How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future

I really enjoyed this book. How he uses data to explain the various systems underlying our everyday lives was enlightening. Looking forward to my next Vaclav Smil book!

For the sheer depth and width of research, background facts and analysis, this book surpasses anything one has read to date, including books by even the most erudite of scientists and analysts. The amount of information and facts about our everyday life that Smil presents is truly mind boggling. He also dispels common myths and theories, very convincingly, especially those concerning global climate change mitigation strategies. Instead, he provides realistic, well-researched and plausible ideas to at least reduce our carbon footprint significantly while asserting that there is currently no evident or even plausible way to achieve the kind of goals nations are setting for themselves with respect to carbon neutrality (net zero by 2035 or 2050, etc). In other words, governments and multilateral institutions are misleading us, and probably themselves too. Still, there is cause for optimism as human ingenuity, while rarely following a predictable path, has always found a way out. In terms of downsides, the one major point that comes to mind is that the book often becomes tedious - droning on with statistics and facts that sometimes feel excessive. Still, given today’s age of misinformation and baseless assertions, too much fact/data should be considered preferable to too little.

In How the World Really Works, Vaclav Smil puts into perspective our dependence on fossil fuels and fossil carbon combustion in terms of size. Throughout seven aspects of life (chapters): Understanding Energy, Food Production, Our Material World, Globalization, Risks, the Environment, and finally, to understand the "Future" he discusses four main materials modern civilization heavily depends on ammonia, steel, concrete, and plastic—each reliant on fossil fuels for production." …. in just two years - 2018 and 2019 - China produced nearly as much cement (about 4,4 billion tons) as did the United States during the entire 20th century (4,56 billion tons)." p98We learn much about global food, crops, or fertilizer production and compare the carbon footprint of bread, tomatoes, chicken, or seafood. However, the dependency of food security on energy supply will last, and we seriously must consider the management of food losses and waste. Smil contextualizes the globalization of traded goods, which reached a turning point in the mid-2000s and currently reorganized supply chains for more resilience. He discusses how post-1950 technical advances facilitated a significant expansion, with China emerging as a dominant player – expansion of goods but also migrants."And despite the impression created by media reporting, the worldwide frequency of violent conflicts and the total number of their casualties have been declining for decades." p.135He also addresses risk management linked with numbers and probabilities, risk perception, and irrational fears. Environmental challenges require effective management of our natural resources.„… of all the risks we face, global climate change is the one that needs to be tackled most urgently and effectively. And there are two fundamental reasons why this combination of speed and efficacy will be much harder to realize than is generally assumed.“ p.224Smil offers negative and positive effects of global warming such as agricultural intensification or shortening of trees‘ lifespans as well as the fact that some crops will increase their water use efficiency. Smil counts on human achievements, creativity, and ingenuity anticipating our future adaptability and innovation.„Catastrophists have always had a hard time imaging that human ingenuity can meet future food, energy, and material needs - …“ p210A compelling and very dense read; very well-researched with great references and orders of magnitude. It reminds us to reconsider our reliance on fossil fuels and explore sustainable pathways for the future. A must-read!

Empfohlen für diejenigen, die verstehen möchten, wie die Welt funktioniert.

Gut

Excellent. Donne une très bonne perspective sur le fonctionnement du monde en 2020.

Don’t read it for or against man made climate change, or for or against trying to stop greenhouse gases. Read it to get a much broader understanding of what the challenge really implies. I suspect seriously green minded non-technical readers may consider it anti-green - but it really isn’t.It gives a lot of insight into why a transition simply cannot happen overnight - without implying at all, that nothing can be done.

The scientist Vaclav Smil has written numerous books explaining everything from Energy to Risk and this book is mostly a short summary of several of those books. The summaries are so cursory that the book becomes uncomfortable to read.Unfortunately for the importance of the topic, the author comes off in this book like an old curmudgeon shouting at the TV. It seems that statements from environmental activities calling for a total and complete elimination of fossil fuels caused him to boil over so much that he wrote this book to tell them how unrealistic that was. He does this by describing how fossil fuels play a critical part in food production, as well as resources like cement, steel and fertilizer.Although there are many negative aspects of this book, I would still recommend it to anyone interested in climate change. He provides numerous facts that need to be considered when discussing transitions away from fossil fuels.

I was left feeling that the book kind of underdelivered. Given the bold title, I had higher expectations..

