HowTheWorldReallyWorks

• Fantastic. Might be a new favorite author!
• Lines etched into the most powerful processors are only about twice the diameter of human DNA.
• None of the people reading this book will relocate to Mars. all of us will continue to eat staple grain crops grown in soil on large expanses of agricultural land, rather than in skyscrapers imagined by the proponents of so-called urban agriculture.

[BROKEN LINK: 2F3G4H5I-6J7K-8L9M-0N1O-2P3Q4R5S6T7U]

• The prescription is easy: "Just decarbonize" switch from burning fossil fuels to converting inexhaustible flows of renewable energies. 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.

UnpopularTruth

• This book is an attempt to explain some of the most fundamental ruling realities governing our survival and our prosperity.
• Our high-energy societies have been steadily increasing their dependence on fossil fuels in general and on electricity, the most flexible form of energy, in particular.
• Decarbonizing trucking, flying and shipping will be a much greater challenge (than decarbonizing electricity) as will the production of key materials without relying on fossil fuels.
• Producing our food requires substantial, direct and indirect fossil fuel inputs.
• it would be very difficult to run all field machinery without liquid fossil fuels and to produce all fertilizers without natural gas and oil.
• Four pillars of modern civilization: ammonia, steel, concrete, and plastics.
• My main area of interest throughout my life has been energy studies, because a satisfactory grasp of that vast field requires a combining an understanding physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and engineering with an attention to history and to social, economic and political factors.
• This book strongly advocates for moving away from extreme views.
• In fundamental physics any process can be defined as a sequence of energy conversions.
• Fire converts the chemical energy of plants into thermal energy and light.
• Our increasing dependence on fossil fuels is the most important factor in explaining the advances of modern civilization and also underlies our concerns about the vulnerability of their supply and the environmental impacts of their combustion.

History

• Energy conversions are the very basis of life and evolution, so tracing the trajectory of useful energy is revealing. Modern history can be seen as unusually rapid sequence of transitions to new energy sources, and the modern world is the cumulative result.

History

• The economic system is essentially a system for extracting, processing and transforming energy as resources into energy embodied in products and services. Energy is the only truly universal currency, and nothing can take place without its transformations. Its hard to understand why modern economics has largely ignored energy. Understanding how the world really works cannot be done without energy literacy.

UnpopularTruth

• Synthesis of ammonia needed to produce nitrogenous fertilizers depends heavily on natural gas as the source of hydrogen.
• Large nuclear reactors are the most reliable producers of electricity.
• Natural gas contains 35 MJ/m³ or less than 1/1000 of kerosene's density.
• There could be no natural-gas powered flight: the energy density of methane is 3 orders of magnitude lower than aviation kerosene. There could be no coal powered flight: the energy difference is not very large, but coal would not flow from wing tanks to the engines
• Unlike coal, crude oil is much easier to produce, store, and distribute.
• Asphalt is derived from crude oil.
• Hydro carbons are feed stocks for many different chemical syntheses.
• Currents above 100 milliamps may be deadly.
• Electricity only supplies ~20% of the final global energy consumption.
  • Nuclear fission is 10% of electricity generation
  • Hydro is 16% of electricity generation
  • solar is 7%
  • The rest is from coal and natural gas
• At the 2020 levels of production, coal reserves would last another 120 years, oil and gas for about 50 years
• Even with an abundant and reliable renewable electricity supply, we would still have to develop large-scale processes to produce steel, ammonia, cement and plastics.

UnpopularTruth

• Both the high relative share and the scale of our dependence on fossil carbon make any rapid substitutions impossible.
• Until a few generations ago, only a small share of well-fed elites did not have to worry about having enough to eat.

