How the World Really Works Quotes

“Now most people in affluent and middle-income countries worry about what (and how much) is best to eat in order to maintain or improve their health and extend their longevity, not whether they will have enough to survive.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future

“Crises expose realities and strip away obfuscation and misdirection.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: A Scientist's Guide to Our Past, Present and Future

“Annual global demand for fossil carbon is now just above 10 billion tons a year—a mass nearly five times more than the recent annual harvest of all staple grains feeding humanity, and more than twice the total mass of water drunk annually by the world’s nearly 8 billion inhabitants—and it should be obvious that displacing and replacing such a mass is not something best handled by government targets for years ending in zero or five. Both the high relative share and the scale of our dependence on fossil carbon make any rapid substitutions impossible: this is not a biased personal impression stemming from a poor understanding of the global energy system – but a realistic conclusion based on engineering and economic realities.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“energy is the only truly universal currency, and nothing (from galactic rotations to ephemeral insect lives) can take place without its transformations.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“Erwin Schrödinger, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933, summed up the basis of life: “What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy” (negative entropy or negentropy = free energy).”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“Energy conversions are the very basis of life and evolution. Modern history can be seen as an unusually rapid sequence of transitions to new energy sources, and the modern world is the cumulative result of their conversions.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“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.[93] 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.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“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.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“during the past 30 years the maximum energy density of batteries has roughly tripled, and even if we were to triple that again densities would still be well below 3,000 Wh/kg in 2050—falling far short of taking a wide-body plane from New York to Tokyo or from Paris to Singapore, something we have been doing daily for decades with kerosene-fueled Boeings and Airbuses.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“In short, for decades it will be impossible to adequately feed the planet without using fossil fuels as sources of energy and raw materials.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“The strong inverse relationship between the risk and overall participation in an activity is obvious: large numbers of people are willing to risk a dislocated shoulder or a sprained ankle while skiing downhill on a groomed run; very few are into launching themselves into the void from precipices.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“be”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“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!”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“Both the high relative share and the scale of our dependence on fossil carbon make any rapid substitutions impossible: this is not a biased personal impression stemming from a poor understanding of the global energy system – but a realistic conclusion based on engineering and economic realities.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“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.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“Ser agnóstico sobre el futuro lejano significa ser honesto: tenemos que admitir los límites de nuestra comprensión, abordar los retos planetarios con humildad, y reconocer que los avances, contratiempos y reveses seguirán formando parte de nuestra evolución, así como que no puede haber garantía de éxito —sea cual sea— en última instancia,”
― Vaclav Smil, Cómo funciona el mundo: Una guía científica de nuestro pasado, presente y futuro

“De omnibus dubitandum”
― Vaclav Smil, Cómo funciona el mundo: Una guía científica de nuestro pasado, presente y futuro

“si disminuye el porcentaje de carne de vacuno y aumenta el de cerdo, pollo, huevos y lácteos, y si se logra una mayor eficiencia en la alimentación del ganado y un mejor uso de los residuos de los cultivos y de los subproductos del procesamiento de los alimentos—, podríamos logar los mismos resultados de producción de carne que en los últimos tiempos, a la vez que limitamos el impacto medioambiental del ganado, incluida su contribución a las emisiones de metano.[70]”
― Vaclav Smil, Cómo funciona el mundo: Una guía científica de nuestro pasado, presente y futuro

“el suministro de agua es un ejemplo perfecto de un recurso casi universalmente mal gestionado, con la complicación añadida de que el acceso a la misma es muy desigual.[15]”
― Vaclav Smil, Cómo funciona el mundo: Una guía científica de nuestro pasado, presente y futuro

“Podría aportar alguna recomendación final útil, siempre que reconozcamos las siguientes realidades fundamentales: querer que nuestra existencia esté libre de riesgos es pedir lo imposible; pero la búsqueda de formas de minimizar estos riesgos sigue siendo la más importante de las motivaciones del progreso humano.”
― Vaclav Smil, Cómo funciona el mundo: Una guía científica de nuestro pasado, presente y futuro

“El silicio convertido en delgadas láminas (el sustrato básico de los microchips) es el material distintivo de la era electrónica, pero miles de millones de personas podrían vivir con prosperidad sin él;”
― Vaclav Smil, Cómo funciona el mundo: Una guía científica de nuestro pasado, presente y futuro

“las sociedades modernas «no comprendían la energía implicada ni los diversos medios mediante los cuales las energías que entran en un sistema complejo retornan indirectamente en forma de aportaciones en todos los puntos de la red […]. El hombre industrial ya no come patatas hechas a partir de energía solar; ahora come patatas hechas, en parte, de petróleo».”
― Vaclav Smil, Cómo funciona el mundo: Una guía científica de nuestro pasado, presente y futuro

“En regiones más productivas, las densidades de población podían elevarse hasta 2-3 personas por cada 100 hectáreas (unos 140 campos de fútbol).[2] Las únicas sociedades recolectoras con densidades de población altas eran grupos costeros (en particular, en el noroeste del Pacífico), que tenían acceso a las migraciones anuales de peces y abundantes oportunidades para cazar mamíferos marinos; un suministro seguro de alimentos ricos en proteínas y grasas que permitía que algunos de ellos llevasen vidas sedentarias en grandes casas comunales de madera, lo cual les dejaba tiempo de sobra para tallar impresionantes tótems. Por contraste, con la agricultura primitiva, donde se cosechaban las plantas que habían aprendido a cultivar, podía alimentarse a más de una persona por hectárea de tierra cultivada.”
― Vaclav Smil, Cómo funciona el mundo: Una guía científica de nuestro pasado, presente y futuro

“Actualmente, un habitante medio del planeta tiene a su disposición casi setecientas veces más energía útil que sus antepasados de principios del siglo XIX. Es más, durante la vida de las personas nacidas después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, el índice se ha más que triplicado, de unos 10 a los 34 GJ/cápita entre 1950 y 2020.”
― Vaclav Smil, Cómo funciona el mundo: Una guía científica de nuestro pasado, presente y futuro

“Computers make it easy to construct many scenarios of rapid carbon elimination—but those who chart their preferred paths to a zero-carbon future owe us realistic explanations, not just sets of more or less arbitrary and highly improbable assumptions detached from technical and economic realities and ignoring the embedded nature, massive scale, and enormous complexity of our energy and material systems.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy; now he eats potatoes partly made of oil.”[81] Fifty years later, this existential dependence is still insufficiently appreciated—but the readers of this book now understand that our food is partly made not just of oil, but also of coal that was used to produce the coke required for smelting the iron needed for field, transportation, and food processing machinery; of natural gas that serves as both feedstock and fuel for the synthesis of nitrogenous fertilizers; and of the electricity generated by the combustion of fossil fuels that is indispensable for crop processing, taking care of animals, and food and feed storage and preparation”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“Between 1800 and 2020, we reduced the labor needed to produce a kilogram of grain by more than 98 percent—and we reduced the share of the country’s population engaged in agriculture by the same large margin.50 This provides a useful guide to the profound economic transformations that would have to take place with any retreat of agricultural mechanization and reduction in the use of synthetic agrochemicals.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future

“And long-distance electricity-powered commercial flight (equivalent to a kerosene-powered Boeing 787 from New York to Tokyo) is the outstanding example of the last category: as we will see, this is an energy conversion that will remain unrealistic for a long time to come.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“energy densities (energy stored per unit of mass or volume, critical for energy storage and portability)”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“four pillars of modern civilization: ammonia, steel, concrete, and plastics.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going