How the World Really Works

Highlights

Page 274

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. This is as true of such ubiquitous devices as mobile phones and laptops (typing a simple query does the trick) as it is of mass-scale procedures such as vaccination (certainly the best planetary example of 2021, with, typically, the rolling up of a sleeve being the only comprehensible part). But explanations of this comprehension deficit go beyond the fact that the sweep of our knowledge encourages specialization, whose obverse is an increasingly shallow understanding—even ignorance—of the basics. 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.

Page 293

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(whether metals, non-metallic minerals, or concrete) is that they have come to be seen as old-fashioned—if not outdated—and distinctly unexciting compared to the world of information, data, and images. The proverbial best minds do not go into soil science and do not try their hand at making better cement; instead they are attracted to dealing with disembodied information, now just streams of electrons in myriads of microdevices. 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.

Page 315

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. 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, rather than trotting out their biases and advancing claims disconnected from physical possibilities.

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But before you plunge into the specific topics, I have a warning as well as a possible request. This book teems with numbers (all metric) because the realities of the modern world cannot be understood only by qualitative descriptions. Many numbers in this book are, inevitably, either very large or very small, and such realities are best treated in terms of orders of magnitude, labelled with globally valid prefixes. Should you not have a grounding in these matters, the appendix on understanding numbers, large and small, takes care of that, and hence some readers might find it profitable to begin this book from its end. Otherwise, I’ll see you in chapter 1 for a closer, quantitative look at energies. It’s a perspective that should never go out of fashion.

Note: Thank god it’s not just words

Page 526

An average inhabitant of the Earth nowadays has at their disposal nearly 700 times more useful energy than their ancestors had at the beginning of the 19th century.

Page 541

Tracing the trajectory of useful energy deployment is so revealing because energy is not just another component in the complex structures of the biosphere, human societies, and their economies, nor just another variable in intricate equations determining the evolution of these interacting systems. 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.

Page 551

those organisms that best capture the available energy hold the evolutionary advantage.

Page 593

There is no better way to answer the question “what is energy?” than by referring to one of the most insightful physicists of the 20th century—to the protean mind of Richard Feynman, who (in his famous Lectures on Physics) tackled the challenge in his straightforward manner, stressing that “energy has a large number of different forms, and there is a formula for each one. These are: gravitational energy, kinetic energy, heat energy, elastic energy, electrical energy, chemical energy, radiant energy, nuclear energy, mass energy.” And then comes this disarming but indubitable conclusion: It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount. It is not that way. However, there are formulas for calculating some numerical quantity, and when we add it all together it gives … always the same number. It is an abstract thing in that it does not tell us the mechanism or the reasons for the various formulas.30

Page 713

During the late 1960s, the already high American demand for oil rose by nearly 25 percent, and global demand increased by nearly 50 percent. European demand had nearly doubled between 1965 and 1973, and Japanese imports became about 2.3 times higher.45 As mentioned, new discoveries of oil covered this surge in demand and oil was selling at what was essentially the same price as in 1950.

Note: When people long for the growth rates of the 50s, they don’t point this out. The proliferation of a new source of energy was what fuelled the growth in the economy.

Page 725

Then in April 1973, the US ended its limits on the import of crude oil east of the Rocky Mountains. Suddenly, it was a sellers’ market, and on October 1 1973 OPEC raised its posted price by 16 percent to $3.01/barrel, followed by an additional 17 percent rise by six Arab Gulf states and, after the Israeli victory over Egypt in Sinai in October 1973, it embargoed all oil exports to the US. On January 1 1974, the Gulf states raised their posted price to $11.65/barrel, completing a 4.5-fold rise in the cost of this essential energy source in a single year—and this ended the era of rapid economic expansion that had been energized by cheap oil. From 1950 to 1973 the Western European economic product had nearly tripled, and the US GDP had more than doubled in that single generation. Between 1973 and 1975 the global economic growth rate dropped by about 90 percent, and as soon as the economies affected by higher oil prices began to adjust to these new realities—above all by impressive improvements in industrial energy efficiency—the fall of the Iranian monarchy and the takeover of Iran by a fundamentalist theocracy led to a second wave of oil price rises, from about $13 in 1978 to $34 in 1981, and to another 90 percent decline in the global rate of economic growth between 1979 and 1982.47 More than $30 a barrel was a demand-destroying price and by 1986 oil was again selling at just $13 a barrel,

Note: OPEC’s greed saved us. There was no need to prioritise efficiency when oil was cheap.

