The Science of How We Got There and Where We Are Going

"How The World Really Works" book by Czech-Canadian scientist Vaclac Smil came to my attention (and probably people around the world) after being listed in Bill Gates 2022 summer book recommendations (https://www.gatesnotes.com/Summer-Books-2022).

This book is a scientific, data-based assessment of how modern science and technology made our 21st-century lives possible, the challenges we face, and what it will take to address these challenges. It provides the big picture of the material and energetic basis of human civilization. In short order, Smil summarizes the history of global energy, food, material production, and trade.

Vaclav Smil identifies ammonia, plastics, steel, and concrete as the “four pillars of modern civilization”, and explains why these fundamental substances are indispensable to the functioning of modern societies and are needed in vast quantities. Since the production of these pillars depends heavily on the combustion and conversion of fossil fuels, he claims that to respond to the goal of a Carbon Zero future, we need to first understand the science, the data, of how the world really works and why the fundamentals of our life will not change drastically in the coming 20-30 years, despite the near-constant flood of claims about superior innovations ranging from solar cells to lithium-ion batteries, from the 3-D printing to bacteria able to synthesize gasoline. Steel, cement, ammonia, and plastics will endure as the four material pillars of civilization.

In seven chapters, the book explores the science behind energy generation, food production, material dependence, globalization, large-scale risks, responses to environmental threats, and predictive uncertainty. Since its quite scientific and long, I will just give here some excerpts from the book which I found interesting:

Annual global demand for fossil carbon is 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 by the worlds nearly 8 billion inhabitants.

Understanding Food Production

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.

Most of the admired and undoubtedly remarkable technical advances that have transformed industries, transportation, communication, and everyday living would have been impossible if more than 80% of all people had to remain in the countryside in order to produce their daily bread (the share of the US population who were farmers in 1800 was 83%).

During the pre-1920 peak of US horse and mule numbers, one-quarter of the country's farmland was dedicated to growing feed for the more than 25 million American working horses and mules, and at that time US farms had to feed only about 105 million people. Obviously, feeding today's more than 330 million people by deploying "just" 25 million horses would be impossible.

Understanding Our Material World

In 2019, the world consumed about 4.5 billion ay of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, 370 million tons of plastics, and 150 million tons of ammonia, and they are not readily replaceable by other materials- certainly not in the near future or on a global scale.

The mass-scale production of all of these four materials depends heavily on the combustion of fossil fuels, and some of these fuels also supply feedstocks for the synthesis of ammonia and for the production of plastics. Iron ore smelting in blast furnaces requires coke made from coal; energy for cement production comes mostly from coal dust, petroleum coke, and heavy fuel oil. The vast majority of simple molecules that are bonded in long chains or branches to make plastics are derived from crude oils and natural gases. And in the modern synthesis of ammonia, natural gas is both the source of hydrogen and processing energy.

As a result, global production of these four indispensable materials claims about 17% of the world's primary energy supply, and currently, there are no commercially available and readily deployable mass-scale alternatives to displace these established processes.

The world now consumes in one year more cement than it did during the entire first half of the 20th century.         

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.