How the World Really Works
The Science of Our Past, Present and Future
Book Edition Details
Summary
"How the World Really Works (2022) tackles a paradox at the heart of the modern world: we’ve never had so much information at our fingertips and never known so little about how things actually work. Of course, we can’t be experts in everything. But, Vaclav Smil argues, it’s our duty as citizens to be informed about the basics – the big questions that shape our societies and their futures."
Introduction
Every morning, you flip a switch and lights illuminate your room. You turn a tap and clean water flows. You open your refrigerator and find fresh food from around the globe. These simple acts seem effortless, almost magical, yet they represent one of the most remarkable achievements in human history: the creation of a civilization that can sustain nearly eight billion people at unprecedented levels of comfort and longevity. But how does this intricate system actually work? Most of us navigate through our daily lives interacting with what are essentially black boxes—we know what goes in and what comes out, but the mechanisms inside remain mysterious. We consume energy without understanding where it comes from, eat food without knowing how it's produced, and live in structures built from materials whose origins we rarely consider. This disconnect between our dependence on complex systems and our understanding of them has created a dangerous gap in our collective knowledge. To make informed decisions about our future—whether addressing climate change, ensuring food security, or managing resources—we need to grasp the fundamental realities that govern our existence. This exploration will reveal how our modern world runs on four essential materials that most people never think about, why our food system is actually an elaborate energy conversion process, and how the environmental challenges we face are far more nuanced than headlines suggest.
Chapter 1: Energy Foundations: The Hidden Power Behind Modern Civilization
Energy is perhaps the most misunderstood concept in modern discourse, yet it's the foundation of everything we do. At its core, energy is simply the capacity to cause change—to move things, heat them, or transform them from one state to another. Think of it as the universal currency that powers all processes, from the beating of your heart to the rotation of galaxies. What makes energy fascinating is that it can never be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another, like a cosmic game of musical chairs where the music never stops. The story of human civilization is essentially the story of energy transitions. For most of our species' existence, we relied solely on muscle power—our own and that of domesticated animals—supplemented by simple machines like waterwheels and windmills. This all changed with the Industrial Revolution, when we learned to harness the concentrated energy stored in fossil fuels. Coal, oil, and natural gas are essentially ancient sunshine, captured by plants millions of years ago and compressed into incredibly dense energy packages. A single gallon of gasoline contains the energy equivalent of about 500 hours of human labor, which explains why these fuels revolutionized transportation and manufacturing. Today's energy landscape is dominated by electricity, the most versatile form of energy ever discovered. Electricity can be instantly transmitted across vast distances, precisely controlled, and converted into almost any other form of energy we need. It powers everything from the smartphone in your pocket to the massive data centers that enable global communication. Yet despite decades of investment in renewable sources like solar and wind power, fossil fuels still provide about 85 percent of the world's primary energy. This isn't due to lack of alternatives, but rather the enormous scale of our energy needs and the physical realities of energy storage and distribution. Understanding energy reveals why rapid transitions are so challenging. The global energy system represents the largest and most complex infrastructure humans have ever built, involving trillions of dollars in investments and serving billions of people. Changing this system is like trying to rebuild a massive ship while sailing through a storm—it requires careful planning, enormous resources, and realistic timelines that often conflict with our urgent desire for immediate solutions.
Chapter 2: Food Production: Converting Energy into Global Sustenance
Modern agriculture is one of humanity's greatest achievements, yet it's also one of our most energy-intensive activities. Every bite of food you eat represents a complex web of energy conversions that would astonish our ancestors. A simple loaf of bread embodies the energy equivalent of about a cup of diesel fuel when you account for growing the wheat, milling the grain, baking the bread, and transporting it to your local store. This isn't a design flaw—it's the price we pay for abundance, reliability, and the freedom for most people to pursue careers other than farming. The transformation began with the Haber-Bosch process, invented in 1909, which learned to capture nitrogen from the air and convert it into fertilizer. This breakthrough broke what scientists call the "nitrogen barrier"—the natural limit on how much food could be grown without depleting soil fertility. Today, synthetic fertilizers feed about half of humanity, meaning that without this industrial process, roughly four billion people would not exist. The irony is profound: we've become so successful at growing food that most people have forgotten how difficult and energy-intensive this process actually is. Consider the journey of a typical chicken dinner. The bird consumed about three kilograms of grain during its seven-week life, grain that required fertilizers, pesticides, and fuel-powered machinery to produce. The chicken lived in a climate-controlled building, was processed in an energy-intensive facility, transported in refrigerated trucks, and stored in freezers before reaching your plate. The total energy cost equals roughly the equivalent of a wine bottle full of crude oil per kilogram of meat. Even vegetables carry surprising energy burdens—those fresh tomatoes in your salad may have been grown in heated greenhouses and flown thousands of miles, embedding more fossil fuel energy than you might imagine. This system has delivered unprecedented food security, but it's also created unprecedented dependencies. Modern agriculture is essentially a way of converting fossil fuels into food, which means our dinner plates are intimately connected to global energy markets and climate concerns. The challenge ahead isn't returning to pre-industrial farming—that would condemn billions to starvation—but finding ways to maintain food security while reducing environmental impacts. This will require not just new technologies, but also changes in what we eat, how much we waste, and how we think about the true cost of our meals.
