Are you tired of extreme predictions of both an eco-apocalypse and a techno-utopia? You know what I mean:
Instead of being jerked around by social media and news media, wouldn’t you rather listen to someone who is knowledgeable and reasonable, who is neither optimist nor pessimist? If you want some level-headed perspective, stop following the news and start reading How the World Really Works. Vaclav Smil, professor emeritus of the University of Manitoba, has studied all this for decades, and will at once blow your mind and improve you mind.
What’s really going on with energy? In 1975 oil supplied 45% of the world’s energy. In 2019 it was 33%. (Natural gas, wind, and solar have made the difference.) But the world simply can’t go all electric because we have no way to store massive amounts of electricity—and electric jets? Not in our lifetime.
What really makes the world go round? Besides energy, four key material pillars hold up modern civilization, all of which depend on carbon fuels. At the dinner table I asked the family to make a guess. Maybe you’d like to try.
I was impressed that they came up with three of the four—steel, plastics, and concrete. We’ve seen huge increases in these—which all dependent on high levels of energy to create.
What’s the fourth? Surprisingly, ammonia—whose nitrogen content makes it key for producing fertilizer which in turn made 75-year-old predictions of mass starvation laughable. But we must not forget that lots of oil is still needed for that and for the plowing, planting, harvesting, processing, and transporting of food.
Wait. There’s more! With all the fad diets out there, how do you decide which one will give the longest life? It’s not that hard, Smil says. Look at the countries with greatest longevity and copy them. Two at the top are Japan and Spain. Since their diets are quite different, you have a choice.
What’s actually happening with globalization, with global warming, with contagious diseases? This book has so much sensible, even-handed information on all these and more.
Granted, Smil has a lot of numbers. But he does his best to make big ideas and trends very understandable. Throughout he uses everyday examples to keep us on track. For example, getting two pounds of chicken to the table requires about half a wine bottle of crude oil.
I love books that give a big picture like Jared Diamond’s Upheaval and Hans Rosling’s Factfulness. They are so much more informative than the annoying, irrelevant, and sensationalized snippets that flood our daily news feeds. To find out what’s really going on, instead spend your time with books like How the World Really Works.
