How the World Really Works, Notes #1
Debunking easy decarbonization
(This is a shorter post including some tidbits from a book I’m reading. I’m working more on longer, more edited posts in the meantime.)
I’ve been reading Vaclav Smil’s How the World Really Works, which might as well have been called Everything Relies on Hydrocarbons, Morons. It’s a book about how modern civilization’s energy, food, transportation, material, and other systems work, and the big punchline is that they all rely on fossil fuels.
More to the point, they all rely on fossil fuels in ways that can’t easily be changed. You can buy an electric car instead of one with an internal combustion engine, but you can’t grow food without nitrogen fertilizers, which are made with fossil fuels, nor can you make the plastic, cement, steel, or other materials vital to modern life without them.
This isn’t a book review - rather, I’m just collecting interesting pieces of the book here.
Smil makes it clear that the modern world is built on fossil fuels. Over the past 220 years, we’ve had about a 1,500x increase in their use. “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.”
Energy density matters a lot for transportation. The more energy per liter, the farther a train, truck, ship or plain can go and the cheaper trade becomes.
Why Fossil Fuels are important in one graph (not from the book) Lubricants, found in just about everything with moving parts, come from fossil fuels. As does asphalt.
Tons of fossil fuels go into the good we eat, from the fertilizer to grow it to the gasoline to transport it from farm to grocery store.
A standard baguette involves at least two tablespoons of diesel fuel’s worth of fossil fuels, between growing the grain, milling it, baking it, and transporting it
A kilogram of roasted chicken involves about half a bottle of wine of crude oil’s worth of fossil fuels
Tomatoes are super energy-intensive, about five tablespoons of diesel fuel per medium tomato
Materially, civilization depends on concrete and steel for our structures, plastic for general-purpose objects, and ammonia for fertilizer (without nitrogen-fixing fertilizer, at least half of the world’s population would starve and die). All require fossil fuels to make.
Concrete crumbles over time; this bill is going to continuously come due in the US and the rest of world over the next few decades.
Globalization is powered by travel and communication technology. Travel technology is still overwhelmingly fossil fuels where it matters: container ships, ships that carry other resources, cargo and passenger flight. This is enabled by the high energy density of fossil fuels, and is very hard to change.
