How the world really works
How the world really works
How the World Really Works review: The tech that underpins society
From how food is grown to how we generate power, Vaclav Smil’s new book outlines the basic technologies that keep society going and commands us to know them better
Whether we like it or not, the industrialised world in still heavily dependent on fossil fuels
DEEPOL by plainpicture/Monty Rakusen
Advertisement
IN SUCH a complex world, no one can be expected to understand everything. But for energy expert Vaclav Smil, there are limits. In his view, it is inexcusable that most of us don’t know the first thing about the basic workings of modern life and the technologies that keep us all alive. It’s not all rocket science, he says. “Appreciating how wheat is grown or steel is made… are not the same as asking… somebody to comprehend femtochemistry.”
Smil deplores the way that Western culture disproportionately rewards work that is removed from the material realities of life on Earth. Most of all, he is concerned that the general public is abandoning its grip on reality. How the World Really Works is Smil’s attempt to redress the balance, showing the fundamentals of how food is grown, how the built environment is made and maintained, and how all of this is powered.
Smil believes it is worth understanding what might seem like outdated technologies given that the building blocks of our lives won’t change significantly over the next 20 to 30 years. Most of our electricity is still generated by steam turbines, invented by Charles Parsons in 1884, or by gas turbines, first commercially deployed in the late 1930s, he writes. And many of the trappings of the industrial world still hinge on the production of ammonia, steel, concrete and plastics, all of which currently require fossil fuels for their production. Even the newest technologies – AI, electric cars, 5G and space tourism – get most of their energy from fossil fuel-based turbines, says Smil.
Alternative methods are on their way, of course, but they will take decades to fully establish. Coal displaced wood relatively easily in the early 20th century, but it will probably take longer to bring in renewables because global energy demand is now an order of magnitude higher.
Given the irrefutable evidence of climate change, does this mean that Western civilisation, so hopelessly dependent on fossil fuels, is doomed?
Perhaps, but Smil would prefer that we concentrate on practical solutions, rather than wasting our energies on complex socio-economic forecasts. In his view, such forecasts will get less accurate over time because “more complex models combining the interactions of economic, social, technical, and environmental factors require more assumptions and open the way for greater errors”.
How the World Really Works neither laments the possibly imminent end of the world, nor bloviates about the potentially transformative powers of the AI Singularity. Indeed, it gives no quarter to such dramatic thinking, be it apocalyptic or techno-utopian.
Instead, in an era where specialisation is seen as the pinnacle of knowledge, Smil is an unapologetic generalist. “Drilling the deepest possible hole and being an unsurpassed master of a tiny sliver of the sky visible from its bottom has never appealed to me,” he writes. “I have always preferred to scan as far and as wide as my limited capabilities have allowed me to do.”
He chooses to explain the workings of the world as it is today, from energy to food, materials, the biosphere, globalisation and the perception of risk. He covers sizeable ground that other commentators ignore. It is a grumpy, pugnacious account that, I would argue, is intellectually indispensable in the run up to this year’s COP27 climate conference in Egypt. In short, How the World Really Works fully delivers on the promise of its title. It is hard to formulate any higher praise.
How The World Really Works
A book this ostentatiously titled can only be written by a researcher of Vaclav Smil’s caliber. The subtitle is no less intriguing: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future.
Remarkably enough, this prolific and media shy professor from the University of Manitoba pulls it off in a little over 200 pages (with 70 pages of references). While the last person capable of describing all that humanity knew probably died in the 1500s, Smil makes a good attempt at capturing what he thinks makes the world tick: not the intricacies of femtochemistry, but what actually powers the world. Not how people behave, not how politics or geography or science or psychology influence the world but what – practically speaking – moves our modern civilization.
The answer is four materials – cement, steel, ammonia, and plastics – plus energy, which when all comes about means fossil fuels. While Smil has lost patience with much of the climate change crowd, it doesn’t stop him from addressing their topics again and again. Many people have explained the mechanisms and the risks involved, “in measured ways as well as in hysterical fashion, too many times.”
