How the World Really Works

Aristotle, writing in his Metaphysics, combined ἐν (in) with ἔργνο (work) and concluded that every object is maintained by ἐνέργεια.26 This understanding endowed all objects with the potential for action, motion, and change—

As we have seen, 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.

“energy has a large number of different forms, and there is a formula for each one. These are: gravitational energy, kinetic energy, heat energy, elastic energy, electrical energy, chemical energy, radiant energy, nuclear energy, mass energy.”

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 nothing (from galactic rotatio

To give just a single key comparison, in 2020 the average annual per capita energy supply of about 40 percent of the world’s population (3.1 billion people, which includes nearly all people in sub-Saharan Africa) was no higher than the rate achieved in both Germany and France in 1860! In order to approach the threshold of a dignified standard of li

An average inhabitant of the Earth nowadays has at their disposal nearly 700 times more useful energy than their ancestors had at the beginning of the 19th century. Moreover, within a lifetime of people born just after the Second World War the rate had more than tripled, from about 10 to 34 GJ/capita between 1950 and 2020. Translating the last rate

Why then do most people in modern societies have such a superficial knowledge about how the world really works? The complexities of the modern world are an obvious explanation: people are constantly interacting with black boxes, whose relatively simple outputs require little or no comprehension of what is taking place inside the box. This is as tru

Not surprisingly, demand was coming from all sectors. In real terms, crude oil was so cheap that there were no incentives to use it efficiently: American houses in regions with a cold climate, increasingly heated by oil furnaces, were built with single-glazed windows and without adequate wall insulation; the average efficiency of American cars actu

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

is impossible to decide which class of electricity converters has had a greater impact—lights or motors. The conversion of electricity into kinetic energy by electric motors first revolutionized nearly every sector of industrial production and later penetrated every household niche.