How the World Really Works

Tracing the trajectory of useful energy deployment is so revealing because energy is not just another component in the complex structures of the biosphere, human societies, and their economies, nor just another variable in intricate equations determining the evolution of these interacting systems. Energy conversions are the very basis of life and e

The long-term trend toward the electrification of societies (rising share of fuels converted to electricity rather than consumed directly) has been unmistakable. The new renewables—solar and wind, as opposed to hydroelectricity whose beginnings go back to 1882—will readily feed into this progression, but the history of electricity generation remind

Producing chicken requires energies whose total is several times higher than the energy content of the edible meat.

Multiples in the International System of Units used in the text Prefix Abbreviation Scientific notation hecto h 102 kilo k 103 mega M 106 giga G 109 tera T 1012 peta P 1015 exa E 1018 zetta Z 1021 yotta Y 1024 Yet another way to illustrate the unprecedented range of magnitudes that enables the functioning of modern societies is to compare them with

Without electricity, drinking water in all cities—as well as liquid and gaseous fossil fuels everywhere—would be unavailable. Powerful electric pumps feed water into the municipal supply, and they have an especially demanding task in cities with high commercial and residential densities where water must be lifted to a great height.

By 1950, fossil fuels supply nearly three-quarters of primary energy (still dominated by coal), and inanimate prime movers—now with gasoline- and diesel-fueled internal combustion engines in the lead—provide more than 80 percent of all mechanical energy. And by the year 2000 only poor people in low-income countries depend on biomass fuels, with woo

Any number between 1 and 10 will be a multiple of 100, 10 becomes 101, 20 is 2 × 101. The advantages of this become quickly apparent as the numbers grow bigger. A 10-fold jump brings us to items counted in hundreds (102) and then to thousands (103), tens of thousands (104), hundreds of thousands (105), and millions (106).

Because these multiples are encountered so frequently in both scientific research and in engineering practice, they were assigned specific Greek names to be used as prefixes for the first three orders of magnitude—101 is deka, 102 is hecto, 103 is kilo—and then for every third order: 106 is mega, 109 giga, all the way to yotta, 1024,

Erwin Schrödinger, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933, summed up the basis of life: “What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy” (negative entropy or negentropy = free energy).20