No matter our position on the threats of climate change, fossil fuels are going to be with us for a long time: they literally power our world and produce our food – and “no AI, no apps, and no electronic messages will change that.” Humanity is
a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years.
Though much berated as a source of heating, propulsion, and versatile use, oil and natural gas remain unchallenged. The world’s most aggressive push toward green everything – Germany in the last two decades – managed to boost its shares of wind and solar in electricity generation to about 40 percent, but could barely make a dent in fossil fuels’ share of primary energy use (from 84 percent to 78 percent). What kinds of elaborate dreams must politicians and media pundits have to entertain the idea that the US – or anyone – can go (net) zero in 9 years?
Stopping fossil fuel use in its tracks, even were it possible, wouldn’t even be moral: billions of people in the Global South need more of the things that we take for granted – energy, fertilizer, food security, vaccines.
We don’t understand our modern world because we have no idea whence our things stem. In the process of economic growth and improved standards of living, we’ve outsourced the production of most things. We constantly interact with black-box machines, the operation of which we don’t understand. Having little interest in Marxian stories of alienation, Smil argues instead that many of the mistaken beliefs of the Twitterati and the chattering commentariat classes – a group he holds to no high regard – can be explained by this practical ignorance. His mission is to correct them.
The world operates, works, by moving matters: across chapters dedicated to energy, food production, and the four pillars of our modern material world, he brings home this point clearly and persuasively.
He rejects descriptors like “pessimistic” or “optimistic” and describes himself repeatedly as a scientist – concerned with how the world works. The tone is reminiscent of the late Hans Rosling, a tad more eloquent and with emphasis on physical realities. A better adjective for him is “ruthless,” as he has no patience for nonsense, and occasionally goes out of his way to ridicule it.
Such nonsense includes the idea that the world could – or would – go vegan; that the “green” energy revolution can be done, and that it would be accompanied by dematerialization; that fossil fuels are optional luxuries that can be disposed of; that techno-optimists are on the verge of all-encompassing artificial intelligence. These are delusions, and using back-of-the-envelope calculations, Smil puts these numbers in their appropriate context: most of these aspirations cannot physically be done, certainly not on the time scale of decades as imagined by some journalists or politician’s PR office.
He’s interested in how the world really works, not how we spin political narratives about it. But he’s also not what a progressive would label a climate denier. His deep concern for the biosphere, for carbon emissions, and for food production shines through his otherwise pretty harsh words.
He aspires to be a realist who describes the world, not a demagogue constructing fairy tales.
The risk chapter is splendid, as is the account of globalization, which he correctly points out were policy choices rather than inevitable economic realities. When discussing the pandemic, he echoes Niall Ferguson from last year: “we are never prepared for these (relatively) low-frequency threats,” lamentable as our poor preparation was.
In other domains of risk, we are better prepared. Despite annually being blasted by winds and storms, fatalities in “America’s tornado-swept states” are low enough that the heightened risk one faces by living there barely registers compared to the everyday death risks of merely being alive. A lot of risky behavior is like that. Although very few people could cite the numbers in base jumping, storms, or driving, most people’s behavior reflects an internalized sense of approximate risk calculation. Amusingly, he reports
Any rational frequent flyer (and even more so an elderly one) should worry more about encountering unforeseen delays, running the security theater gauntlet, enduring the tedium of long-distance flying, and coping with the debilitating effects of jetlag.
In typical Smil-fashion, he goes into deep detail about things many people know (flying is safer than driving) but glosses over, with an appropriately ridiculing line, the ineffectiveness of airport security screening – which the same crowd would never imagine abolishing.
Let them eat fossil fuels!
As in previous books, he favors a move away from meat, but thinks chicken is the healthiest and most sustainable source of protein. In general, he has no patience with nutritional studies on account of their countless poor methods – including those that find microscopically small effects based on food-intake surveys that are heavily skewed by poor memory.
It’s not a very fruitful endeavor anyway. Nothing illustrates the non-binding choice on our plates better than contrasting the two countries at the top of life expectancy lists: Japan and Spain. Despite differing somewhat in their countrywide statistics (84.6 vs 83.6, well ahead of the rest of the world’s rich countries, clustered around 81-82; the U.S. lagging behind at 78.9), the two populations’ diets couldn’t be more different.
