I am not a pessimist or an optimist, I am a scientist. There is no agenda in understanding how the world really works.
How the World Really Works could be considered the capstone to Vaclav Smil’s impressive career in interdisciplinary research and analysis: having written over 40 books and 500 papers, he is considered “the” world-leading expert on energy (amongst other topics), and this current book attempts to synthesise and present what he knows to be fact in a world of increasing polarisation and misinformation. There was much that I found interesting here — so much about the functioning of our material world (from energy, container shipping, and food production, to the noninevitability of globalisation and the curiously out-of-touch human perception of risk) that I have accepted without examining — but I couldn’t help but be turned off by Smil’s frequently smug and superior tone (accented with snide asides and exclamation marks!) I liked that Smil positioned himself between the eco-doomsayers and the techno-optimists — calling that the rational middleground as we humans have never been good at predicting the future — but while I enjoyed the factoids, I’m still annoyed by the tone; my three stars are a refusal to take a stand on this book.
Inevitably, this book — the product of my life’s work, and written for the layperson — is a continuation of my long-lasting quest to understand the basic realities of the biosphere, history, and the world we have created. And it also does, yet again, what I have been steadfastly doing for decades: it strongly advocates for moving away from extreme views. Recent (and increasingly strident or increasingly giddy) advocates of such positions will be disappointed: this is not the place to find either laments about the world ending in 2030 or an infatuation with astonishingly transformative powers of artificial intelligence arriving sooner than we think. Instead, this book tries to provide a foundation for a more measured and necessarily agnostic perspective. I hope that my rational, matter-of-fact approach will help readers to understand how the world really works, and what our chances are of seeing it offer better prospects to the coming generations.
Right from the start, Smil stresses that decarbonising the economy (giving up fossil fuels) is a near-term impossibility because of the way our world is built (not to mention the staggering amounts of fossil fuels that go into, for instance, the manufacture and transport of a single wind turbine; not to mention the fact that he doesn’t believe there is an alternative to jet fuel for long distance flight; not to mention that Germany decommissioned their nuclear power plants and spent billions on solar technology that has eased their fossil fuel consumption by a percentage point or two.) A major thrust of the book concerns what Smill refers to as the four pillars of the modern world and he records that in 2019, we collectively consumed 4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, 370 million tons of plastics, and 150 million tons of ammonia. He makes the case that each of these essential consumables could not easily (if ever) be replaced by a more eco-friendly alternative, and as each of them requires massive amounts of fossil fuels for their production, he explains:
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.
Smil reports that the global annual demand for fossil carbon is around 10 billion tons, and while affluent economies (including China) give lip service to reducing consumption, it is reasonable to expect emerging economies (especially those in India and Africa) to ramp up their consumption in order to provide their citizens with the benefits of modern materials (as in the hygienic benefits of cement floors or the use of nitrogen-rich fertilisers to improve crop yields). Smil does make it clear that he’s not denying the ill effects of our carbonised economy, but he stresses that catastrophists calling for “net zero by whatever year” can’t will it into being without addressing how the world really works; this doesn’t come down to individuals giving up gas-fuelled cars and abandoning the suburbs (which are the kind of decisions that are ours to make, but which have an incredibly negligible effect on the big picture.)
An example of Smil snarking on the eco-catastrophists:
Some prophecies claim that we might only have about a decade left to avert a global catastrophe, and in January 2020 Greta Thunberg went as far as to specify just eight years. Just a few months later, the president of the UN’s General Assembly gave us 11 years to avert a complete social collapse whereupon the planet will be simultaneously burning (suffering unquenchable summer-long fires) and inundated with water (via a rapid sea-level rise). But, nihil novi sub sole: in 1989, another high UN official said that “government have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control,” which means that by now we must be quite beyond the beyond, and that our very existence might be only a matter of Borgesian imagination. I am convinced that we could do without this continuing flood of never-less-than-worrisome and too-often-quite-frightening predictions. How helpful is it to be told every day that the world is coming to an end in 2050 or even 2030?
And snarking on the techno-utopians
Crises expose realities and strip away obfuscation and misdirection. The response of the affluent world to COVID-19 deserves a single ironic comment: Homo deus indeed!
And, after making some good points about how, even forty years ago (despite having microchips and container ships, understanding the greenhouse effect) no one could have predicted the world we are living in today (and especially the offshoring of jobs that led to both rust belt America and the economic surge of China) Smil snarks on the futility of making predictions at all:
In the past, this tendency toward dichotomy was often described as the clash of catastrophists and cornucopians, but these labels appear to be too timid to reflect the recent extreme polarization of sentiments. And this polarization has been accompanied by a greater propensity for dated quantitative forecasts. You see them everywhere, from cars (worldwide sales of electric passenger vehicles will reach 65 million by 2040) and carbon (the EU will have net-zero carbon emissions by 2037). Or so we’re told. In reality, most of these forecasts are no better than simple guesses: any number for 2050 obtained by a computer model primed with dubious assumptions — or, even worse, by a politically expedient decision — has a very brief shelf life. My advice: if you would like a better understanding of what the future may look like, avoid these new-age dated prophecies entirely, or use them primarily as evidence of prevailing expectations and biases.
Again: Smil does write, “There is something new as we look ahead, that unmistakably increasing (albeit not unanimous) conviction that, of all the risks we face, global climate change is the one that needs to be tackled most urgently and effectively.” And it would seem that this entire book exists to make the point that decarbonising the economy would take a global accord to fundamentally change the way that our world actually works — at great cost to people alive today who probably won’t live to reap the benefits — and that both the eco-doomsayers and the techno-optimists are a distraction from actual reality. And, admittedly, this was worth wading through the snark to arrive at. I would read Smil again.
Being agnostic about the distant future means being honest: we have to admit the limits of our understanding, approach all planetary challenges with humility, and recognize that advances, setbacks, and failures will all continue to be a part of our evolution and that there can be no assurance of (however defined) ultimate success, no arrival at any singularity — but, as long as we use our accumulated understanding with determination and perseverance, there will also not be an early end of days. The future will emerge from our accomplishments and failures, and while we might be clever (and lucky) enough to foresee some of its forms and features, the whole remains elusive even when looking just a generation ahead.
For my own reference, this was an interesting response to The Revolt Against Humanity (which I read in August and which explores the debate between the Antihumanists [who believe that humanity will soon be wiped out and good riddance] and the Transhumanists [who believe that the singularity is nigh and that it will represent the perfected evolutionary endpoint for humanity]). How interesting that I've often tried to pin my own beliefs on that spectrum from cornucopian to catastrophist (with a proclivity for the techno-as-saviour end) without considering that that whole debate is just a distraction from reality. Interesting.
