was a mere 1.1 percent of the Dutch GDP—and nearly a century later (1778–1780) both of these shares were still only 1.7 percent.[25]

The integration of the global economy has been closely tied to the introduction of wide-body jetliners—to the Boeing 747 and to its later Airbus (A340 and A380) emulators. Their services have been particularly important for Asian exporters, who use them to deliver on short notice many highly sought-after or seasonal items (the latest mobile phone brands, Christmas gifts) to North American and European markets. And wide-body airplanes enabled mass-scale tourism to previously rarely visited destinations (runways long enough to accommodate 747s are in Bali and Tenerife, Nairobi and Tahiti), intercontinental immigration trips, and educational exchanges.

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.

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.

Phosphorus from fertilizers is lost through soil erosion and precipitation runoff and it is released in waste produced by domestic animals and people.[31] Because water (whether fresh or ocean) normally has very low concentrations of this element, its additions lead to eutrophication, the enrichment of waters with previously scarce nutrients that results in the excessive growth of algae.[32] Losses of nitrogen from fertilized farmland (and from animal and human waste) also cause eutrophication, but aquatic photosynthesis is more responsive to phosphorus additions. Neither primary sewage treatment (sedimentation removes 5–10 percent of phosphorus) nor secondary removal (filtration captures 10–20 percent) prevents eutrophication, but phosphorus can be removed by using coagulating agents or by microbial processes, then turned into crystals and reused as fertilizer.[33]

In already highly saturated markets with already congested traffic, the EU’s car ownership per 1,000 people rose by 13 percent between 2005 and 2017, and during the past 25 years it was up about 25 percent in Germany and 20 percent in France.

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; they merely assert that it could be so.

COVID-19 has provided a perfect—and costly—global reminder of our limited capacity to chart our futures, and that, too, will not (cannot) change in any dramatic way during the coming generation. The latest pandemic came after a decade that was suffused with adulatory praise of unprecedented and supposedly truly “disruptive” scientific and technical advances. Chief among them have been the anticipation of imminent deployments of the miraculous powers of artificial intelligence and neural-learning networks (Singularity-lite, one might say) and genome editing that will make it possible to engineer life forms at will.