How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future

by Vaclav Smil

Yet these beneficiaries are still a minority (only about a fifth) of the world’s population, whose total count is approaching 8 billion people.

The second achievement to admire is the unprecedented expansion of our understanding of both the physical world and all forms of life.

In 1872, a century after the appearance of the last volume of the Encyclopédie, any collection of knowledge had to resort to the superficial treatment of a rapidly expanding range

topics, and, one and a half centuries later, it is impossible to sum up our understanding even

within narrowly circumscribed specialties: such terms as “physics” or...

meaningless labels, and experts in particle physics would find it ve...

even the first page of a new research paper in v...

They may share long apprenticeships, but too often they cannot agree on the best course of action. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic made it clear that disagreements among experts may extend even to such seemingly simple decisions as wearing a face mask. By the end of March

2020 (three months into the pandemic) the World Health Organization still advised against doing so unless a person was infected, and the reversal came only in early June 2020.

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.

Urbanization and mechanization have been two important reasons for this comprehension deficit.

Since the year 2007, more than half of humanity has lived in cities (more than 80 percent in all affluent countries), and unlike in the industrializing cities of the 19th and early

20th centuries, jobs in modern urban areas are lar...

Most modern urbanites are thus disconnected not only from the ways we produce our food but also from the ways we build our machines and devices, and the growing mechanization of all productive activity means that only a very small share of the global population now engages in deliver...

The other major reason for the poor, and declining, understanding of those fundamental processes that deliver energy (as food or as fuels) and durable materials (whether metals, non-metallic minerals, or concrete) is that they have come to be seen as old-fashioned—if not outdated—and distinctly unexciting compared to the world of information, data, and images.

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.

Dematerialization, powered by artificial intelligence, will end our dependence on shaped masses of metals and processed minerals, and eventually we might even do without

the Earth’s environment: who needs it if we are going to terraform Mars?

Of course, these are all not just grossly premature predictions, they are fantasies fostered by a society where fake news has become common and where reality and fiction have commingled to such an extent that gullible minds, susceptible to cult-like visions, believe what keener observers ...

To give just a single key comparison, in 2020 the average annual per capita energy supply of about 40 percent of the world’s population (3.1 billion people, which includes nearly all

people in sub-Saharan Africa) was no higher than the rate achieved in both Germany and France in 1860!

In order to approach the threshold of a dignified standard of living, those 3.1 billion people will need at least to double—but preferably triple—their per capita energy use, and in doing so multiply their electricit...

urban, industrial, and transportation infrastructures. Inevitably...

subject the biosphere to further ...

The real wrench in the works: we are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years. Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat, or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near-miraculous technical advances.

But who is going, willingly, to engineer the former while we are still lacking any convincing, practical, affordable global strategy and technical means to pursue the latter?

What will actually happen? The gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast, but in a democratic society no contest of ideas and proposals can proceed in rational ways without all sides sharing at least a modicum of relevant information about the real world, r...

from physical possi...

in the long run, there are too many unexpected developments and too many complex interactions that no individual or collective effort can anticipate.

I am neither a pessimist nor an optimist; I am a scientist trying to explain how the world really works, and I will use that understanding in order to make us better realize our future limits and opportunities.

The first chapter of this book shows how our high-energy societies have been steadily increasing their dependence on fossil fuels in general and on electricity, the most flexible form of energy, in particular.

Appreciation of these realities serves as a much-needed corrective to the now-common claims (based on a poor understanding of complex realities) that we can decarbonize the global energy supply in a hurry, and that it will take only two or three decades before we rely solely on renewable energy conversions.

The second chapter of this book is about the most basic survival necessity: producing our food.

Its focus is on explaining how much of what we rely on to survive, from wheat to tomatoes to shrimp, has one thing in common: it requires substantial, direct and indirect, fossil fuel inputs.

Awareness of this fundamental dependence on fossil fuels leads to a realistic understanding of our continued need for fossil carbon: it is relatively easy to generate electricity by wind turbines or solar cells rather than by burning coal or natural gas—but it would be much more difficult to run all field machinery without liquid fossil ...

The third chapter explains how and why our societies are sustained by materials created by human ingenuity, focusing on what I call the four pillars of modern civilization: ammonia,

steel, concrete, and plastics.

Understanding these realities exposes the misleading nature of recently fashionable claims about the dematerialization of modern economies dominated by se...

The relative decline of material needs per unit of many finished products has been one of the defining trends of modern industrial developments. But in absolute terms, material demands have been rising even in the world’s most affluent societies, and they remain far below any conceivable saturation levels in low-income countries where the ownership of well-built apartments, kitchen ...

The fourth chapter is the story of globalization, or how the world has become so interconnected by tra...

The fifth chapter provides a realistic framework for judging the risks we face: modern societies have succeeded in eliminating or reducing many previously mortal or crippling risks—polio and giving birth, for example—but many perils will always be with us, and we

repeatedly fail to make proper risk assessments, both underestimating and exaggerating the

dangers w...

The sixth chapter will look first at how unfolding environmental changes might affect our three existential necessities: oxygen, water, and food.

The rest of the chapter will focus on global warming, the change that has dominated recent environmental concerns and has led to the emergence of new—near apocalyptic—catastrophism on one hand, and complete denials of the process on the other.

Instead of recounting and adjudging these contested claims (too many books have already done so), I will stress that, contrary to widespread perceptions, this is not a recently discovered phenomenon: we have understoo...

Predictably, I have little use for either of these positions, and my perspective will find no favor with either doctrine.

I do not foresee any imminent break with history in either direction; I do not see any already predetermined outcomes, but rather a complicated trajectory contingent on our—far from foreclosed—choices.

This book rests on two foundations: abundant scientific findings and half a century of my research and book-writing. The first includes items...

as the pioneering elucidations of energy conversions and of the green...