How the World Really Works by Vaclav Smil (Review 1)

Like The Times Complete History of the World and Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works, the title of Vaclav Smil’s How the World Really Works suggests a book of impossibly ambitious scope. Libraries are filled with thick tomes purporting to describe how very small components of the world “really work,” and they often admit, if not insist, that there is much yet to be learned even about their restricted subjects. Unsurprisingly, then, Smil immediately has to narrow the scope of “the world” to something more manageable and limited – after all, the book is only about 300 pages, including extensive notes and references. Smil describes his goal as “explain[ing] some of the most fundamental ruling realities governing our survival and our prosperity.” Those “realities” concern energy, food production, the “four pillars of modern civilization” (ammonia, plastics, steel, and concrete), globalization, risks, the environment, and the future. Ok, the book is still impossibly ambitious.

Smil is particularly concerned with rebutting popular notions that the global economy is largely dematerializing and that humans can relatively easily decarbonize the economy by quickly ditching fossil fuels for low-carbon substitutes. Although he is careful not to use climate change as the sole frame of the book, and some of what he discusses has little obvious connection to it, the primary but not exclusive purpose of his analysis and presentation of data – oh, so much data! – is to drive home that “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.” The data and discussion most directly applicable to that thesis are original and superb. Smil makes abundantly clear that the current debate about replacing fossil fuels with green energy sources ignores important questions affecting enormous sectors of the economy. Anyone interested in understanding the challenges of addressing climate change should study and absorb those parts of the book. On the other hand, Smil’s treatment of more tangential topics, particularly globalization but also “risks” and “the environment,” suffers from significant incompleteness and, in some cases, irrelevance and inaccuracy. Smil defends all of the topics as necessary, in fact, “existential[ly]” necessary, but those farthest removed from his core thesis detract from his best points.

Before turning to the “ruling realities,” which Smil helpfully breaks out into individual chapters, it is worth addressing an important aspect of Smil’s writing.How the World Really Works presents so much data in such a dense format that you might think you were reading an almanac. Here is a typical pair of Smilian sentences: “Obviously, the energy cost of secondary steel made in EAFs is much lower than the cost of integrated production: today’s best performance is just above 2 GJ/t. To this must be added the energy costs of rolling the metal (mostly 1.5-2 GJ/t), and hence the representative global rates for the overall energy cost may be about 25 GJ/t for integrated steelmaking and 5 GJ/t for recycled steel.” To be fair, Smil defines terms and acronyms before using them, but it’s still academic-journal level tough sledding through thickets of numbers and terms. Moreover, and inexplicably, there’s not a graph, chart, or table in the book to help with comprehension. Edward Tufte, who authored several volumes about displaying quantitative information in useful (and sometimes beautiful) illustrations, wrote, “Often the most effective way to describe, explore, and summarize a set of numbers - even a very large set – is to look at pictures of those numbers. Furthermore, of all methods for analyzing and communicating statistical information, well-designed data graphics are usually the simplest and at the same time the most powerful.” Smil’s book would be much better with some Tufte-quality graphics to illustrate his reams of statistics.

The first three chapters, concerning energy, food production, and the “four pillars,” respectively, are the heart of the book. Smil has studied and written about energy for many years, and he makes a compelling and well-supported case for the claim (or the “reality”) that energy is central to all economic activity and “is the only truly universal currency.” By the end of just the first chapter, no honest reader can believe that climate change, pollution, or any problem – even if serious and real - can be avoided with facile plans to “go green” or “carbon-free” by arbitrary dates in the near future. The energy economy underlies the entire economy, and so changing energy inputs and infrastructure requires redoing the entire economy, full stop. Smil acknowledges the serious problems that the development of the energy economy has caused, but he deliberately declines to propose a more effective or realistic plan. He does, however, make important and helpful observations that could guide policy. For example,contra decades of misplaced anti-nuclear sentiment by self-professed “environmentalists,” Smil emphasizes that modern nuclear reactors “offer safe, long-lasting, and highly-reliable ways of electricity generation.” He might have noted that nuclear power generation has an extremely low carbon output and requires the smallest land use of any major source of energy generation. How the World Really Works, however, is not How the World Could Work Better, but there are at least hints of what might work in a better world and what definitely will not.

