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

by Vaclav Smil

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.

World Steel Association puts the average global rate at 500 kilograms of carbon per ton, with recent primary steelmaking emitting about 900 megatons of carbon a year, or 7–9 percent of direct emissions from the global combustion of fossil fuels.[78]

steel is not the only major material responsible for a significant share of CO2 emissions: cement is much less energy-intensive, but because its global output is nearly three times that of steel, its production is responsible for a very similar share (about 8 percent) of emitted carbon.

Cement is the indispensable component of concrete, and it is produced by heating (to at least 1,450°C) ground limestone (a source of calcium) and clay, shale, or waste materials (sources of silicon, aluminum, and iron) in large kilns—long (100–220 meters) inclined metal cylinders.[79] This high-temperature sintering produces clinker (fused limestone and aluminosilicates) that is ground to yield fine, powdery cement. Concrete consists largely (65–85 percent) of aggregates and also water (15–20 percent).[80] Finer aggregates such as sand result in stronger concrete, but need more water in the mix than do coarser aggregates that use different sizes of gravel. The mixture is held together by cement—typically 10–15 percent of concrete’s final mass—whose reaction with water first sets the mixture and then hardens it.

The Pantheon, intact after nearly two millennia (it was completed in 126 ce) still spans a greater distance than any other structure made of non-reinforced concrete.[83]

Reinforced concrete is now inside every large modern building and every transportation infrastructure,

The standard configuration of the US Interstate Highway System is a layer of about 28 centimeters of non-reinforced concrete on top of a twice-as-thick layer of natural aggregates (stones, gravel, sand)—and the entire Interstate system contains about 50 million tons of cement, 1.5 billion metric tons of aggregates, and only about 6 million tons of steel (for structural support and culvert pipes).[94]

But by far the most massive structures built of reinforced concrete are the world’s largest dams.

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 (4.56 billion tons).

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.

Between 1990 and 2020, the mass-scale concretization of the modern world has emplaced nearly 700 billion tons of hard but slowly crumbling material. The durability of concrete structures varies widely: while it is impossible to offer an average longevity figure, many will deteriorate badly after just two or three decades while others will do well for 60–100 years. This means that during the 21st century we will face unprecedented burdens of concrete deterioration, renewal, and removal (with, obviously, a particularly acute problem in China), as structures will have to be torn down—in order to be replaced or destroyed—or abandoned. Concrete structures can be slowly demolished, reinforcing steel can be separated, and both materials can be recycled: not cheap, but perfectly possible.

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 hygiene and to reduce the incidence of parasitic diseases by nearly 80 percent.[103]

today’s low-income modernizing countries, whose enormous infrastructural and consumer needs will require large-scale increases of all basic materials. Replicating the post-1990 Chinese experience in those countries would amount to a 15-fold increase of steel output, a more than 10-fold boost for cement production, a more than doubling of ammonia synthesis, and a more than 30-fold increase of plastic syntheses.[105] Obviously, even if other modernizing countries accomplish only half or even just a quarter of China’s recent material advances, these countries would still see multiplications of their current uses. Requirements for fossil carbon have been—and for decades will continue to be—the price we pay for the multitude of benefits arising from our reliance on steel, cement, ammonia, and plastics.

Modern economies will always be tied to massive material flows, whether those of ammonia-based fertilizers to feed the still-growing global population; plastics, steel, and cement needed for new tools, machines, structures, and infrastructures; or new inputs required to produce solar cells, wind turbines, electric cars, and storage batteries. 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.

Statistics concerning money movements greatly underestimate the real (including massive illegal) flows. The global merchandise trade is now close to $20 trillion a year, and the annual value of world trade in commercial services is close to $6 trillion.[4] Global foreign direct investment doubled between 2000 and 2019 and now approaches $1.5 trillion a year, while by 2020 global currency trading totaled nearly $7 trillion per day.[5] 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]

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]

Globalization has been linked, approvingly, with the advantages, benefits, creative destruction, modernity, and progress it has brought to entire nations. China has been by far its greatest beneficiary, as the country’s reintegration into the global economy helped to reduce the number of people living in extreme poverty by 94 percent between 1980 and 2015.[11]