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In large, populous nations, the complete reliance on these renewables would require what we are still missing: either mass-scale, long-term (days to weeks) electricity storage that would back up intermittent electricity generation, or extensive grids of high-voltage lines to transmit electricity across time zones and from sunny and windy regions to major urban and industrial concentrations. Could these new renewables produce enough electricity to replace not only today’s generation fueled by coal and natural gas, but also all the energy now supplied by liquid fuels to vehicles, ships, and planes by way of a complete electrification of transport? And could they really do so, as some plans now promise, in a matter of just two or three decades?

Note: Storage or transmission - succinctly put.

Page 781

But despite these complications, high costs, and technical challenges, we have been striving to electrify modern economies, and this quest for ever-higher electrification will continue because this form of energy combines many unequaled advantages. Most obviously, at the point of its final consumption, electricity’s use is always effortless and clean, and the majority of the time it is also exceptionally efficient. With just the flip of a switch, push of a button, or adjustment of a thermostat (now often requiring only a hand signal or voice command), electric lights and motors or electric heaters and coolers are turned on—with no bulky fuel storages, no laborious carrying and stoking, no dangers of incomplete combustion (emitting poisonous carbon monoxide), and no cleaning of lamps or stoves or furnaces. Electricity is the best form of energy for lighting: it has no competitor on any scale of private or public illumination, and very few innovations have produced such an impact on modern civilization as has the ability to remove the limits of daylight and to illuminate the night.

Note: Advantages of electricity. I shared this with Kushagra. He had written a scathing review of the book because he felt that the author was against electrification.

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It is impossible to decide which class of electricity converters has had a greater impact—lights or motors. The conversion of electricity into kinetic energy by electric motors first revolutionized nearly every sector of industrial production and later penetrated every household niche. Less demanding manual tasks and those that deployed steam engines to lift, press, cut, weave, and other industrial operations were almost completely electrified. In the US this took place within just four decades after the introduction of the first AC electric motors.54 By 1930, electric drive had nearly doubled American manufacturing productivity, and had done so again by the late 1960s.55 Concurrently, electric motors began their gradual conquest of rail transportation, beginning with electric streetcars and then with passenger trains.

Note: It is energy that increases productivity. Until computers, was there any other source?

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The long-term trend toward the electrification of societies (rising share of fuels converted to electricity rather than consumed directly) has been unmistakable. The new renewables—solar and wind, as opposed to hydroelectricity whose beginnings go back to 1882—will readily feed into this progression, but the history of electricity generation reminds us that many complications and complexities accompany the process; and that, despite its profound and rising importance, electricity still supplies only a relatively small share of final global energy consumption, just 18 percent.

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Notice the key qualifying adjective: the target is not total decarbonization but “net zero” or carbon neutrality. This definition allows for continued emissions to be compensated by (as yet non-existent!) large-scale removal of CO2 from the atmosphere and its permanent storage underground, or by such temporary measures as the mass-scale planting of trees.

Note: Sadge

Page 924

How soon will we fly intercontinentally on a wide-body jet powered by batteries? News headlines assure us that the future of flight is electric—touchingly ignoring the huge gap between the energy density of kerosene burned by turbofans and today’s best lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries that would be on board these hypothetically electric planes. Turbofan engines powering jetliners burn fuel whose energy density is 46 megajoules per kilogram (that’s nearly 12,000 watt-hours per kilogram), converting chemical to thermal and kinetic energy—while today’s best Li-ion batteries supply less than 300 Wh/kg, more than a 40-fold difference.79 Admittedly, electric motors are roughly twice as efficient energy converters as gas turbines, and hence the effective density gap is “only” about 20-fold. But 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.80

Note: Ok intercontinental electric flights are not happening. But maybe short haul flights could?

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Moreover (as will be explained in chapter 3), we have no readily deployable commercial-scale alternatives for energizing the production of the four material pillars of modern civilization solely by electricity. This means that even with an abundant and reliable renewable electricity supply, we would have to develop new large-scale processes to produce steel, ammonia, cement, and plastics.

