How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going
by Vaclav Smil
updated 1d ago
by Vaclav Smil
updated 1d ago
The real wrench in the works: we are 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. Complete decarbonization of the globa
... See moreLuc Castera added 8mo ago
more recently, physicist Robert Ayres has repeatedly stressed in his writings the central notion of energy in all economies: “the economic system is essentially a system for extracting, processing and transforming energy as resources into energy embodied in products and services.”[23] Simply put, energy is the only truly universal currency, and not
... See moreLuc Castera added 8mo ago
the most common definition of energy: “the capacity for doing work”—a definition valid only when the term “work” means not only some invested labor but, as one of the leading physicists of the era put it, a generalized physical “act of producing a change of configuration in a system in opposition to a force which resists that change.”[29]
Luc Castera added 8mo ago
There is no better way to answer the question “what is energy?” than by referring to one of the most insightful physicists of the 20th century—to the protean mind of Richard Feynman, who (in his famous Lectures on Physics) tackled the challenge in his straightforward manner, stressing that “energy has a large number of different forms, and there is
... See moreLuc Castera added 8mo ago
Most recently, a poor understanding of energy has the proponents of a new green world naively calling for a near-instant shift from abominable, polluting, and finite fossil fuels to superior, green and ever-renewable solar electricity. But liquid hydrocarbons refined from crude oil (gasoline, aviation kerosene, diesel fuel, residual heavy oil) have
... See moreLuc Castera added 8mo ago
There are many choices available when it comes to energy conversions, some far better than others. The high densities of chemical energy in kerosene and diesel fuel are great for intercontinental flying and shipping, but if you want your submarine to stay submerged while crossing the Pacific Ocean then the best choice is to fission enriched uranium
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energy exists in various forms, and to make it useful to us we need to convert one form of it into another type. But treating this multifaceted abstract as a monolith has been the norm, as if different forms of energy were effortlessly substitutable.
Luc Castera added 8mo ago
During the late 1960s, the already high American demand for oil rose by nearly 25 percent, and global demand increased by nearly 50 percent. European demand had nearly doubled between 1965 and 1973, and Japanese imports became about 2.3 times higher.[45] As mentioned, new discoveries of oil covered this surge in demand and oil was selling at what w
... See moreLuc Castera added 8mo ago
And hydrocarbons have yet another indispensable non-fuel use: as feedstocks for many different chemical syntheses (dominated by ethane, propane, and butane from natural gas liquids) producing a variety of synthetic fibers, resins, adhesives, dyes, paints and coatings, detergents, and pesticides, all vital in myriad ways to our modern world.[40] Giv
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