Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works, energy sustainability, material foundations, realism, numerical accuracy, fossil fuels, climate change, Bill Gates, environmental responsibility, social justice
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Explore Vaclav Smil's 2022 book, How the World Really Works, a scientist's guide to our past, present, and future, focusing on realism, energy, and sustainability.
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[...] But Smil's realism is not just technical; it has ethical as well as strategic implications. In Understanding Risk, he explains the cognitive biases that cause us to misjudge risk. Humans are plain bad at dealing with potential but low probability disaster scenarios. Risk is not an abnormality but part of complex systems (Smil, 2022). The rational governance is simply calibrated not to being married to moral panic. He applies this reasoning to other global risks - pandemics, nuclear accidents or climate catastrophes. [...]
[...] However, it has then brought Gates's (2022) reflections into play to provide a richer reading and see that Smil's fact-based, quantitative realism provides a basis for sustainability and ethics. Smil invites us to use both wisdom and caution as we work with a complex, interdependent world. References Gates, B. (2022, June 6). Three cheers for the dull, factually correct middle. GatesNotes.https://www.gatesnotes.com/how-the-world-really-works Smil, V. (2022). How the world really works: A scientist's guide to our past, present and future. [...]
[...] He says the purpose is not to predict the future, but to prepare for its inherent unpredictability. Smil believes that human history teaches a simple lesson: in a complex world, most often, we forecast wrongly. The mistake has been repeated far too long: economists, technologists, and politicians make wrong predictions about our future. It is much reasonable to develop resilient systems - in terms of energy, food, health, and governance - that are capable of absorbing and responding to shocks. [...]
[...] His pragmatism responds to the notion of decarbonizing today mistake, he insists, in light of historical transition periods from wood to coal, coal to oil and oil to gas. One other highlight about the book's strengths is emphasized by Bill Gates (2022). Numeric realism is among the most salient aspects of the reader's work. He credits Smil's assertion of brief but thorough education in numeric thinking about the fundamental forces that shape human life" to energy and emissions. According to Gates (2022), someone could arguably decide to define the first three chapters as compulsory reading for those forming opinions on climate policy. [...]
[...] Smil's (2022) analysis of food systems and material production extends this point. The food supply that currently sustains the planet is making disproportionate use of fossil fuels, starting with the nitrogen fertilizers synthesized by the Haber-Bosch process, diesel tractors, and the cooling machines in which crops are carried to millions of locations. Finally, the four modern material civilization "lifts" is the ammonia, steel, concrete, and plastics that can exist because of fossil energy, and Smil has repeatedly stressed that they cannot be given up. [...]