Spaniards eat much more meat, about twice the Japanese mean, and plenty more cheese; its animal-fat intake is around four times the Japanese per-capita average. Even though olive oil intake per-capita has fallen in Spain by 25 percent since 1960, it’s still double the total intake of Japan. Another common suspect in the story for disease attributable to diet includes sugar, where Spain’s average intake is about 40 percent above Japan’s. Still, Spain’s rate of cardiovascular diseases has fallen faster than in other rich countries and is well below theirs.
So what gives? Take your pick of favored nutritional stories – vegetarian or meat, low-fat or high fat, sugar or no sugar – and these two countries’ outcomes would have anyone scratching his head in confusion. With a meatier, fattier and more sugary diet, Spain is very different from Japan’s frugal, fishy, low-meat, and much-celebrated diet. Such nuance is Smil’s forte – when he’s not livid over the nonsense that many moderns are wont to embrace.
To a certain extent, the concern over what we eat is moot anyway. We’re fed, not by plants or meat, but by fossil fuels:
our food is partly made not just of oil, but also of coal that was used to produce the coke required for smelting the iron needed for field, transportation, and food processing machinery; of natural gas that serves as both feedstock and fuel for the synthesis of nitrogenous fertilizers; and of the electricity generated by the combustion of fossil fuels that is indispensable for crop processing, taking care of animals, and food and feed storage and preparation.
There are no graphs, but Smil’s pages are riddled with numbers, “because the realities of the modern world cannot be understood only by qualitative descriptions.” Sometimes the plentiful calculations and conversions are dizzying rather than illuminating. Smil doesn’t seem to comply with any ideologically consistent narratives.
As always, he’s much more concerned with what is and what is not physically possible. Thus, his meticulously researched words are for anyone who wants his priors reexamined and feathers ruffled.
Everything You Thought You Knew, and Why You’re Wrong
Send any friend a story
As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.
Give this article
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
By Nathaniel Rich
HOW THE WORLD REALLY WORKS
The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going
The title’s pleonastic fourth word is the giveaway. It announces the tone of Vaclav Smil’s 49th book: vinegary scorn for the irresponsible declarations of self-proclaimed experts, particularly those guilty of innumeracy, ahistoricism and other forms of wishful thinking that Vaclav Smil would never, ever fall for. You’ve heard a lot of prognostications about the state of the world. They’re bunk. Here, at last, is how the world really works.
Smil, who has taught at the University of Manitoba for half a century, rests his expertise on the strength of a polymathic pedigree nearly unmatched in North American academic life. Unlike Noam Chomsky — whose own breadth of expertise Smil ridicules in passing — Smil does not suffer polemics. Nor is he a forecaster, as he stresses repeatedly (with mounting exasperation). If anything he is an anti-forecaster, contemptuous of any prediction made about complex systems. Smil is a compiler of data, an indefatigable quantifier (to the 10th decimal), a summarizer, a pragmatist and a utilitarian. Or, as he puts it, “I am a scientist trying to explain how the world really works.”
To do so, however, one must sort and prioritize — one must filter the world’s information through subjective criteria. Even utilitarianism lies in the eye of the beholder. Should policies designed to favor the greatest number of people, for instance, account for people not yet born? If so, how many generations of them? When it comes to such questions, critical as they are to climate policy, mathematical calculations yield inexorably to ethical ones.
Before venturing into such unscientific morass, however, one must get one’s numbers straight, and it is here that Smil excels. He addresses the book to lay readers who may have no idea how food reaches their plates, how energy animates their refrigerators or how likely they are to be T-boned on the way to Whole Foods. Sure, most of us could offer reasonable explanations — we could satisfy the questions of a first grader. But most of us would also wither under Smilian cross-examination.