Top line: a highly recommended read.Smil's mission is to tell us that hopes of a rapid and easy transition into a "net-zero" future or a world where AI has solved all our problems are pipe dreams, and in this he is a complete success. It's all a salutory reminder that the physical - and not the virtual - world is what really matters and that the material changes of the last 20 years are enormous and not something that can be rolled back quickly and easily.Happily Smil is not some climate-change denying crank, so we are definitely in a discourse about why change needs to happen as well as how difficult it is.But I also think he is maybe too pessimistic: the very scale and scope of China's economic transformation in the last 40 years - which Smil correctly describes as fundamental for all humanity - shows that human will and determination can achieve great things. Maybe not to the arbitrary targets of a "year ending in 5 or 0" but that is not a reason not to try - and sometimes this book does read as though he thinks it might all be a bit hopeless - certainly some of its readers are going to quote it as though he is making that argument.In other ways the book feels like it is using excuses to avoid facing up to bad news. Yes, models are never likely to be anything close to perfect predictors of the future, but why are they cited with approval when it comes to estimating how much of certain future resources are available (when it suits Smil's argument) but (sometimes mockingly) dismissed when it comes to the impact of climate change? Facing up to hard reality also means facing up to the unavoidable damage that is yet to come.The chapter on risk is very interesting but feels oddly out of place in the book's narrative. Something the author wanted to get off his chest in the middle of the pandemic?All in all I do strongly recommend this book, but nullius in verba.

Often these days it seems there is much motivated talk of the great changes that humanity must undertake to adjust its behavior to influence the biosphere less without an appreciation of what that would truly take. The motivated talk is not without good intention, nor should it be dismissed because there are aspects which are unrealistic. Nonetheless to get a more honest picture of how great change can truly take place from a bottoms up perspective in our material world one should read How the World Really Works to appreciate the complexity we really face and the many bottlenecks which we have no current solutions to.Vaclev Smil does not limit himself to narrow questions in this book but instead tries to take a step back and appreciate the problems humanity faces and reflect on how to think about solution forming. The book is not optimistic or pessimistic and attempts to be a scientific realist about the current trajectory of the biosphere and what can be done given the material requirements of the population base. The author starts out by highlighting the fundamental differences between exponential growth in tech hardware and logistic like growth in most material economics, in particular the challenges to further productivity gains in energy production, agricultural yields while the roadmap for further density increases in semiconductors can be clearer and we should not get confused about the inability to advance material sciences the way miniaturization has done elsewhere. The author starts with the critical ingredient to human progress, energy. The main observations are around our inescapable need for fossil fuels. The statistics on alternative energy proportion going up while absolute demand for fossil fuels still increases or at best remains flat highlight how we have not solved our diversification problem and one can draw the quick inference that more wind power for Germany wont solve their gas deficiency. The reconstruction of our energy infrastructure to support a non fossil fuel world is currently a complete fantasy. The author moves onto food and highlights there crop yields over time and how real growth in yield was really catalyzed by the growth of fertilizers dependent on the Haber-Bosch process. This is another massive energy drain highlighting that mass food production and further scale is completely dependent on further energy availability and the yields from moving away from nitrogen fixing would require an order of magnitude more arable land for farming. The author then starts to focus on material production with the likes of steel, cement and overall structures required for human habitation and how these cannot be imagined away. He also discusses the growing risks humanity faces and touches about the pandemic. The author does not highlight the challenges of going to carbon neutral as an excuse to do nothing and is deeply worried about the irreversibility of our actions on the biosphere, as such the author discusses how we are affecting the environment and what the subsequent consequences are of those changes. In putting this together the author tries to give perspective that rising tides wont be the end of humanity nor will tech solve our material constraints and that we need to be completely realistic about the challenges we face so that we start to work on honest solutions to the problems we are causing.All in all How the World Really Works does a good job at framing the problems humanity faces in scale. This is not a political book on right or wrong but a calculated book on the quantities involved and the material constraints on inputs and outputs. This should very much be understood by those framing policies that are intended to be effective and the book is essential reading for those who want to understand this issues better. Both informative and interesting, definitely a good book to gain the proper context to think about what needs to be done and how it can be done.

Vaclav Smil nimmt seine Aufgabe ernst. Mit vielen Quellen belegt er die Sicht auf die unmittelbare Vergangenheit und Zukunft unseres Planeten. Nahrung, Energie, Rohstoffe und deren Auswirkungen auf unsere Umwelt werden nüchtern analysiert. Der äusserst relevante Inhalt könnte gerne mit ein paar Diagrammen lebhafter gestaltet werden.

As sharp as ever!For those who know his earlier books will find this one even more accessible, although not easy by any means. I think readers will be surprised by the scale of their own ignorance."Energy is the ultimate currency" and this books paints a vivid picture as to why that is.Read it and gift it!