Book Review - How The World Really Works - Wall Street Journal

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-wo ... 1651848551


‘How the World Really Works’ Review: Putting It All Together
Never mind the ephemeral wonders of digital tech: Our lives are built of steel, plastic, concrete and ammonia.
By Kyle Harper -- a professor at the University of Oklahoma, is the author of “Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History” and “The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire.”
May 6, 2022


‘I just want to say one word to you. Just one word . . . Plastics.” Such is the memorable career advice given to the aimless 21-year-old Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, in “The Graduate” (1967). The plastics industry was, and is, the symbol for everything uncool: an inauthentic material, the boring bourgeois business of making and selling it, all with a whiff of environmental unfriendliness.

Yet plastics are, according to Vaclav Smil, one of the “four pillars” of modern civilization, along with ammonia, steel and concrete. While the notorious drink bottle destined to pollute the ocean is the stereotypical image of plastics, moldable synthetic materials make possible everything from lightweight vehicles to pipelines to medical equipment.

Similarly, ammonia is the “gas that feeds the world”: the Haber-Bosch process that fixes reactive nitrogen and allows the synthesis of fertilizer is, according to Mr. Smil, “perhaps the most momentous technical advance in history.” Steel is the skeleton of our built environments and transportation networks, as irreplaceable for modern structures as bones are for the body. And concrete, “the most massively deployed material of modern civilization,” is, in a literal sense, the foundation of our civilizations.

Mr. Smil is a polymath who has carved out a unique academic career. Born in 1943 in German-controlled Czech Bohemia, he holds a Ph.D. in geography and spent four decades in a department of environmental science in Winnipeg, Canada. He studies the history of energy and materials—the physical, chemical and biological bases of human societies—and has written more than 40 books (“Growth,” “Harvesting the Biosphere” and “Should We Eat Meat?” are my personal favorites.) His painstaking research on subjects too technical (or mundane) for most professional historians makes him an indispensable resource for understanding how the modern world came into being. Mr. Smil’s unique approach is something like a worldview and a way of life.

“How the World Really Works” represents the highly readable distillation of this lifetime of scholarship. Its chief theme is the flow of energy and materials through our societies, and the daunting environmental challenges that follow. But we are given bravura treatments of how to think rationally about risk and where to place our worries (asteroids and cosmic radiation: no; the Yellowstone supervolcano and geomagnetic storms arising from the sun: sort of; speeding and distracted driving: absolutely). We are offered advice on diet from the perspective of personal health (hint: average lifespans in Japan and Spain say more than a thousand meta-studies) as well as planetary well-being (grains and sardines do pretty well).

The tone of this book, as of his others, is a plain-spoken scientific realism. Reading Mr. Smil is a bit like watching a grumpy uncle put the naive cousins in their place at a proverbial Thanksgiving squabble. In particular, Mr. Smil wants to correct what he sees as two increasingly common bad ideas.

One is environmentalism of the kind that promotes what the author argues are “unrealistic” decarbonization goals without a serious appreciation of current global dependence on fossil energy. Arbitrary, long-range targets to be achieved in years that end in “5” or “0” are his bête noire. Fossil energy, he makes clear, remains the hidden basis not just of transportation but also heavy industry, construction and agriculture. In a few stunning pages, Mr. Smil walks you through a stomach-turning calculation of how much diesel-fuel equivalent of fossil energy goes into every chicken, loaf of bread, and tomato you eat.

The other foil for Mr. Smil is a breathless techno-optimism—the promise that apps, AI or terraforming Mars can rescue us from our greatest civilizational challenges. Mr. Smil has a strong preference for physical technologies over digital ones. He is a poet of the cement kiln, the steel forge, PVC and the diesel engine. He lacks the same regard for nifty smartphones or disembodied software.

In other words, there is something in “How the World Really Works” for everyone to hate. At the same time, Mr. Smil disavows both prediction and prescription, instead aiming to understand how we got here (to a time when half of the world enjoys at least a decent standard of living), because he believes that to be a prerequisite for clear and honest thinking about how to get where we want to go (to a decent standard of living to everyone in a sustainable manner). As poor societies aspire to emulate the growth path of recent successes like China, their middle-class lifestyles will need energy and materials, too. And the sobering reality is that energy and material transitions are hard and expensive. They are even harder when the ultimate goal is not to feed, house and move people efficiently—but both efficiently and cleanly.

Mr. Smil wants his readers to confront certain environmental and economic realities. “It is hard to understand,” he writes, “why modern economics, that body of explanations and precepts whose practitioners exercise more influence on public policy than any other experts, has largely ignored energy.” It says a lot about both political polarization and capacity for wishful thinking that such an independent outlook, hard to pigeonhole, feels rare and refreshing.

The “just the facts, ma’am,” attitude of “How the World Really Works” cuts through the excesses of alarmism and denialism. Critics will argue that this leads Mr. Smil to underestimate the chances of technological breakthroughs and environmental catastrophe alike. Both are possible. After all, before Fritz Haber figured out how to synthesize ammonia, the world was going to starve, and warnings along those lines were as dire as any climate catastrophism today. Mr. Smil says virtually nothing about hydrogen fuel or nuclear fusion. In a hundred years, these game-changers might look a lot like the Haber-Bosch process (and some future Mr. Smil might be touting them as the underrated innovation of the previous century).

Equally, some might accuse “How the World Really Works” of playing down climate change. Mr. Smil the empiricist has a deep-rooted distaste for computer models and for doomsaying. He argues that we will likely have enough food, oxygen and water to subsist, but is that sufficient? As his body of work convincingly reminds us, modern growth is sudden and jarring, and was achieved by the unprecedented mobilization of finite resources and the consequent demands on the planet’s physical, chemical and biological systems.

One unsettling conclusion of his realistic outlook might be, in the words of the Roman historian Livy, that we can survive neither our vices nor their remedies. For his part, Mr. Smil looks over the horizon of the future with humility and calmness, foreseeing “a mixture of progress and setbacks, of seemingly insurmountable difficulties and near-miraculous advances.”