In short order Smil summarizes the history of global energy, food, material production and trade. (Smil has dedicated books to each subject.) Salient details emerge. Canada, blessed with greater forest acreage than any affluent nation, saves money by importing toothpicks from China. No country possesses sufficient rare earth metals to support its economy. The world throws out a third of its food. Human beings today enjoy, on average, the annual benefit of 34 gigajoules of energy. Expressed in units of human labor, that is “as if 60 adults would be working nonstop, day and night,” for each person. Residents of affluent countries have it better: An American family of four has more hired help than the Sun King at Versailles.
During these expositional chapters, a bell keeps ringing, and its din soon drowns out the litanies of diesel fuel per kilogram units and ratios of edible mass to mass of embedded energy. It brings the grim announcement that every fundamental aspect of modern civilization rests overwhelmingly on fossil fuel combustion. Take our food system. Readers of Michael Pollan or Amanda Little understand that it’s morally indefensible to purchase Chilean blueberries or, God forbid, New Zealand lamb. But even a humble loaf of sourdough requires the equivalent of about 5.5 tablespoons of diesel fuel, and a supermarket tomato, which Smil describes as no more than “an appealingly shaped container of water” (apologies to Marcella Hazan), is the product of about six tablespoons of diesel. “How many vegans enjoying the salad,” he writes, “are aware of its substantial fossil fuel pedigree?”
This Eminent Scientist Says Climate Activists Need to Get Real
“There are these billions of people who want to burn more fossil fuel,” says Vaclav Smil. “There is very little you can do about that.”
It is best to eat local, but we do not have enough arable land to support our population, even in our vast continent, at least not without the application of obscene quantities of natural-gas-derived fertilizer. One must further account for the more than three billion people in the developing world who will need to double or triple their food production to approach a dignified standard of living. Then add the additional two billion who will soon join us. “For the foreseeable future,” writes Smil, “we cannot feed the world without relying on fossil fuels.” He performs similar calculations for the world’s production of energy, cement, ammonia, steel and plastic, always reaching the same result: “A mass-scale, rapid retreat from the current state is impossible.”
Smil’s impartial scientist persona slips with each sneer at the “proponents of a new green world” or “those who prefer mantras of green solutions to understanding how we have come to this point.” Still, his broader point holds: We are slaves to fossil fuels. The global transition that we’ve only barely, unevenly, begun is not the work of years but decades, if not centuries.
Smil’s book can best be understood as a work of criticism. He finds a worthy target in the inane rhetorical battle, waged by climate activists (and echoed by climate journalists), between blithe optimism and apocalyptic pessimism. He reserves his greatest vitriol for popular writers who either “argue that a sustainable future is in our grasp” or warn that “large areas of the Earth are to become uninhabitable soon, climate migration will reshape America and the world, average global income will decline substantially.”
Smil leaves the identities of such “increasingly strident or increasingly giddy” writers a mystery, however, because with a few exceptions (Jeremy Rifkin, Amory Lovins and Yuval Noah Harari are briefly mentioned), he declines to name them. Instead, we are invited to join his mockery of “mass media ‘news,’” the “new tech crowd,” the “armies of instant experts” and those who make statements like, “Let us all just sing from these green hymnals, let us follow all-renewable prescriptions and a new global nirvana will arrive. …” That does indeed sound like a naïve thing to say. Let’s hope that, one day, whoever said it will read Smil.
It is nevertheless reassuring to read an author so impervious to rhetorical fashion and so eager to champion uncertainty. It is possible, Smil reminds us, to devote enormous resources to fighting climate change without making empty promises about the consequences these efforts will have on our own lives. Smil’s book is at its essence a plea for agnosticism, and, believe it or not, humility — the rarest earth metal of all. His most valuable declarations concern the impossibility of acting with perfect foresight. Living with uncertainty, after all, “remains the essence of the human condition.” Even under the most optimistic scenario, the future will not resemble the past. We will have to navigate seemingly impossible conditions, relying on instinct and imperfect assumptions and our old familiar flaws (chiefly “our never-failing propensity to discount the future”). This may not be a particularly galvanizing conclusion, but it is, yes, how the world works.
How the World Really Works
AC explains that the way the world actually works is not at all how the globalist establishment’s Narrative tells you it works.
