How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

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]

There is no shortage of fossil fuel resources in the Earth’s crust, no danger of imminently running out of coal and hydrocarbons: at the 2020 level of production, coal reserves would last for about 120 years, oil and gas reserves for about 50 years, and continued exploration would transfer more of them from the resource to the reserve (technically

Notice the key qualifying adjective: the target is not total decarbonization but “net zero” or carbon neutrality. This definition allows for continued emissions to be compensated by (as yet non-existent!) large-scale removal of CO2 from the atmosphere and its permanent storage underground, or by such temporary measures as the mass-scale planting of

Germany will soon generate half of its electricity from renewables, but during the two decades of Energiewende the share of fossil fuels in the country’s primary energy supply has only declined from about 84 percent to 78 percent: Germans like their unrestricted Autobahn speeds and their frequent intercontinental flying, and German industries hum o

Food and energy supply, the two existential necessities covered in the preceding chapters, would be impossible without mass-scale mobilization of many man-made materials—metals, alloys, non-metallic and synthetic compounds—and the same is true about all our buildings and infrastructures and about all modes of transportation and communication.

generating electricity for mass-scale commercial use is a costly and complicated undertaking. Its distribution from where it is generated to the places and regions of its largest use—to cities, industries, and electrified forms of rapid transportation—is equally complicated: it requires transformers and extensive grids of high-voltage transmission

What explains this impressive achievement? Answering that it must be due to higher crop yields is a truism. Saying that the increase has been the combined effect of better crop varieties, agricultural mechanization, fertilization, irrigation, and crop protection correctly describes the changes in key inputs—but it still misses the fundamental expla

Most of the admired and undoubtedly remarkable technical advances that have transformed industries, transportation, communication, and everyday living would have been impossible if more than 80 percent of all people had to remain in the countryside in order to produce their daily bread (the share of the US population who were farmers in 1800 was 83

Given prevailing diets and farming practices, synthetic nitrogen feeds half of humanity—or, everything else being equal, half of the world’s population could not be sustained without synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers.

This increasing dependence on fossil fuels is the most important factor in explaining the advances of modern civilization—and also our underlying concerns about the vulnerability of their supply and the environmental impacts of their combustion.