Food production receives far too little attention in the developed world, and Smil’s second chapter is a refreshing if characteristically dense introduction and overview of worldwide agricultural activity. He focuses particularly on the role and necessity of synthetic fertilizers. As he does with the hopelessly unrealistic plans of Green New Deals to Go Carbon-Free by 2050, Smil methodically dismantles gauzy dreams of “purely organic cropping,” pointing out that doing so would require most people to return to farms and spend their time planting and harvesting crops, weeding, spreading manure, and feeding and slaughtering animals. (Presumably he believes that new wave vegan organic farmers who avoid animal products entirely would quickly starve.) Smil wryly notes, “I do not foresee the organic green online commentariat embracing these options anytime soon.” Although his judgment is harsh, Smil’s criticisms and skepticism seem genuinely rooted in facing facts and being honest about the reality of food production, not a political dislike of smelly hippies who “buy organic.”

The third chapter on the four pillars of modern civilization provides a wonderful and desperately-needed explanation of the reality (to use Smil’s preferred term) that “[m]odern economies will always be tied to massive material flows.” The first material, ammonia, is the most surprising of the four pillars. Apart from chemists and, perhaps, non-organic farmers, ammonia is most familiar as a component of cleaning solutions, with maybe some vague and minor other uses. How in the world is it a “pillar” of civilization? With his usual dense strings of figures, Smil proves that ammonia is truly “the gas that feeds the world” because it is such an important component of fertilizer. “About 80 percent of global ammonia production is used to fertilize crops,” a fact that was so far from my initial guess that I’ve committed to memorizing it. The other key fact is that natural gas is a primary input for ammonia synthesis. Solar panels can make electricity, but they’re useless for making fertilizer. Any serious effort to remove natural gas from the economy (because it is a fossil fuel whose use generates carbon, even if less than fuel oils and much less than coal) must answer the question of what will substitute for natural gas to make the massive amounts of ammonia used for fertilizer around the world.

Plastics, the second pillar, is another underexplored topic that is easy to dismiss as relatively unimportant. Smil establishes that plastics now dominate huge swaths of the material economy, and his short section on the role various plastics play in the modern hospital room brilliantly strips away any fuzzy thinking about how “we” can “get away from plastic” simply by using paper straws and organic cotton grocery bags. Smil does not shy away from the problems plastics cause in the environment – at the outset, he describes them as “troublesome.” Plastic pollution is a serious problem that deserves serious attention. As with fossil fuels, however, it is simply not realistic to “pivot” quickly to a plastic-free economy. Although Smil does not directly address environmentalist demands for a plastic-free world and docudrama attacks on “Big Plastic,” his analysis makes clear that they will (must!) be doomed as ineffective, feel-good activism or, among many other bad outcomes, countless hospitalized kids and grandmas will have no oxygen tubes or IV bags.

The third and fourth sections, on steel and concrete respectively, are just as compelling if less surprising as civilizational “pillars.” In addition to showing how important and ubiquitous (literally massive) steel and concrete are to modern economies, Smil details the fossil fuel requirements for making them. Like ammonia (but unlike plastics, which many activists hope can simply disappear), steel and concrete are largely absent from any discussion of going green or carbon-free in the near future – even in discussing wind power, which Smil notes requires huge wind turbines: “enormous accumulations of steel, cement, and plastic.” Perhaps the most important take-away of the book is that any serious plan for moving to a carbon-free or significantly carbon-reduced economy requires addressing how people are going to make and transport ammonia, plastics, steel and concrete. Essentially no discussion of renewable energy does so now.