I used to be purely mechanistic, and “scientific,” in quotes, because I was really just adopting what I was told by those I thought understood the world as a cause and effect mechanism. There were molecules, and physics, and rules, and everything was just sort of there, clicking away as a clockwork mechanism, which began with a chemical soup, accreted into “life,” which was just a sort of curious quirky self-perpetuating chemical reaction. And it all happened as they said, we were the first here, and it was all as it appeared. It was a fairly cohesive theory, as you could follow it from beginning to end and it made sense and looked good on the surface, given the lies we were told and what was hidden.
The Bible was some weird book of fairy tales, which people latched on to and claimed was true, but which was vastly inferior to understanding what I thought was a coherent story of life’s formation, evolution, and our present state.
As time went on, I saw things, from Bob seemingly getting taken over by some weird evil personality, to feeling the golden glow raining down from above which you see in old Renaissance paintings, right at the moment when I first took the fork which led to this path. That warm glow of love raining down on people in those paintings was not some artist’s concoction to simulate God’s love and grace. It is actually a real phenomenon I assume people were feeling back then as the Dark Ages passed and the chosen began to embark on their given roles. When I felt it there was someone else there who felt it too. I assume God knew as a mechanist, I would have written it off as some neural quirk inside my brain, but for a witness. So He gave me a witness. It is a weird, warm glow of happiness and love that clearly rains from above, and makes you feel different and uplifted, almost euphoric.
So I was realizing religion and God were real things, and there was something else going on in this world from my own experiences, even before I found out the evil leaders in this world were using occult worship to seek favor from some evil entity with the power to grant favors in this world. And now we find out there was some sort of interdimensional, technologically sophisticated entity which had been here long before humans, hidden from us, and which was making fun of our most advanced military tech and operations as it ran circles around them. It appears it can present itself to us in all sorts of ways to trick us as to its true nature. And you know it is in our government, because it has to have intel operations, and that is how intel operations roll.
And all along was the Bible, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
More accurate than anything taught in school, in college, in our news media. It is the only thing not either clueless or outright lying to us. And the amazing thing is, it didn’t just come out and get revealed. It was there all along, and the establishment has been attacking it from Day One.
So yeah, I think the Bible is really the main text book now for how this world works.
I came to much the same conclusions for very different reasons, but the important thing to keep in mind is that even a fairly basic knowledge of what has passed for science for the last 30 years will rapidly convince anyone of sufficient intelligence that a) the scientific narrative is not only false, but impossible, b) science doesn’t offer rational explanations for the vast majority of things it purports to explain, and c) the scientific profession is actively engaged in hiding and/or explaining away a considerable amount of information that directly contradicts the scientific narrative.
And all of this is correctly anticipated and explained by the Biblical narrative, which describes a world that is fallen from perfection, filled with sin, and ruled by evil.
The Problem of Evil for the secular perspective should not be underrated. It is so fundamental a problem that it is almost impossible to examine it honestly and not reject the secular perspective entirely.
Politics of Poverty
Forget what you learned in school, the Panama Papers are your new curriculum on how the world works.
Since the release, I’ve been glued to the ICIJ’s Panama Papers. Like a great film, there’s intrigue, star players, and an unbelievable magnitude of malfeasance.
With a box of popcorn by my side, I’ve delved into the meticulous journalism that’s confirmed to the world what many already suspected.
The mega rich, political elites, and unsavory characters like human and drug traffickers get to play by different rules than the rest of us.
Lesson one: Politics is a rigged game, everywhere.
Where countries fall on Transparency International’s corruption indices is irrelevant. As Charles S. Piece put it in Esquire, the Panama Papers reveal “that every political system in the world—even the nakedly authoritarian ones—is hopelessly rigged, and that the marvelous new world of the miraculous global economy is an even bigger thieves’ paradise than you, me, or even Jamie Dimon thought it was.”
Panama, along with at least 50 other countries, are tax havens (a concept you never learned in your freshman International Relations course). This means the governments of these jurisdictions turn a blind eye to the flows of money coming in and out of the banks on their sovereign soil. They also levy no, or very low taxes.
