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

by Vaclav Smil

The data are clear: between 1989 and 2019 we increased global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions by about 65 percent. Even when we deconstruct this global mean, we see that affluent countries like the US, Canada, Japan, Australia, and those in the EU, whose per capita energy use was very high three decades ago, did reduce their emissions, but only by about 4 percent, while Indian emissions quadrupled and Chinese emissions rose 4.5 times.[77]

The latest analysis of these combined effects concluded that we are already committed to global warming of 2.3°C.[84]

This is going to kill a lot of people

The Princeton scenario-builders recognize that it will be impossible to eliminate all fossil fuel consumption and that the only way to achieve net-zero emissions is to resort to what they label the “fourth pillar” of their overall strategy—to mass-scale carbon capture and storage of emitted CO2—and their calculation requires the removal of 1–1.7 gigatons of the gas per year. When compared on a volume equivalent basis, that would necessitate the creation of an entirely new gas-capture-transportation-storage industry that every year would have to handle 1.3–2.4 times the volume of current US crude oil production, an industry that took more than 160 years and trillions of dollars to build.

At the same time, additional monies would have to be spent on dismantling the existing transmission infrastructure of the US oil and gas industry. Given the rich historical experience with massive long-term cost overruns, any cost estimates for expenditure over the next three decades cannot be trusted even as far as their order of magnitude is concerned.

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; they merely assert that it could be so. Attentive readers will remember (see chapter 1) that during the first two decades of the 21st century Germany’s unprecedented quest for decarbonization (based on wind and solar) succeeded in boosting the shares of wind- and solar-generated electricity to more than 40 percent, but it lowered the share of fossil fuels in the country’s primary energy use only from about 84 percent to 78 percent.

Reality thus presses in from both ends. The sheer scale, cost, and technical inertia of carbon-dependent activities make it impossible to eliminate all of these uses in just a few decades. As I detailed in the chapter on energy, we cannot sever that dependence so rapidly, and every realistic long-term forecast concurs: most notably, even the IEA’s most aggressive decarbonization scenario has fossil fuels supplying 56 percent of the global primary energy demand by 2040. Similarly, the enormous scale and cost of material and energy demands make it impossible to resort to direct air capture as a decisive component of rapid global decarbonization.

Only the imagination limits these assumptions: they range from fairly plausible to patently delusionary. This is a new scientific genre where heavy doses of wishful thinking are commingled with a few solid facts. All of these models should be seen mainly as heuristic exercises, as bases for thinking about options and approaches, never to be mistaken for prescient descriptions of our future.

Analogically, the post-1980 rise of China (as well as India) has changed the circumstances of any response to rising global trace gas emissions. In 1980, four years after Mao Zedong’s death, China’s per capita economic product was less than one-quarter of the Nigerian mean; there were no private passenger cars; only the top Communist Party leaders living in the seclusion of Zhongnanhai (the former imperial garden within the Forbidden City, now the central headquarters of the Communist Party) had air conditioning; and China produced just 10 percent of global CO2 emissions.[103]

By 2019 China was, in terms of purchasing power, the world’s largest economy; its per capita GDP was five times the Nigerian mean; the country was the world’s largest producer of cars; half of all urban households had two window-mounted air-conditioning units; the length of its rapid train network surpassed the combined length of all the EU’s links; and about 150 million of its citizens had traveled overseas. The country also emitted 30 percent of the world’s CO2 from fossil fuels.

Looking ahead, most of the power to enact meaningful change will lie more and more in the modernizing economies of Asia: excluding high-income and low- or no-population growth Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, the continent is now producing half of all emissions. And while the unfolding transformation of sub-Saharan Africa has been much slower, its combined population of about 1.1 billion will nearly double during the next 30 years, it will contain almost 50 percent more people than China (the country that all low-income economies wish to emulate), and a critical assessment of the continent’s electricity future points to a high-carbon lock-in, with fossil-fueled generation dominant and with the share of non-hydro renewables remaining below 10 percent in 2030.[104]

The evolution of societies is affected by the unpredictability of human behavior, by sudden shifts of long-lasting historical trajectories, by the rise and fall of nations, and is accompanied by our ability to enact meaningful changes. These realities affect many inherently complex (and far from satisfactorily understood) biospheric processes. And because they elicit often contradictory natural responses, such as forests being both sinks and sources of carbon, it is impossible to say with confidence where we will be—in terms of fossil fuel consumption, the pace of decarbonization, or environmental consequences—in 2030 or 2050.