Chapter 3: Material Pillars: Four Substances That Built Our World
Beneath the digital veneer of our modern world lies a foundation built on four essential materials that most people never think about: steel, cement, plastics, and ammonia. These substances are so fundamental to civilization that without them, our current way of life would be impossible. They represent what might be called the "material metabolism" of modern society—the basic building blocks that enable everything from skyscrapers to smartphones, from highways to hospitals. Steel is the skeleton of the modern world. Every car contains about 900 kilograms of steel, every building relies on steel reinforcement, and every mode of transportation depends on steel components. We produce nearly two billion tons of steel annually, enough to build about 2,000 Eiffel Towers every day. What makes steel remarkable isn't just its strength, but its recyclability—it can be melted down and reformed indefinitely without losing its properties. The steel in your car might have previously been part of a bridge, a ship, or a skyscraper, making it one of our most sustainable materials. Cement, the key ingredient in concrete, has literally shaped our urban landscape. We produce about 4.5 billion tons annually, enough to cover the entire state of Delaware in a layer one meter thick every year. Concrete is the most widely used material on Earth after water, and for good reason—it's strong, durable, and can be formed into virtually any shape. The concrete in modern buildings and infrastructure will outlast most of the technologies we consider cutting-edge today. Plastics, despite their environmental controversies, have revolutionized everything from medicine to transportation. The plastic components in a modern car reduce its weight by hundreds of kilograms, improving fuel efficiency and safety. In hospitals, disposable plastic equipment prevents countless infections and saves lives. The challenge isn't eliminating plastics—it's using them more wisely and developing better recycling systems. Ammonia, perhaps the least known of these four pillars, is arguably the most important. As the foundation of all nitrogen fertilizers, ammonia synthesis literally feeds the world. Without it, global food production would plummet, and billions would face starvation. The Haber-Bosch process that produces ammonia has been called the most important invention of the 20th century, enabling the population growth that defines our modern era.
Chapter 4: Environmental Realities: Climate Change and Planetary Boundaries
Environmental challenges represent perhaps the most complex puzzle facing modern civilization, requiring us to balance immediate human needs with long-term planetary health. The story of climate change illustrates both our scientific capabilities and our collective limitations. Contrary to popular belief, we've understood the basic physics of global warming for more than 150 years—the greenhouse effect was first described in the 1860s, and scientists calculated the warming effects of doubled carbon dioxide concentrations in 1896. What's new isn't the science, but the scale of the challenge and our growing awareness of its implications. The greenhouse effect itself is essential for life on Earth. Without trace gases like carbon dioxide and methane in our atmosphere, our planet's surface would be frozen at minus 18 degrees Celsius. These gases act like a blanket, trapping just enough heat to maintain temperatures suitable for liquid water and life as we know it. The problem isn't the greenhouse effect itself, but our enhancement of it through fossil fuel combustion, which has increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations by more than 50 percent since pre-industrial times. Climate change represents a unique challenge because it operates on timescales that don't match human psychology or political cycles. The carbon dioxide we emit today will influence global temperatures for decades or centuries to come, while the benefits of reducing emissions won't be clearly visible for generations. This creates what economists call a "temporal mismatch"—the costs of action are immediate and tangible, while the benefits are distant and diffuse. It's like asking someone to pay for fire insurance on a house that might burn down in fifty years. Yet environmental challenges extend far beyond climate change. We're simultaneously dealing with issues of water scarcity, soil degradation, biodiversity loss, and pollution that affect billions of people today. The good news is that we have solutions for many of these problems—more efficient technologies, better agricultural practices, and cleaner industrial processes. The challenge lies in implementing these solutions at the scale and speed required while maintaining the economic growth that lifts people out of poverty. This isn't just a technical challenge but a social and political one, requiring unprecedented global cooperation and long-term thinking in a world often focused on immediate concerns.
Summary
The fundamental insight that emerges from understanding how our world really works is that modern civilization represents an intricate dance between energy, materials, and environmental systems—a dance that has enabled unprecedented human prosperity but also created unprecedented dependencies and risks. We live in a world where the flip of a switch, the turn of a tap, or the purchase of food represents the culmination of vast, interconnected systems that most of us barely comprehend. This knowledge gap isn't merely academic—it's dangerous, because the decisions we make about energy, food, materials, and environment will determine whether we can sustain our current prosperity while addressing the mounting challenges of climate change, resource constraints, and environmental degradation. As we face an uncertain future, two questions become paramount: Can we maintain the systems that support billions of people while transitioning to more sustainable practices, and do we have the collective wisdom and political will to make the necessary changes before our dependencies become our downfall? For anyone seeking to understand the forces shaping our world and our future, grappling with these fundamental realities isn't optional—it's essential for informed citizenship in an increasingly complex and interconnected world.
By Vaclav Smil