The East India Company, headquartered in London and operating between 1600 and 1874, traded a wide range of items—largely to and from the Indian subcontinent—ranging from textiles and metals to spices and opium. The Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company) imported spices, textiles, gems, and coffee mostly from Southeast Asia; it kept its uninterrupted monopoly on trade with Japan for two centuries (between 1641 and 1858), and the Dutch domination of the East Indies ended only in 1945.[16]

The next fundamental advance in prime movers that raised the capability of long-distance shipping was the replacement of steam engines with diesel engines—machines of superior efficiency and reliable performance.[37] Two concurrent processes that promoted further globalization were the invention of airplanes powered by reciprocating gasoline engines, and radio communication.

the first airline company, the Dutch KLM, was set up in 1921.[38] The first transatlantic radio signal arrived in December 1901; the French army deployed the first portable transmitters for air-to-ground communication in 1916; and the first commercial radio stations began to broadcast in the early 1920s.[39]

the adoption of radio receivers was rapid: within a decade after their introduction, 60 percent of American families had them—nearly as fast a rate of acquisition as that of black-and-white TVs (which also originated in the 1920s) after the Second World War, and a faster rate than the subsequent diffusion of color TV which in the US took off rapidly during the early 1960s.[46]

Marine diesels and reciprocating aircraft engines remained the technical enablers of globalization during the two interwar decades, and their mass-scale deployment made the decisive contribution to the outcome of the Second World War. By the conflict’s end, the US had built nearly 296,000 airplanes compared to about 112,000 in Germany and 68,000 in Japan.[47] In 1945, the United States emerged as the world’s dominant power, and the economic recovery of Western Europe was fast. Aided by the US investment (1948’s Marshall Plan), all of the region’s countries surpassed their prewar (1934–1938) level of industrial production by 1949, while Japan’s recovery was accelerated by the contribution of that country’s industries to the Korean War.[48]

the greatest shipping innovation came in 1957, when a North Carolina trucker Malcolm McLean finally transformed his pre–Second World War idea—carrying cargo in uniformly-sized steel boxes, which are easy to load by large port cranes and can be off-loaded directly onto waiting trucks or trains or stacked temporarily for later distribution—into a commercial reality.

there was no problem meeting the propulsion needs of these new large ships. The pre–Second World War sizes of the largest diesel engine had more than doubled by the late 1950s—to more than 10 megawatts—as their efficiencies approached 50 percent.[55] Subsequently, the maximum power of these massive multi-cylinder engines rose to 35 megawatts by the late 1960s and to more than 40 megawatts by 1973. Any diesel engines rated above 30 megawatts can power the largest ULCC, and hence the size of these vessels has never been limited by the availability of adequate prime movers.

The first practical transistors—solid-state devices performing the same functions as glass-enclosed devices—became commercially available during the early 1950s, and before the decade’s end the ideas of several American inventors (Robert Noyce, Jack Kilby, Jean Hoerni, Kurt Lehovec, and Mohamed Atalla) resulted in the production of the first integrated circuits, with active (transistors) and passive (capacitors, resistors) components built and interconnected on a thin layer of silicon (a semiconducting material). These circuits can perform any specified computing functions, and their first practical uses were in rockets and space exploration.[63]

Intel in 1969 when it began to design the world’s first microprocessor, emplacing more than 2,000 transistors on a single silicon wafer in order to perform a complete set of prescribed functions: in the case of Intel’s pioneering 4044, it was to run a small Japanese electronic calculator.[64]

The gradual opening of China began in 1972 with Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing, took a decisive turn in late 1978 (two years after Mao Zedong’s death) with the rise of Deng Xiaoping and the launching of long-overdue economic reforms (the de facto privatization of farming, modernization of industry, and partial return to private enterprise), and accelerated after China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001.