He predicts that, come 2045, machine intelligence will have surpassed human intelligence, what he calls biological and nonbiological intelligence will merge, and machine intelligence will fill the universe at infinite speed.[3] This is the ultimate ascension. It will make colonization of the rest of the universe an inevitably effortless endeavor.

In contrast, even short-term projections involving complex systems—those that reflect interplays of many technical, economic, and environmental factors, and which can be strongly affected by a number of arbitrary decisions such as unexpectedly generous government subsidies or new laws or sudden policy reversals—remain highly uncertain, and even near-term outlooks result in a broad range of possible outcomes. Forecasts for the worldwide adoption of electric passenger cars are an excellent recent example in this category.[8]

Moving from relatively simple pencil-and-paper forecasts to complex computerized scenarios makes it easier to perform the requisite calculations and to produce different scenarios, but it does not eliminate the inevitable perils of making assumptions. Just the opposite—more complex models combining the interactions of economic, social, technical, and environmental factors require more assumptions and open the way for greater errors.

The nuclear promise went far beyond electricity generation, and some astonishingly dubious ideas were tested or expensively investigated.

Little has changed half a century later: frightening prophecies and utterly unrealistic promises abound. The latest burst of intensified catastrophism has been focused on environmental degradation in general and on concerns about global climate change in particular. Journalists and activists write about climate apocalypse now, issuing final warnings. In the future, areas best suited for human habitation will shrink, large areas of the Earth are to become uninhabitable soon, climate migration will reshape America and the world, average global income will decline substantially, some prophecies claim that we might only have about a decade left to avert a global catastrophe, and in January 2020 Greta Thunberg went as far as to specify just eight years.[25]

That is bound to bring more embarrassments and more ridiculous predictions, as well as more surprises caused by unanticipated events. Extremes are fairly easy to envisage; anticipating realities that will arise from combinations of inertial developments and unpredictable discontinuities remains an elusive quest. No amount of modeling will eliminate that, and our long-range predictions will continue to err.[28]

Steel, cement, ammonia, and plastics will endure as the four material pillars of civilization; a major share of the world’s transportation will be still energized by refined liquid fuels (automotive gasoline and diesel, aviation kerosene, and diesel and fuel oil for shipping); grain fields will be cultivated by tractors pulling plows, harrows, seeders, and fertilizer applicators and harvested by combines spilling the grains into trucks.

The best we could do is what the residents of Italian towns did in the Middle Ages: stay away from others, stay inside for 40 days, isolate for quaranta giorni.[42]

COVID-19’s impact in rich countries in general, and in the United States in particular, also illustrates how misplaced some of our highly touted (and very expensive) future-forming endeavors have been.

How irrelevant are all of these quests while (as the cliché goes) the only remaining superpower could not provide its nurses and doctors with enough simple personal protection equipment, including such low-tech items as gloves, masks, caps, and gowns?

The country that spends more than half a trillion every year on its military (more than all of its potential adversaries put together) was unprepared for an event that was absolutely certain to occur, and it did not have enough basic medical supplies: investment in domestic production worth a few hundred million dollars could have significantly reduced the economic losses of COVID-19, measured in the trillions![45]

Obviously, a temperature rise that would continue for 25–35 years after the launching of a massive global decarbonization effort would present a major challenge for enacting and pursuing such drastic measures. But because there are currently no globally binding commitments that could see any widespread adoption of such steps within a few years, both the break-even point and the onset of measurable temperature declines advance even further into the future. 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.

Are the young citizens of affluent countries ready to put these distant benefits ahead of their more immediate gains?

Old people already sold us out Planet if fucked, btw

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.

A realistic grasp of our past, present, and uncertain future is the best foundation for approaching the unknowable expanse of time before us. While we cannot be specific, we know that the most likely prospect is a mixture of progress and setbacks, of seemingly insurmountable difficulties and near-miraculous advances. The future, as ever, is not predetermined. Its outcome depends on our actions.