How The World Really Works, Notes #2

Risks and possibilitles

The back end of the book is definitely weaker than the beginning. Smil talks about various risks to civilization, primarily from Climate Change, disdaining attempts to reason from first principles and adopting a median position between, as he puts it, catastrophists and cornucopians. The book’s dismissal of AI is amusing to me, as the part focusing on risks was written in 2020. Oh, the times they are a’changing.

Notes:

• Climate Change is in no way an existential risk to the human species. It’s often catastrophized as such, but there’s no realistic scenario in which it kills all of us within the next century.

• Current best predictions are neither as good as possible nor as bad as possible.

• Fossil fuel use is likely to rise as China, India, and Africa industrialize, bringing billions of people from a very low standard of living to a much higher one. This represents both more environmental damage and an immense reduction in human suffering/increase in human wellbeing.

• Predictions of ‘peak oil’ have repeatedly come and gone. There’s no reason to think humans won’t keep innovating new solutions, keeping the supply of fossil fuels healthy for decades to come.

• Most people have a very miscalibrated sense of what’s risky to them, personally, based on the disasters that have more salience and news coverage. Driving is far safer than flying, and yet far more people are afraid to fly than drive. Nuclear power is far safer than coal (coal kills with air pollution, nuclear barely kills anyone, per GWh generated).