Smil undoubtedly would disagree, but this book would have been better if it had ended after the third chapter. Excluding the introduction and references, it would be less than 100 pages of dense but important, original information vital to analyzing and understanding the economy and omnipresent debates about climate change. My recommendation to almost anyone thinking of reading it would be to read the first three chapters, maybe twice, and then to pick up something else. Having made it through the whole book, and at the risk of matching a book that should have ended much earlier with a review that should end now, I’ll turn to the rest.

“Understanding Globalization” is the first chapter where it is clear that Smil tries to cover too much in too little space. He purports to trace “four distinct eras of globalization” using technological advances to structure the chronology. The starting point of “wind-driven globalization” is promising enough, but after a brief sketch of early Dutch trading activity and its “limited economic impact,” Smil asserts that the next era “had to wait until steam engines displaced sails in intercontinental shipping, when screws made paddlewheels obsolete, and when steel-hulled ships became dominant.” Wait, what? This history of globalization simply skips over the most intensive periods of European colonization, which took place during the age of sail. Where one would expect pages of dense data about Spanish, English, and Portuguese mercantilism, mining, shipping, immigration, slave-trading and myriad other colonial activities, which truly spanned the globe, there is nothing. There are no references to the gold and (especially) silver that flowed from South America in such quantities that it caused inflation in Europe, thousands of miles away. This is not a minor oversight – the populations and economies of entire continents were fundamentally and permanently disrupted during the era of “wind-driven” global transportation. Many millions of slaves were forcibly relocated from Africa to the Americas, and many millions more immigrants, mostly but not exclusively from Europe, completely changed the populations of continents far from their origins. Colonial trade and economics were not small or irrelevant matters to either the colonizers or the colonized; they were central preoccupations of both and caused numerous wars and political turmoil for centuries. This was globalization on an epic scale, and it is impossible to understand the world or “globalization” without it.

The chapter’s outline of more recent globalization is less obviously incomplete but still unsatisfying. After an odd detour into Moore’s law, the chapter ends with Smil identifying some of the criticisms of “excessive globalization” and suggesting that “we may have seen the peak of globalization.” It is not clear how this chronology or the (reasonable) suggestion that globalization may be in retreat tie into the other and main themes of the book.

Unlike the first three chapters, which make important and original points that too few people have considered, the fifth chapter, “Understanding Risks,” is an unoriginal summary that makes the same arguments behavioral scientists, economists, and rationalists have been making for many years. As the National Safety Council explains:

Fear is natural and healthy. It can help us respond to danger more quickly or avoid a dangerous situation altogether. It can also cause us to worry about the wrong things, especially when it comes to estimating our level of risk.

If we overestimate our risk in one area, it can lead to anxiety and interfere with carrying out our normal daily routine. Ironically, it also leads us to underestimate real risks that can injure or kill us.

It can be difficult to accurately assess the biggest risks we face. Plane crashes, being struck by lightning, or being attacked by a dog are common fears, but what about falls, the danger inside a bottle of pills, or your drive to work?

Knowing the odds is the first step in beating them.

(NSC Injury Facts “Odds of Dying.”) The web site www.besthealthdegrees.com/health-risks/ has an interesting and easy-to-read graphic called “Your Risks of Dying” based on statistics from various sources. “Understanding Risks” is simply another entry into this genre. I suspect that almost all readers of How the World Really Works would be familiar with the general theme that people downplay risks related to actions they control to some extent (like driving) and overestimate the risks of random events that they do not control (like terrorism). Similarly, anyone more than one hundred pages into a book like this almost certainly knows that flying on commercial airlines is exceptionally safe, much more so than driving a car. Smil does offers a few unusual and unexpected facts about relative risk. For example, he points out that base-jumping is not just exceptionally risky, but that it's 1000 (!) times riskier in terms of risk of death than sky-diving. If you like free-falling, the less risky choice is clear.