India, with its messy electoral and multiethnic politics, has not been able to replicate China’s post-1990 rise driven by the unchallenged rule of a single party, but the record of its per capita GDP growth during the first two decades of the 21st century indicates a clear departure from the previous decades of poor performance. Between 1970 and 1990, the country’s per capita GDP (in constant monies) had actually declined in six separate years and stayed below 4 percent for four years, while between 2000 and 2019 there was an annual growth above 4 percent for 18 of those years.[71] Moreover, since 2008 the country’s annual growth of merchandise exports has been, at 5.3 percent, only slightly behind China’s 5.7 percent, and the impact of India’s software engineers in Silicon Valley (where they have been the single most important contingent of skilled immigrants in the industry) has been far above Chinese contributions.[72]

As for maximum ship sizes, in 1972 and 1973 Malcolm McLean launched his largest container vessels, each with a capacity of 1,968 standard steel containers (nearly five times larger than his first converted vessels in 1957). In 1996, Regina Maersk could load 6,000 standard units; by 2008 the maximum was 13,800; and in 2019 the Mediterranean Shipping Company put into service six giant vessels each able to carry 23,756 standard containers, hence a 12-fold increase of maximum vessel capacity between 1973 and 2019.[77] Inevitably, this mass-scale conversion to container shipping required the commensurate conversion of freight trains and truck transportation, and these intermodal chains now bring the goods from a city in China’s interior to the loading dock of a Walmart in Missouri.

between 1973 and 2018 global airfreight (expressed in ton-kilometers) rose about 12-fold, while scheduled passenger traffic rose from about 0.5 trillion to more than 8.3 trillion passenger-kilometers, nearly a 17-fold gain.[78] Nearly two-thirds (5.3 trillion passenger-kilometers) of the latest total were on international flights—the equivalent of flying nearly half a billion people a year from New York to London and back again.

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.

between 1971 and 2019 microprocessor power increased by seven orders of magnitude—17.1 billion times, to be exact.

everybody with a computer or a mobile phone can now see worldwide shipping and aviation activities in real time, just by clicking on the MarineTraffic website and watching cargo vessels (green icons) converging on Shanghai and Hong Kong, lining up to pass between Bali and Lombok, or going up the English Channel; to see tankers (red) debouching from the Persian Gulf, 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, while fishing illegally, they turn off their transponders).[86] Analogical, and no less fascinating, is the click-away opportunity to monitor all commercial flights.[87] Early

technical advances do not make continued progress inevitable: most notably, the first half of the 20th century saw a significant retreat from economic globalization and hence also from the accompanying international movement of people. The reasons for this retreat are obvious, as the decades were marked by an unprecedented concatenation of large-scale tragedies and reversals of national fortunes. The list, limited to the key events, includes the end of the Qing, China’s last imperial dynasty (1912); the First World War (1914–1918); the end of Czarist Russia, when the Bolsheviks took power and years of civil war followed, ending with the establishment of the USSR (1917–1921); the unraveling of the Ottoman Empire (final dissolution by 1923); the political instability in Europe of the postwar 1920s; the stock market collapse in late October 1929; the subsequent worldwide economic crises that lasted for most of the 1930s; Japan’s invasion of Manchuria (1931), the true beginning of another great war; the Nazi takeover of Germany (1933); the Spanish civil war (1936–1939); the Second World War (1939–1945); the renewed civil war in China (1945–1949); the beginning of the Cold War (1947); and Mao’s proclamation of the People’s Republic of China (1949). The retreat of economic globalization was substantial. The share of trade in global GDP fell from about 14 percent in 1913 to about 6 percent in 1939 and then to only 4 percent in 1945.[90]

This manufacturing switch has brought changes ranging from risible to tragic. In the first category are such 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, a country whose wood stocks amount to a small fraction of Canada’s enormous boreal forest patrimony.[94] 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]

globalization did reach a turning point in the mid-2000s. This development was soon obscured by the Great Recession of 2008, but McKinsey’s analysis of 23 industry value chains (interconnected activities, from design to retail, that deliver final products) spanning 43 countries between 1995 to 2017 shows that goods-producing value chains (still growing slowly in absolute terms) have become significantly less trade-intensive, with exports declining from 28.1 percent of gross output in 2007 to 22.5 percent in 2017.[96] What I see to be the study’s second-most important finding is that, contrary to common perception, only about 18 percent of the global goods trade is now driven by lower labor costs (labor arbitrage), that in many chains this share has been declining throughout the 2010s, and that global value chains are becoming more knowledge-intensive and rely increasingly on highly skilled labor. Similarly, an OECD study shows that the expansion of global value chains stopped in 2011 and since then has slightly declined: there has been less trade in intermediate goods and services.[97]

reshoring of manufacturing could be the wave of the future, both in North America and in Europe: a 2020 survey showed that 64 percent of American manufacturers said that reshoring is likely following the pandemic.[102]

it has looked increasingly as if most aspects of globalization will not soar to new highs, in 2020 this notion became entirely unexceptional: we may have seen the peak of globalization, and its ebb may last not just for years but for decades to come.