Governments are active conspirators in this elaborately rigged system. For instance, in the U.S., every state permits the creation of shell companies that do not require identifying the real owners of those entities. Shell companies are essentially empty vessels for holding financial assets anonymously. This is a key tool for avoiding taxes, and for criminals to launder illicit money and gain access to banks.
Embarrassingly, my home state Delaware is the global epicenter for shell companies. In fact, there are more shell companies incorporated in Delaware than Delawareans. An applicant has to give more personal information to get a library card in Delaware than to set up a shell company, and it only takes about an hour to be ‘in business.’
Delaware’s role as a tax haven is inexcusable. Not only does it permit corporations, wealthy foreigners, and criminals to hide their money, it facilitates the misery that results from tax avoidance. Your Comparative Politics course, or the one you took on African politics, likely never examined how tax havens are accessories to the robbery of developing countries’ tax revenues, stunting their ability to achieve poverty reduction and development progress. Without tax dollars, governments cannot build schools, hospitals, or the infrastructure to create dynamic and inclusive economies that bring jobs and fight poverty.
The lesson we should be learning from the release of the Panama papers is that today’s global inequality problem, along with other severe miseries, are linked.
They are symptoms of a failed system of global governance. There is essentially no global tax regime to mitigate the scourge of tax evasion and avoidance. This absence of international cooperation, and the ease in which it permits the movement of financial assets from where taxes are due to tax havens, drives the obscene levels of extreme wealth we see today. As my colleagues and I have pointed out, we live in a world where 62 people have the same wealth as the bottom half of humanity. And trust me, this isn’t because those 62 people work harder than the rest of us. They just have better accountants.
Lesson two: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Truer words have never been spoken, and the Panama Papers put that into stark relief.
When it comes to taxes, the mantra should be ‘we pay, they play;’ because for the ultra wealthy, corporations, and criminals, paying taxes is optional. Of course, you and I have no option.
Of course, governments don’t do less because they can’t collect taxes from the rich. They simply increase the tax burden on the rest of us. As Zucman put it:
“You know, if billionaires pay very little in taxes, it means that the rest of us – we have to pay more. So it means more taxes for the middle class, and so we all pay the cost of tax evasion by the wealthiest individuals.”
Maybe we did learn this lesson in school? If you read Thucydides, you’ll recall his conclusion that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Of course, we’re not that weak!
A glimmer of how the world can work
The events surrounding the Panama papers aren’t all doom and gloom. I mean, it’s pretty bad, given that Mossack Fonseca is one firm in one tax haven, suggesting the magnitude of illicit financial flows and tax avoidance is massive beyond belief.
Still, the impressive coordination among hundreds of journalists, the release of the Papers and the excellent reporting, are extremely encouraging.
This experience demonstrates the power of whistle-blowers, dedicated journalists, and civil society activists to reveal the inner architecture of how wealth is hidden.
More than 7 percent of the people in Iceland came out to call for their Prime Minister to resign because of the revelations exposed in the Papers (and he did). That is a real testament to the power of information as a driver of social change and accountability. And we’re seeing similar outbursts across the world. In the UK, thousands are in the streets calling for PM David Cameron to resign and nearly 400 activists were arrested in front of the U.S. capitol on Monday protesting corruption.
The ICIJ should take a bow, and the hundreds of journalists who collaborated on this project deserve acknowledgement. As someone who works on the links between tax avoidance, global illicit flows and extreme economic inequality, this work is both validating and evidentially powerful. So, thank you profusely.
Putting an end to double standards
Oxfam calls on Congress and the President to pass the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act and implement aggressive public Country by Country Reporting requirements for all multinational companies headquartered in the United States. Both of which will help address the secrecy surrounding shell companies.
We also urge the US to be a leader in creating a multilateral global rule system that emphasizes information sharing, transparency, and global accountability.
The Panama Papers reveals the extreme, yet largely legal, political rigging that let’s wealthy individuals, corporations and criminals play by different rules than you and me. They also offer a perfect opportunity for citizens to seize on the shock and outrage they are spurring to demand governments create a more level playing field.