The question is what to do with this information. Yes, most people are terrible at assessing risk. Specific facts about the risks of base-jumping, downhill skiing, or terrorism are not, however, directly relevant to other domains. That leads to a fundamental problem and frustration: Being aware of lots of specific risks and common biases in (mis)interpreting them does not help much when trying to analyze other risks for which there are not good data. How do the risks of climate change compare to the risks of various proposed “solutions” - many of which Smil would consider, with sound justification, infeasible anyway? I don’t know, and Smil doesn’t say.

In the last two chapters, Smil returns, at least to a large extent, to the issues of climate change and how we might address it consistent with how the world really works. “Understanding the Environment” starts with brief explanations of what really should concern us (oxygen, no; food and water, yes), and then proceeds to critique the extreme optimists and catastrophists on either side. This is the crux of Smil’s overarching point – if one takes a close, data-heavy look at how the world makes and uses energy and materials, there is no chance in hell that “singing from the green hymnals” will bring about a carbon-free world in 2035 or 2050, but there also is little chance that technological innovation - particularly AI - will save the day or the world, either. Mostly, this is just an expansion of arguments made in the first three chapters and would be better incorporated there. There is simply not enough space to explain “the environment” or AI, so Smil only briefly sketches the main topics of the former and completely omits the latter. (Smil seems unaware that a significant contingent of people working on AI are convinced that it will cause the downfall of humanity, not its salvation.)

The title of “Understanding the Future,” the last chapter, seems almost ironic, given that Smil repeatedly disclaims any ability to or interest in forecasting the future: “As I never fail to stress, I do not forecast.” In fact, Smil recounts numerous failed predictions, especially concerning resource-depletion (“peak oil,” anyone?), and makes a convincing case that nobody in the past accurately predicted or_could have predicted_ the world as it really is now. There is too much complexity and uncertainty. Indeed, even Smil’s counter-example of a narrow, “highly-plausible” 10-year population forecast for Poland is likely to be wrong because the assumption of mass immigration being “unlikely in such an immigration-averse country” was blown apart by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which very few, including Smil, would have predicted even a couple of years ago. Now, recent estimates are that approximately 3.7 million refugees from Ukraine are now in Poland because of the war. Predicting the future is hard!

Another rare, somewhat specific claim - that “hundreds of millions of stunted children, mostly in Africa, need to drink more milk” - is also largely incorrect. The percentage of Africans with lactose intolerance is variable, but intolerance is more common than tolerance – up to 100 percent lactose intolerance in some African countries and ethnic groups. Making stunted children who cannot digest milk drink more of it is a bad idea.

These mistakes of Smil’s, however, support rather than undermine the major point that the future remains highly uncertain. Smil prefers to describe himself as “agnostic about the future” rather than a nihilist. That leads to a strikingly vague and odd end to a chapter devoted to understanding the future:

While we cannot be specific, we know that the most likely prospect is a mixture of progress and setbacks, of seemingly insurmountable difficulties and near-miraculous advances. The future, as ever, is not predetermined. Its outcome depends on our actions.

Only those who are sincerely convinced that climate change or some other catastrophe will bring the world to complete ruin or who think that a positive singularity will bring about a techno-utopia could disagree; for everyone else, this conclusion conveys almost no information. Again, most readers would be better off stopping at Chapter 3.

Smil admits that he has “always preferred to scan as far and as wide as [his] limited capabilities have allowed.” That is unquestionably the weakness here. By framing the book as the product of his life’s work and proposing to address sweeping subjects that would take several volumes to cover with any adequacy, Smil indulges in what he so carefully and ruthlessly attacks – wishful thinking. The addition of a substantially incomplete history of globalization and the inclusion of well-understood, even bromidic, misapprehensions of risks and biased risk-assessments are distractions from the less ambitious but important main topic.How the World Really Works makes a compelling and detailed case for an important “reality” – that transitioning the world from fossil fuels to something else will be much more difficult than most politicians and activists acknowledge. It is worth reading for that alone.