NowIsDifferent

• The modern worlds most important – and fundamentally existential – dependence on fossil fuels is their direct and indirect use in the production of our food. Direct use includes fuels to power all field machinery, the transportation of harvest from fields, and irrigation pumps. Indirect use is much broader and includes fertilizers. Most of the dependence is on liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons in machine fuels and raw materials.
• As always we are eating products of photosynthesis. What has changed is the intensity of our crop and animal production: we could not harvest such abundance and in such a highly predictable manner, without the still-rising inputs of fossil fuels and electricity.
• Agriculture must be energized by solar radiation, specifically by the blue and red parts of the visible spectrum. photosynthesis is a multi-step process that combines atmospheric carbon dioxide and water – as well as small amounts of elements including most notably nitrogen and phosphorus – to produce new plant mass for crops.
• Two centuries ago, the addition of non-solar forms of energy began to affect the crop production and later also the capture or marine species.
• High-productivity harvests are possible thanks to increasing infusions of fossil energies. Coal is used to make metallurgical coke charged into blast furnaces, and cast iron is converted to steel in open hearth furnaces. Steel is needed for agricultural machinery as well as for making the means of transportation.
• In two centuries, the human labor to produce a kilogram of American wheat was reduced from 10 minutes to less than 2 seconds.
• The road to the modern world began with inexpensive steel plows and inorganic fertilizers.
• Fertilizers that supply the three essential plant macro-nutrients – nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium – are needed in large quantities to ensure high crop yields.
  • Potassium is the least costly to produce, as all it takes is potash (KCl) from surface or underground mines.
  • Ammonia is the starting compound for making all synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers (the most important indirect energy input in modern farming) Nitrogen is needed in such large quantities because it is in every living cell: it is in chlorophyll (which powers photosynthesis), DNA and RNA (which stores genetic information), and in amino acids, which made up all the proteins required for the growth and maintenance of our tissues. The element is abundant – it makes up nearly 80% of the atmosphere, organisms live submerged it it – and yet it is a key limiting factor in crop productivity as well as in human growth. This is one of the great paradoxical realities of the biosphere and its explanation is simple: nitrogen exists in the atmosphere as a non-reactive molecule (N₂) and only a few natural processes can split the bond between the two nitrogen atoms and make the element available to form reactive compounds.

• Ammonia NH₃ is a highly reactive compound that is readily converted into soluble nitrates that can supply plants with their nitrogen needs.
• Leguminous food crops, including soybeans, beans, peas, lentils, and peanuts, are able to provide (fix) their own nitrogen. But no stable grain, oil crop or tuber can do that.
• For now and the foreseeable future, we cannot feed the world without relying on fossil fuels.
• Feeding efficiency over the past five decades have shown now improvements for either beef or pork, but impressive gains for chicken. Producing one American chicken (whose average edible weight is almost exactly 1 kg) needs 3 kg of corn. The total energy use (in mL equivalent of diesel fuel) is 300-350 mL/kg for chicken, which is remarkably efficient compared to 210-250 mL/kg for bread, is US cities the average price of a kg of white bread is only about 5% lower than the price per kg of whole chicken. This helps to explain the rapid rise of chicken to become the dominant meat in all Western countries.
• The gains in energy cost of vegetables is surprisingly high.
• Turns out that capturing seafood is the most energy intensive process of food provision. The marine species that people prefer to eat are carnivorous and need to be fed protein-rich fish meals and fish oil.
• Anthropogenic energy inputs to modern field farming add up to only about 4% of the annual global energy use. This sounds small, but it must be remembered that the Sun will always do most of the work of growing food. It is also a demonstration of small inputs having disproportionately large consequences, not an uncommon finding in the behavior of complex systems.
• For the US, the grand total of energy use in food production is ~20% the total energy supply.
• Between 1800 and 2020, we reduced the labor needed to produce a kg of grain by more than 98% and we reduced the share of the country's population engaged in agriculture by the same large margin. This provides a useful guide of the profound economic transformations that would have to take place with any retreat of agricultural mechanization and reduction in the use of synthetic agrochemicals.
• Half of the recent global crop harvests have been produced thanks to the application of synthetic nitrogenous compounds.
• The quest for mass-scale veganism is doomed to fail. Eating meat has been a significant a component of our evolutionary heritage as our large brains (which evolved partly because of meat eating). All our hominid ancestors were omnivorous, as are both species of chimpanzees which are closest to us in genetic makeup.

