How the World Really Works

The real wrench in the works: we are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years.

Modern economies will always be tied to massive material flows, whether those of ammonia-based fertilizers to feed the still-growing global population; plastics, steel, and cement needed for new tools, machines, structures, and infrastructures; or new inputs required to produce solar cells, wind turbines, electric cars, and storage batteries. And u

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

Moreover (as will be explained in chapter 3), we have no readily deployable commercial-scale alternatives for energizing the production of the four material pillars of modern civilization solely by electricity. This means that even with an abundant and reliable renewable electricity supply, we would have to develop new large-scale processes to prod

Iron ore smelting in blast furnaces requires coke made from coal (and also natural gas); energy for cement production comes mostly from coal dust, petroleum coke, and heavy fuel oil. The vast majority of simple molecules that are bonded in long chains or branches to make plastics are derived from crude oils and natural gases. And in the modern synt