Page 936

Not surprisingly, decarbonization outside of electricity generation has progressed slowly. Germany will soon generate half of its electricity from renewables, but during the two decades of Energiewende the share of fossil fuels in the country’s primary energy supply has only declined from about 84 percent to 78 percent: Germans like their unrestricted Autobahn speeds and their frequent intercontinental flying, and German industries hum on natural gas and oil.81 If the country replicates its past record, then in 2040 its dependence on fossil fuels will still be close to 70 percent.

Note: Daaamn. Even the poster child of renewable adoption is moving at a glacial pace.

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In contrast to recent hasty political pledges, these realities have been recognized by all carefully considered long-term energy supply scenarios. The Stated Policies Scenario published by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in 2020 sees the share of fossil fuels declining from 80 percent of the total global demand in 2019 to 72 percent by 2040, while the IEA’s Sustainable Development Scenario (its most aggressive decarbonization scenario so far, allowing for substantially accelerated global decarbonization) envisages fossil fuels supplying 56 percent of the global primary energy demand by 2040, making it highly improbable that this high share could be cut close to zero in a single decade.84

Note: That’s a bleak best case scenario.

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There are still significant numbers of children, adolescents, and adults who experience food shortages, particularly in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, but during the past three generations their total has declined from the world’s majority to less than 1 in 10 of the world’s inhabitants. The United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates that the worldwide share of undernourished people decreased from about 65 percent in 1950 to 25 percent by 1970, and to about 15 percent by the year 2000. Continued improvements (with fluctuations caused by temporary national or regional setbacks due to natural disasters or armed conflicts) lowered the rate to 8.9 percent by 2019—which means that rising food production reduced the malnutrition rate from 2 in 3 people in 1950 to 1 in 11 by 2019.4 This impressive achievement is even more noteworthy if expressed in a way that accounts for the intervening large-scale increase of the global population, from about 2.5 billion people in 1950 to 7.7 billion in 2019. The steep reduction in global undernutrition means that in 1950 the world was able to supply adequate food to about 890 million people, but by 2019 that had risen to just over 7 billion: a nearly eight-fold increase in absolute terms!

Note: Remarkable

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The fundamental energy conversion producing our food has not changed: as always, we are eating, whether directly as plant foods or indirectly as animal foodstuffs, products of photosynthesis—the biosphere’s most important energy conversion, powered by solar radiation. What has changed is the intensity of our crop, and animal, production: we could not harvest such abundance, and in such a highly predictable manner, without the still-rising inputs of fossil fuels and electricity. Without these anthropogenic energy subsidies, we could not have supplied 90 percent of humanity with adequate nutrition and we could not have reduced global malnutrition to such a degree, while simultaneously steadily decreasing the amount of time and the area of cropland needed to feed one person.

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Many people nowadays admiringly quote the performance gains of modern computing (“so much data”) or telecommunication (“so much cheaper”)—but what about harvests? In two centuries, the human labor to produce a kilogram of American wheat was reduced from 10 minutes to less than two seconds. This is how our modern world really works. And as mentioned, I could have done similarly stunning reconstructions of falling labor inputs, rising yields, and soaring productivity for Chinese or Indian rice. The time frames would be different but the relative gains would be similar.

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As a result, leguminous food crops, including soybeans, beans, peas, lentils, and peanuts, are able to provide (fix) their own nitrogen supply, as can such leguminous cover crops as alfalfa, clovers, and vetches. But no staple grains, no oil crops (except for soybeans and peanuts), and no tubers can do that. The only way for them to benefit from the nitrogen-fixing abilities of legumes is to rotate them with alfalfa, clovers, or vetches, grow these nitrogen fixers for a few months, and then plow them under so the soils are replenished with reactive nitrogen to be picked up by the succeeding wheat, rice, or potatoes.18 In traditional agricultures, the only other option to enrich soil nitrogen stores was to collect and apply human and animal wastes. But this is an inherently laborious and inefficient way to supply the nutrient. These wastes have very low nitrogen content and they are subject to volatilization losses (the conversion of liquids to gases—the ammonia smell from manure can be overpowering).

