CityReads | Using Numbers to Explain the Modern World
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From how food is grown to how we generate power, Vaclav Smil's new book outlines the basic technologies that keep society going.
Vaclav Smil. 2022. How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future. Viking.
Source:
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/319/319141/how-the-world-really-works/9780241454398.html
Czech-Canadian scholar Vaclav Smil just published a new book — How the World Really Works: A Scientist's Guide to the Past, Present, and Future. This is his 49th book. Smil is a distinguished emeritus professor at the University of Manitoba, Canada, who conducts interdisciplinary research in the areas of energy, environment and demographic change, food production, the history of technological innovation, risk assessment and public policy.
Nearly half of his more than 40 books deal with various aspects of energy, from wide-ranging surveys of general energetics and energy throughout history to closer looks at individual fuel categories (oil, natural gas, biomass) and specific properties and processes (power density, energy transitions).
The rest of his books shows his interdisciplinary quests: he has written about such fundamental phenomena as growth — in all of its natural and anthropogenic guises — and risk; about the global environment (the biosphere, biogeochemical cycles, global ecology, photosynthetic productivity, and harvests), food and agriculture, materials (above all, steel and fertilizers), technical advances, and the progress and retreat of manufacturing, and also about ancient Roman and modern American history and Japanese food.
Smil is a polymath with a gift for rigorously crushing complex data into pleasing morsels of information. Exhibit one: a 2011 paper in which he calculated the dry mass of humans on the planet had grown so much that we outweigh wild land mammals by at least a factor of 10.
In his book, Make the World Modern: Materials and Dematerialization published in 2013, Smil calculated that China used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the U.S. used in the entire 20th Century.
The new book continues this cheering trend, revealing that the 4.4bn tons of cement that China made in the two years of 2018 and 2019 nearly equaled the 4.56bn tons the US made during the entire 20th century. Not surprisingly, the country now has the world’s most extensive systems of freeways, rapid trains, and airports, as well as the largest number of giant hydro stations and new multimillion-population cities.
Salient details emerge. Canada, blessed with greater forest acreage than any affluent nation, saves money by importing toothpicks from China. No country possesses sufficient rare earth metals to support its economy. The world throws out a third of its food. Human beings today enjoy, on average, the annual benefit of 34 gigajoules of energy. Expressed in units of human labor, that is "as if 60 adults would be working nonstop, day and night," for each person. Residents of affluent countries have it better: An American family of four has more hired help than the Sun King at Versailles.
This book — the product of his life's work, and written for the layperson —is a continuation of his long-lasting quest to understand the basic realities of the biosphere, history, and the world we have created. This book teems with numbers (all metric) because the realities of the modern world cannot be understood only by qualitative descriptions.
We have never had so much information at our fingertips and yet most of us don't know how the world really works.
Why do most people in modern societies have such a superficial knowledge about how the world really works?
There is an unprecedented expansion of our understanding of both the physical world and all forms of life. Our knowledge extends from grand generalizations about complex systems on the universal (galaxies, stars) and planetary (atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere) scale to processes at the level of atoms and genes: lines etched into the surface of the most powerful microprocessor are only about twice the diameter of human DNA. We have translated this understanding into a still-expanding array of machines, devices, procedures, protocols, and interventions that sustain modern civilization, and the enormity of our aggregate knowledge — and the ways we have deployed it in our service — is far beyond the comprehension of any individual mind.
Most people misunderstand the fundamental workings of the modern world. After all, appreciating how wheat is grown or steel is made or realizing that globalization is neither new nor inevitable are not the same as asking that somebody comprehend femtochemistry (the study of chemical reactions at timescales of 10-15 seconds) or polymerase chain reactions (the rapid copying of DNA).
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 largely in services. 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 delivering civilization's energy and the materials that comprise our modern world.
America now has only about 3 million men and women (farm owners and hired labor) directly engaged in producing food — people who actually plow the fields, sow the seeds, apply fertilizer, eradicate weeds, harvest the crops (picking fruit and vegetables is the most labor-intensive part of the process), and take care of the animals. That's less than 1 percent of the country's population, and hence it is no wonder that most Americans have no idea, or only some vague notion, about how their bread or their cuts of meat came to be.
