How the World Really Works

In 1900, less than 2 percent of the world’s fossil fuel production was used to generate electricity; by 1950 that share was still less than 10 percent; it now stands at about 25 percent.63 The concurrent expansion of hydroelectric capacity accelerated during the 1930s, with large state-funded projects in the USA and the USSR, and reached new highs

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

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.

For those who ignore the energetic and material imperatives of our world, those who prefer mantras of green solutions to understanding how we have come to this point, the prescription is easy: just decarbonize—switch from burning fossil carbon to converting inexhaustible flows of renewable energies. The real wrench in the works: we are a fossil-fue

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—

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

“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.”

The proverbial best minds do not go into soil science and do not try their hand at making better cement; instead they are attracted to dealing with disembodied information, now just streams of electrons in myriads of microdevices. From lawyers and economists to code writers and money managers, their disproportionately high rewards are for work comp