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Given that vegans extol eating plants, and that the media have reported extensively on the high environmental cost of meat, you might think that gains in the energy cost of chicken have been surpassed by those in the cultivation and marketing of vegetables. You would be mistaken to think that. The opposite has been true, in fact, and there is no better example to illustrate these surprisingly high energy burdens than taking a close look at tomatoes.

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We get this high energy cost, in large part, because greenhouse tomatoes are among the world’s most heavily fertilized crops: per unit area they receive up to 10 times as much nitrogen (and also phosphorus) as is used to produce grain corn, America’s leading field crop.38 Sulfur, magnesium, and other micronutrients are also used, as are chemicals protecting against insects and fungi. Heating is the most important direct use of energy in greenhouse cultivation: it extends the growing season and improves crop quality but, inevitably, when deployed in colder climates it becomes the single largest user of energy. Plastic greenhouses located in the southernmost part of Almería province are the world’s largest covered area of commercial cultivation of produce: about 40,000 hectares (think of a 20 km × 20 km square) and easily identifiable on satellite images—look for yourself on Google Earth. You can even take a ride on Google Street View, which offers an otherworldly experience of these low-elevation, plastic-covered structures. Under this sea of plastic, the Spanish growers and their local and immigrant African laborers produce annually (in temperatures often surpassing 40ºC) nearly 3 million tons of early and out-of-season vegetables (tomatoes, peppers, green beans, zucchini, eggplant, melons) and some fruit, and export about 80 percent of it to EU countries.39 A truck transporting a 13-ton load of tomatoes from Almería to Stockholm covers 3,745 kilometers and consumes about 1,120 liters of diesel fuel.40 That works out to nearly 90 milliliters per kilogram of tomatoes, and transport, storage, and packing at the regional distribution centers as well as deliveries to stores raises that to nearly 130 mL/kg. This means that when bought in a Scandinavian supermarket, tomatoes from Almería’s heated plastic greenhouses have a stunningly high embedded production and transportation energy cost. Its total is equivalent to about 650 mL/kg, or more than five tablespoons (each containing 14.8 milliliters) of diesel fuel per medium-sized (125 gram) tomato!

Note: Some of this is inherent, rest is incidental. For example, the transportation could become greener. But hard to greenify the fertiliser.

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So, the evidence is inescapable: our food supply—be it staple grains, clucking birds, favorite vegetables, or seafood praised for its nutritious quality—has become increasingly dependent on fossil fuels. This fundamental reality is commonly ignored by those who do not try to understand how our world really works and who are now predicting rapid decarbonization. Those same people would be shocked to know that our present situation cannot be changed easily or rapidly: as we saw in the preceding chapter, the ubiquity and the scale of the dependence are too large for that.

Note: Me before reading these two chapters: fuck the Saudis and Russians. Fossil fuels will be a thing of the past when most cars on the road are electric by 2040.

Me after reading this: damn. And all of the fossil fuels expended on this is only going to get cheaper when we stop using it to run cars.

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Can we reverse at least some of these trends? Can the world of soon-to-be 8 billion people feed itself—while maintaining a variety of crop and animal products and the quality of prevailing diets—without synthetic fertilizers and without other agrochemicals? Could we return to purely organic cropping, relying on recycled organic wastes and natural pest controls, and could we do without engine-powered irrigation and without field machinery by bringing back draft animals? We could, but purely organic farming would require most of us to abandon cities, resettle villages, dismantle central animal feeding operations, and bring all animals back to farms to use them for labor and as sources of manure. Every day we would have to feed and water our animals, regularly remove their manure, ferment it and then spread it on fields, and tend the herds and flocks on pasture. As seasonal labor demands rose and ebbed, men would guide the plows harnessed to teams of horses; women and children would plant and weed vegetable plots; and everybody would be pitching in during harvest and slaughter time, stooking sheaves of wheat, digging up potatoes, helping to turn freshly slaughtered pigs and geese into food. I do not foresee the organic green online commentariat embracing these options anytime soon. And even if they were willing to empty the cities and embrace organic earthiness, they could still produce only enough food to sustain less than half of today’s global population.