UnpopularTruth

• A nearly perfect solution to our food problem would be to develop grain or oil crops with their roots hosting bacteria able to convert inert atmospheric nitrogen to nitrates.
• industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy; now he eats potatoes partly made of oil.
• Even if we try to change the global food system as fast as is realistically conceivable we will be eating transformed fossil fuels for decades to come.
• We could have an accomplished and reasonably affluent civilization that provides plenty of food, material comforts, and access to health care without any semi-conductors, microchips or PC. We had one until the mid 1950s
• Producing large high-purity silicon crystals costs two orders of magnitude more primary energy than making aluminum and three orders of magnitude more than making steel.
• The four pillars of civilization are needed in larger and still increasing quantities than other inputs. They are not replaceable by other materials.
• The mass-scale production of the pillars depends heavily on the combustion of fossil fuels, and some of these fuels also supply feed stocks for ammonia and plastics. Iron ore smelting in blast furnaces requires coke made from coal. The vast majority of simple molecules that are bonded in long chains to make plastics are derived from crude oil and natural gases.
• Global production of the four pillars claims 17% of the worlds primary energy supply, and 25% of all C02 emissions.
• Of the four substances it is ammonia that deserves the top position as our most important material. In 2020, nearly 4 billion people would not have been alive without synthetic ammonia.
• "Haber-Bosch process" is how ammonia is made invented at BASF. easily the most momentous technical advance in history.
• The key innovation behind the "Green Revolution" that produced unprecedented crop yields is the use of natural gas as the source of hydrogen.
• About 150 megatons of ammonia are now synthesized, with 80% being used as fertilizer.
• Plastics are a large group of synthetic organic material whose common quality is that they are fit for forming/molding. Synthesis begins with monomers, simple molecules that can be bonded in long chains or branches to make polymers. Two key monomers; ethylene and propylene are produced by steam cracking (heating to 800C) hydrocarbon feed stocks.
• PVC is now the primary component in 25% of all health-care products.
• Irresponsible dumping of plastics is not an argument against the proper use of these diverse and often truly indispensable synthetic materials.
• Pig or cast iron is 95-97 percent iron, 2-4% carbon. The high carbon content makes it brittle.
• Modern steels are made from cast iron by reducing its carbon content to 0.08-2%.
• Steels physical properties handily beat those of the hardest stones and the other two most common metals. (Granite has similar compressive strength, buts its tensile strength is an order of magnitude lower.
• Steel dominates the look of modern civilization and enables its most fundamental functions.
• Steel is nearly always the largest part of transportation equipment. Jetliners are the major exception (aluminum alloys and composite fibers dominate)
• Steel containers ship ~everything we own.
• Only three elements are more common than iron in the earths crust (oxygen, silicon, and aluminum)
• Recycled steel accounts for ~30% of the annual output.
• Total energy requirement of steel is ~5% the total energy supply.
• Cement is much less energy-intensive, but b/c its global output is 3x still its production is responsible for a similar level of carbon output.
• Cement is the indispensable component of concrete. It is produced by heating ground limestone (a source of calcium) and clay or shale (sources of silicon, aluminum and iron) in large kilns.
• Concrete consists largely of 65-85% aggregates and water (15-20%). The mixture is held together by cement ~10% of the concrete's final mass.
• Concrete is the most massively deployed material of modern civilization. Plain concrete is good in compression and steel reinforced concrete is also good in tension.
• Large wind turbines are the embodiment of fossil fuels.
• If low labor costs were the sole reason for locating new factories abroad then sub-Saharan Africa would be the most obvious choice and India would always be preferable to China. China provided a combination of other attractors – above all centralized one-party government that could guarantee political stability and acceptable investment conditions; a large highly homogeneous and literate population, and an enormous domestic population.
• Diesel engines has made the greatest difference in enabling mass-scale transport in the global economy.
• Natural gas is a cleaner fuel than coal or refined oils and is also well suited to both industrial and domestic uses and to the generation of electricity.
• The greatest shipping innovation came in 1957 which a uniformly-sized steel cargo container were standardized.
• Gas turbine, in which fuel is sprayed into a stream of compressed air in order to generate a high-temperature gas that expands and exits the machine at high speed.
• In 1996 a group of Penn students recreated ENIAC by putting 175000 transistors on a 7.5 x 5.3 mm² microchip: the original machine was 5e6 times heavier it required about 4e5 times more electricity, and was 5e2 times slower.
• Between 1971 and 2019 microprocessor power increased by seven orders of magnitude 17e9 times
• One sweeping, simplifying way to describe the advances of modern civilization is to see them as serial quests to reduce the risks that come from us being complex and fragile organisms trying to survive against many odds in a world abounding with dangers.
• Widespread fear of nuclear electricity generation is yet another excellent example of risk misperception
• France has been deriving more than 70% of its electricity from nuclear fission since the 80s.
• Driving is an order of magnitude more dangerous than flying. During the time a person is driving the average change of dying goes up by about 50% compared to staying home.
  • Skydiving is 50 times higher than just sitting in a chair.
• Viral pandemics are guaranteed to reappear with relatively high frequency;
• We can likely avoid the high moralities of a virus like 1918 because we have eradicated tuberculosis and pneumonia is treatable with antibiotics.
• About 1e9 people have lived through three pandemics, but when COVID-19 struck references were made overwhelmingly to the 1918 episode as the 3 more recent pandemics have left ~no impressions
• Oxygen is the most accurately limiting resource for human survival.
• The Great Oxidation event began about 2.5e9 years ago.
• No re-hydration for a day is a trying experience, for 2 days it becomes perilous, and after 3 days it is usually fatal.
• The real concern about plant nutrients is the environmental consequences of their unwanted presence in the environment, mostly in water. Phosphorus from fertilizers can run off in the water causing excessive growth of algae, water normally has very low concentration of phosphorus.
• Simple physics explains our worries about the environmental consequences of planetary warming. C02 and CH4 are negligibly small fraction of the atmosphere (80% N2 and 20% O2) but their effect makes the difference between a lifeless frozen planet and a blue and green earth.
• Trace gases change the planets radiation balance by absorbing some of the outgoing (infrared) radiation and raising the surface temperature. This allows for the existence of liquid water, whose evaporation puts water vapor (another gas that absorbs outgoing infrared radiation) into the atmosphere.
• Water vapor is by far the most important absorber of outgoing radiation, and hence it is the gas that has been responsible for most of the atmospheric warming in the past and it will remain so in the future. But water vapor is not the cause of atmospheric warming b/c it does not control atmospheric temperature; earth natural warming is controlled by trace gases whose concentration is not affected by the ambient temperature.
• Rising CO2 emissions have been driven primarily by the combustion of fossil fuels and by the production of cement.
• CO2 accounts for about 75% of the anthropogenic warming effect, CH4 for about 15 percent and the rest is mostly N20.
• We did not have to wait for new computer models or for the establishment of the IPPC to beware of this effect and to think about our response.
• The only effective, substantial moves toward decarbonization have not come from any determined, deliberate, targeted policies. Rather, they have been by products of general technical advances. (Higher conversion efficiencies, more nuclear and hydro generation, less wasteful processing and manufacturing procedures) and of ongoing production and management shifts (switching from coal to natural gas) whose initiation and progress had nothing to do with any quest for reduced gas emissions. Three decades of large-scale international climate conferences have had no effect on the course of global C02 emissions.
• Our best option for dealing with future water supply is to manage demand, and one of the best large-scale examples of this working is the recent history of the US reducing per capita water usage by nearly 40%.
• Photosynthesis is always an extremely lopsided exchange of internal water (inside a leaf) for external C02 (in the atmosphere) Anytime a plant opens its stomata to import carbon for photosynthesis it loses large amounts of water. 240-330 kg of water per kilogram of harvested grain.
• Informed looks at the three existential necessities of life – breathing, drinking, and eating – concur; there should be no unavoidable apocalypse by 2030 or 2050.
• COVID-19 lesson: We were unprepared - to a degree even those of us who expected major problems found surprising – for an event whose near-imminent occurrence could have been forecast with 100 percent certainty.
• To believe that our understanding of dynamic, multi-factorial realities needed in climate change models has reached the state of perfection is to mistake the science of global warming for the religion of climate change. Was there a single climate modeler who predicted in 1980 the most important anthropogenic factor driving global warming over the past 30 years: the economic rise of China?