better hygiene (no single improvement being more important than more soap and the more frequent washing of hands), and better public health measures (ranging from mass-scale vaccinations to food safety oversight) have improved domestic comfort, reduced the risks of infections spread from contaminated water, cut the frequency of foodborne pathogens, and largely eliminated the dangers of carbon monoxide poisoning from wood-fired stoves.[2]

The Japanese diet has undergone an enormous transformation during the past 150 years. The traditional diet, consumed by most of the nation before 1900, was insufficient to support the population’s growth potential and it resulted in short statures among both women and men;

Seafood supply expanded rapidly as the country built the world’s largest fishing (and whaling) fleet. Meat became a part of common Japanese dishes, and many baked goods emerged as favorites in this traditionally non-baking culture. Higher incomes and hybridization of tastes brought increases in mean blood cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and body weight—and yet heart disease did not soar and longevity increased.[14]

there is a major gap in terms of average fat intake, with American males consuming about 45 percent more and women 30 percent more than the Japanese. And the greatest disparity is in sugar intake: among US adults it is about 70 percent higher. When recalculated in terms of average annual differences, Americans have recently consumed about 8 kilograms more fat and 16 kilograms more sugar every year than the average adult in Japan.[15]

so-called Mediterranean diet, with high intakes of vegetables, fruits, and whole grains complemented by beans, nuts, seeds, and olive oil.

the Spanish supply of animal fat is four times the Japanese rate.[18] Spaniards now consume almost twice the volume of plant oils as the Japanese—but their consumption of olive oil is about 25 percent lower than in 1960.

Higher incomes have only increased the traditional predilection for sugary creations, and the adoption of pop drinks did the rest: since 1960, per capita consumption of sugar has doubled and it is now about 40 percent above the Japanese level. At the same time, Spanish wine-drinking has been relentlessly declining, from about 45 liters per capita in 1960 to just 11 liters by 2020, and beer has become by far the country’s most-consumed alcoholic drink. The way Spain now eats is substantially different from the way Japan feeds itself—and, most definitely (being the continent’s top carnivore), this diet hardly resembles the frugal, near-vegetarian, and life-lengthening legendary Mediterranean diet.

But despite a more meaty, fatty, and sugary diet (and also rapidly abandoning drinking its supposedly heart-protecting wines), Spain’s cardiovascular mortality has kept on declining and life expectancy has been rising. Since 1960, Spain’s CVD mortality has been falling at a faster pace than the average of affluent economies, and by 2011 it was about a third lower than their mean; and since 1960, Spain has added more than 13 y...

Fatalistic people also underestimate risks in order to avoid the effort required to analyze them and draw practical conclusions, and because they feel totally unable to cope with them.[31] Traffic fatalism has been particularly well studied. Fatalistic drivers underestimate dangerous driving situations, are less likely to practice defensive driving (no distractions, keeping safe trailing distance, no speeding), and are less likely to restrain their children with seat belts or to report involvement in road accidents. Worryingly, studies in some countries found traffic fatalism prevalent among taxi drivers, and pervasive among minibus drivers.[32]

Homicides take almost as many lives as leukemia (6 vs. 7.2), a dual testament to the advances in treating that malignancy and to the extraordinary violence of American society.

Driving is an order of magnitude more dangerous than flying, and during the time a person is driving the average chance of dying goes up by about 50 percent compared to staying at home or tending a garden

Perhaps the most revealing way to compare the airline industry’s fatalities is per 100 billion passenger-kilometers flown. This rate was 14.3 in 2010, it reached a record low of 0.65 in 2017, but it increased to 2.75 in 2019. Flying in 2019 was thus more than five times safer than in 2010, and more than 200 times safer than at the beginning of the jetliner era in the late 1950s.[54]