Combines harvest wheat — but do they also harvest soybeans or lentils? How long does it take for a tiny piglet to become a pork chop: weeks or years? The vast majority of Americans simply don't know — and they have plenty of company. China is the world's largest producer of steel-smelting, casting, and rolling nearly a billion tons of it every year — but all of that is done by less than 0.25 percent of China's 1.4 billion people. Only a tiny percentage of the Chinese population will ever stand close to a blast furnace, or see the continuous casting mill with its red ribbons of hot, moving steel. And this disconnect is the case across the world.
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.
But all of us will continue to eat staple grain crops grown in soil on large expanses of agricultural land, rather than in the skyscrapers imagined by the proponents of so-called urban agriculture; none of us will live in a dematerialized world that has no use for such irreplaceable natural services as evaporating water or pollinating plants. But delivering these existential necessities will be an increasingly challenging task, because a large share of humanity lives in conditions that the affluent minority left behind generations ago, and because the growing demand for energy and materials has been stressing the biosphere so much and so fast that we have imperiled its capability to keep its flows and stores within the boundaries compatible with its long-term functioning.
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 electricity supply, boost their food production, and build essential urban, industrial, and transportation infrastructures. Inevitably, these demands will subject the biosphere to further degradation.
And how will we deal with unfolding climate change? There is now a widespread consensus that we need to do something to prevent many highly undesirable consequences, but what kind of action, what sort of behavioral transformation would work best? For those who ignore the energetic and material imperatives of our world, those who prefer mantras of green solutions to understanding how we have come to this point, the prescription is easy: just decarbonize — switch from burning fossil carbon to converting inexhaustible flows of renewable energies.
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.
This book is an attempt to reduce the comprehension deficit, to explain some of the most fundamental ruling realities governing our survival and our prosperity. 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.
Introduction of the seven chapters of the book
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. For all the vows that countries and companies are making to ditch fossil energy and reach net zero emissions by 2050, progress outside electricity generation has been achingly slow.
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 fuels and to produce all fertilizers and other agrochemicals without natural gas and oil. In short, for decades it will be impossible to adequately feed the planet without using fossil fuels as sources of energy and raw materials. Global crop cultivation supported solely by the laborious recycling of organic wastes and by more common rotations is conceivable for a global population of 3 billion people consuming largely plant-based diets, but not for nearly 8 billion people on mixed diets.
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.
When we are eating, we are essentially eating fossil fuels. Most crops are dependent on nitrogen fertilizers made from ammonium, which is made from hydrogen, which is separated from natural gas through the Haber-Bosch process. But there is also the fuel used to run the equipment, move, chill, and package our food.
Smil measures the energy to make the soybean feed; heat the barns; supply water and sawdust; and store, refrigerate, and cook the chicken, coming up with a total of 350 milliliters of diesel fuel per kilogram of chicken. Production of per kilogram of tomatoes require the equivalent of 500 milliliters of diesel. even a humble loaf of sourdough requires the equivalent of about 5.5 tablespoons of diesel fuel. How many vegans enjoying the salad are aware of its substantial fossil fuel pedigree?
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 services and miniaturized electronic devices.
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 appliances, and air conditioning (to say nothing about cars) remains a dream for billions of people.
The fourth chapter is the story of globalization, or how the world has become so interconnected by transportation and communication. This historical perspective shows how old (or indeed ancient) the origins of this process are, and how recent is its highest — and finally truly global —extent. And a closer look makes it clear that there is nothing inevitable about the future course of this ambivalently perceived (much praised, much questioned, and much criticized) phenomenon.
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 we face. After finishing this chapter, readers will have a good appreciation of the relative risks of many common involuntary exposures and voluntary activities (from falling at home to flying between continents; from living in a hurricane-prone city to parachuting).
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, I will stress that, contrary to widespread perceptions, this is not a recently discovered phenomenon: we have understood the fundamentals of this process for more than 150 years.
In the closing chapter I will look to the future, specifically at the recent opposing propensities to embrace catastrophism (those that say there are just years left before the final curtain descends on modern civilization) and techno-optimism (those that predict that the powers of invention will open unlimited horizons beyond the confines of the Earth, turning all terrestrial challenges into inconsequential histories). 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.
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