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There are obvious opportunities for running field machinery without fossil fuels. Decarbonized irrigation could become common with pumps powered by solar- or wind-generated electricity rather than by combustion engines. Batteries with improving energy density and lower cost would make it possible to convert more tractors and trucks to electric drive.79 And in the next chapter I will explain the alternatives to the dominant, natural gas–based synthesis of ammonia. But none of these options can be adopted either rapidly or without additional (and often substantial) investments. These advances are, at present, a very long way off. They will depend on inexpensive renewable electricity generation backed up by adequate large-scale storage, a combination that is yet to be commercialized

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All of this coverage deals overwhelmingly with such immaterial, intangible phenomena as the annual percentage growth of GDP (how Western economists used to swoon over China’s double-digit rates!), rising national debt ratios (unimportant in the world of Modern Monetary Theory, with money supply seen as unlimited), record sums poured into new initial public offerings (for such existentially critical inventions as gaming apps), the benefits of unprecedented mobile connectivity (awaiting 5G networks as something close to the second coming), or promises of artificial intelligence imminently transforming our lives (the pandemic was an excellent demonstration of the complete emptiness of such claims).

Note: I wonder if he regrets the comment about AI in December 2022.

Page 586

As noted in chapter 2, only an impossibly complete recycling of all wastes voided by grazing animals could, together with near-perfect recycling of all other sources of organic nitrogen, provide the amount of nitrogen annually applied to crops in ammonia-based fertilizers. Meanwhile, there are no other materials that can rival the combination of malleability, durability, and light weight offered by many kinds of plastics. Similarly, even if we were able to produce identical masses of construction lumber or quarried stone, they could not equal the strength, versatility, and durability of reinforced concrete. We would be able to build pyramids and cathedrals but not elegant long spans of arched bridges, giant hydroelectric dams, multilane roads, or long airport runways. And steel has become so ubiquitous that its irreplaceable deployment determines our ability to extract energies, produce food, and shelter populations, as well as ensuring the extent and quality of all essential infrastructures: no metal could, even remotely, become its substitute.

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The next two decades saw an eightfold increase of ammonia production to just over 30 million tons a year as synthetic fertilizer enabled the Green Revolution (starting during the 1960s)—the adoption of new superior wheat and rice varieties that, when supplied with adequate nitrogen, produced unprecedented yields. The key innovations behind this rise were the use of natural gas as the source of hydrogen, and the introduction of efficient centrifugal compressors and better catalysts.

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I hasten to add that the 50 percent of humanity dependent on ammonia is not an immutable approximation. Given prevailing diets and farming practices, synthetic nitrogen feeds half of humanity—or, everything else being equal, half of the world’s population could not be sustained without synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers. But the share would be lower if the affluent world converted to the largely meatless Indian diet, and it would be higher if the entire world ate as well as the Chinese do today, to say nothing about the universal adoption of the American diet.25 We could also reduce our dependence on nitrogenous fertilizers by cutting our food waste (as we saw earlier) and by using the fertilizers more efficiently.

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During the first half of the 21st century—with slower global population growth and with stagnant or even declining counts in many affluent countries—economies should have no problems meeting the demand for steel, cement, ammonia, and plastics, especially with intensified recycling. But it is unlikely that by 2050 all of these industries will eliminate their dependence on fossil fuels and cease to be significant contributors to global CO2 emissions. This is especially unlikely in 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. And as we continue to expand renewable energy conversions, we will require larger masses of old materials as well as unprecedented quantities of materials that were previously needed in only modest amounts.106

Note: We kinda forget that developing countries might succeed at developing like China did.

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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.

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The COVID-19 pandemic’s onset led to new acute overtourism crises, as hundreds of elderly people were shut in on cruise ships off the shores of Japan or Madagascar in the early spring of 2020—and yet before the end of the year, even as new waves of infection were rising fast around the world, major companies advertised new megaship cruises for 2021 (such is modern restlessness!).

Note: Wrong. It doesn’t indicate restlessness as much as it indicates desperation of the company to remain solvent.

Page 102

If low labor costs were the sole reason for locating new factories abroad—as many people seem to erroneously believe—then sub-Saharan Africa would be the most obvious choice, and India would almost always be preferable to China. But 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

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Another nice thing about the hood was that it’s super cheap. You can get by on next to nothing. There’s a meal you can get in the hood called a kota. It’s a quarter loaf of bread. You scrape out the bread, then you fill it with fried potatoes, a slice of baloney, and some pickled mango relish called achar.

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