The Science Behind How We Get Here and Where We’re Going
0241454409
Vaclav Smil
Notes
…for decades it will be impossible to adequately feed the planet without using fossil fuels as sources of energy and raw materials…the modern world’s most important – and fundamentally existential – dependence on fossil fuels is their direct and indirect use in the production of our food. Direct use includes fuels to power all field machinery (mostly tractors, combines and other harvesters), the transportation of harvests from fields to storage and processing sites, and irrigation pumps. Indirect use is much broader, taking into account the fuels and electricity used to produce agricultural machinery, fertilizers and agrochemicals (herbicides, insecticides, fungicides), and other inputs ranging from glass and plastic sheets for greenhouses, to global positioning devices that enable precision farming.
In two centuries, the human labor to produce a kilogram of American wheat was reduced from 10 minutes to less than two seconds. This is how our modern world really works.
…the well-documented global food losses have been excessively high, mostly because of an indefensible difference between output and actual needs: daily average per capita requirements of adults in largely sedentary affluent populations are no more than 2,000-2,100 kilocalories, far below the actual supplies of 3,200-4,000 kilocalories.
Between 1990 and 2020, the mass-scale concretization of the modern world has emplaced nearly 700 billion tons of hard but slowly crumbling material…This means that during the 21st century we will face unprecedented burdens of concrete deterioration, renewal, and removal (with, obviously, a particularly acute problem in China), as structures will have to be torn down – in order to be replaced or destroyed – or abandoned.
China provided va combination of other attractors – above-all, centralized one-party government that could guarantee political stability and acceptable investment options; a large, highly homogenous and literate population; and an enormous domestic market – that made it the preferred choice over Nigeria, Bangladesh, and even India, resulting in a remarkable collusion between the world’s largest communist state and a nearly complete lineup of the world’s leading capitalist enterprise.
Driving is an order of magnitude more dangerous than flying.
We are concerned about too much of something without which we could not be alive: the greenhouse effect. This existential imperative is the regulation of the Earth’s atmospheric temperature by a few trace gasses – above all by carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). Compared to the two gasses that make the bulk of the atmosphere (nitrogen at 78%, oxygen at 21%), their presence is negligible (small fractions of a percent) but their effect makes the difference between a lifeless, frozen planet and a blue and green Earth.
In 1957, three decades before the sudden surge of interest in global warming, Roger Revelle, an American oceanographer, and Hans Suess, a physical chemist, appraised the process of mass-scale fossil fuel combustion in its correct evolutionary terms: “Thus human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in the sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.”
Affluent countries could reduce their average per capita energy use by large margins and still retain a comfortable quality of life. Widespread diffusion of simple technical fixes ranging from mandated triple windows to designs of more durable vehicles would have significant cumulative effects. The halving of food waste and changing the composition of global meat consumption would reduce carbon emissions without degrading the quality of food supply.