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

Globally, the automotive sector, now with more than 1.4 billion vehicles on the road, is the largest consumer, followed by use in industry—with the largest markets being textiles, energy, chemicals, and food processing—and in ocean-going vessels.

The third chapter explains how and why our societies are sustained by materials created by human ingenuity, focusing on what I call the four pillars of modern civilization: ammonia, steel, concrete, and plastics.

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.

we may have seen the peak of globalization, and its ebb may last not just for years but for decades to come.

In 1995, crude oil extraction finally surpassed the 1979 record and then continued to rise, meeting the demand of an economically reforming China as well as the rising demand elsewhere in Asia—but oil has not regained its pre-1975 relative dominance.[49] Its share of the global commercial primary energy supply fell from 45 percent in 1970 to 38 per

In contrast, modern nuclear reactors, if properly built and carefully run, offer safe, long-lasting, and highly reliable ways of electricity generation; as already noted, they are able to operate more than 90 percent of the time, and their lifespan can exceed 40 years. Still, the future of nuclear generation remains uncertain. Only China, India, an

three existential necessities: oxygen, water, and food.

How soon will we fly intercontinentally on a wide-body jet powered by batteries? News headlines assure us that the future of flight is electric—touchingly ignoring the huge gap between the energy density of kerosene burned by turbofans and today’s best lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries that would be on board these hypothetically electric planes. Turbo

only an impossibly complete recycling of all wastes voided by grazing animals could, together with near-perfect recycling of all other sources of organic nitrogen, provide the amount of nitrogen annually applied to crops in ammonia-based fertilizers. Meanwhile, there are no other materials that can rival the combination of malleability, durability,