How the World Really Works

A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future

One of the best books I have read in recent times. So much data that boggles your mind.

The main point he makes is to use energy consumption to show us what changes.

Even by 1850, rising coal extraction in Europe and North America supplies no more than 7 percent of all fuel energy, nearly half of all useful kinetic energy comes from draft animals, about 40 percent from human muscles, and just 15 percent from the three inanimate prime movers: waterwheels, windmills, and the slowly spreading steam engines. The world of 1850 is much more akin to the world of 1700 or even of 1600 than that of the year 2000.

To be more precise: “Consequently, the 20th century saw a nearly 40-fold gain in useful energy; since 1800 the gain was about 3,500-fold.”

Think about that. The amount of energy we have available now is mind boggling. World wide, it is as if 60 people working non-stop for one human being, in countries like germany, I consume so much energy as if 240 people were working for me night and day. And while we can save energy, remember that “is not the case with the more than 5 billion people whose energy consumption is a fraction of those affluent levels, who need much more ammonia to raise their crop yields to feed their increasing populations, and much more steel and cement and plastics to build their essential infrastructures.”

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!

Growing crops needs sunlight, or always needed sunlight, but we added non-solar forms of energy two centuries ago, that allowed for higher yields.

Producing wheat now takes less than two hours of human labor per hectare (compared to 150 hours in 1801), and with yields of around 3.5 tons per hectare this translates to less than two seconds per kilogram of grain.

In the last two centures, producing a kg of wheat moved from taking 10 minutes of human labor to 1.5 seconds. There is a huge part about fish and growing things and where the energy comes from. I won’t go into that but simply point out that without the artificial production of ammonium, invented in 1903, we would not be anywhere near our production of food and creating ammonium takes huge amount of energy.

The global population rose from 1 billion in 1800 to 1.6 billion in 1900 and 6.1 billion in the year 2000, and hence the supply of useful energy rose (all values in gigajoules per capita) from 0.05 in 1800 to 2.7 in 1900 and to about 28 in the year 2000. […] 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.

Now for the big energy uses:

In 2019, the world consumed about 4.5 billion tons 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.

…

Iron ore smelting in blast furnaces requires coke made from coal (and also natural gas); 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 percent of the world’s primary energy supply, and 25 percent of all CO2 emissions originating in the combustion of fossil fuels—and currently there are no commercially available and readily deployable mass-scale alternatives to displace these established processes.

…

Without ammonia, 4 billion people would not be able to be fed. And I know that companies building roads and other things with concrete are actually recycling concrete at a ever greater rate.

Now imagine that the developing world wants to move the same way as china.

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.

So …

The data are clear: between 1989 and 2019 we increased global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions by about 65 percent. Even when we deconstruct this global mean, we see that affluent countries like the US, Canada, Japan, Australia, and those in the EU, whose per capita energy use was very high three decades ago, did reduce their emissions, but only by about 4 percent, while Indian emissions quadrupled and Chinese emissions rose 4.5 times. […] the Paris accord did not (could not) codify any specific reduction targets by the world’s largest emitters, and it would, even if all voluntary non-binding pledges were honored (something utterly improbable), result in a 50 percent increase of emissions by 2050.

This is just a fact of other countries wanting it nice too.

Consequently, even if those countries whose standard of living is today where China’s was in 1999 were to achieve only a tenth of China’s recent growth, they would experience a 10-fold increase of car ownership and a 40-fold increase in air conditioners.

Also …

The most radical way to cut energy costs and the environmental impact of nitrogen fertilizers is to reduce how much is used: that option is available to affluent countries with their excessive food supply and waste—but hundreds of millions of stunted children, mostly in Africa, need to drink more milk and eat more meat, and that protein can come only from substantially increasing the amount of nitrogen they use in cropping. Just to drive this conclusion home, annual applications of fertilizers average about 160 kilograms per hectare of agricultural land in the EU and less than 20 kilograms in Ethiopia, an order-of-magnitude difference illustrating the huge development gap that is so often ignored in appraisals of global needs.

He also touched on Covid.

Except the next time, the risk will be significantly higher because the combination of natural aging and prolongation of life will greatly increase the share of people over 65 years of age. The UN projects that share rising by about 70 percent by 2050, and in better-off countries one person in four will be older than that. How will we cope in 2050 with a pandemic that might be more infectious than COVID-19, when in some countries a third of the population is in the most vulnerable category?

To end …

Nobody in 1945 could have predicted a world with more than 5 billion additional people that is also better fed than at any time in history—even as it keeps wasting an indefensibly high share of all the food it grows. Nor did anybody foresee a world that relegated a number of infectious diseases (most notably polio everywhere, and tuberculosis in affluent nations) to historical footnotes, but that cannot keep economic inequality from widening even in the richest countries; a world that is at once much cleaner and much healthier yet also more polluted in new ways (from plastic in the ocean to heavy metals in soils) and, due to the ongoing biospheric degradation, also more precarious; or a world suffused in instant and essentially free information that comes at the price of massively disseminated misinformation, lies and reprehensible claims.

Bummer. Still very good, and really worth to think about.