UnpopularTruth

• We can proceed fairly fast with the displacement of coal-fired electricity by natural gas and by expanding solar and wind electricity generation. We can move away from SUVs and accelerate mass-scale deployment of electric cars, and we still have large inefficiencies in construction, household, and commercial energy use that can profitable be reduced.
• All climate models should be seen mainly as heuristic exercises, as bases for thinking about options and approaches, never to be mistaken for prescient descriptions of our future.
• Global warming presents an uncommonly difficult challenge precisely because it is a truly global phenomenon, and because its largest cause is the combustion of fuels that constitute the massive energetic foundations of modern civilization. Non-carbon energies could completely displace fossil carbon in 1-3 decades ONLY if we were willing to take substantial cuts to the standard of living in all affluent countries and deny the modernizing nations of Asia and Africa improvements in their lots.
• Any sufficiently effective steps to addressing climate change will be decidedly non-magical, gradual, and costly. We have been transforming the environment on increasing scales and with rising intensity for millennia, and we have derived many benefits from these changes – but, inevitably, the biosphere has suffered. There are ways to reduce those impacts, but the resolve to deploy them at required scales has been lacking, and if we start acting in a sufficiently effective manner – and on a global scale – we will have to pay a considerable economic and social price.
• In 1960 Science published an absurd calculation claiming that the continuation of the historic rate of increase in population growth would result in infinitely rapid growth by November 2026.
• Sometime during the 2020s the work population will cross a significant demographic milestone as 1/2 of it will be living in countries whose total fertility rate is below the replacement level.
• We cannot eliminate the need for land, water, and nutrients in food production.
• Steel, cement, ammonia and plastics will endure as the four material pillars of civilization; a major share of the worlds transportation will be still energized by refined liquid fuels (automotive gasoline and diesel, aviation kerosene, and diesel and fuel oil for shipping); grain fields will be cultivated by tractors pulling plows.
• On climate change, no real progress can be achieved until at least the top 5 countries, now responsible for 80% of all emissions, agree to clear and binding commitments.
• A commonly used climate-economy model indicates that the break-even year for mitigation efforts launched in the early 2020s would only be around 2080.
• Few uncertain outcomes will be as important in determining our future as the trajectory of the global population during the remainder of the 21C.
• A realistic grasp of our past, present, and uncertain future is the best foundation for approaching the unknowable expanse of time before us.
• Quantification is pervasive but, all too often, its quality is questionable, as the numbers range from precise and repeated measurements to sloppy assumptions and careless estimates.