Book Review: How the World Really Works by Vaclav Smil
A pragmatic look at the world
This book was a great read.
As always, I am approximately 2 years behind the more popular accounts in reading this book. I really enjoyed the facts behind the examples provided by the author. His perspective as a scientist, with the focus on data, is exactly what I needed to better understand many of the important concepts around the fundamental building blocks of our society. Just look at how many things I bookmarked lol.
Everyday, we interact with things that are extremely complex, and we have little to no appreciation for it. We tend to oversimplify something complex to make it digestible. Our political leaders know this and seem to get more airtime the more polarizing they are.
My Example
I’ll give you an example from my perspective on something that I feel somewhat educated in. The engine in your car (likely still internal combustion) is very complex. There is a large amount of real time data that your engine takes in to properly meter the fuel and air into the combustion chamber. The balance of producing as much power as possible and having full and complete combustion is no easy task. There are now generations of accumulated knowledge under the hood. I know it may seem hard to fathom, but vehicles used to get “tune-ups” several times per year. This involved not only changing out dirty fluids, but also changing out the breaker points in your distributor, spark plugs & spark plug wire service or replacement, the carburetor choke would be adjusted, and some other things. Tune-ups are farther and farther apart for today’s vehicles.
Today’s ICE (internal combustion engine) engine may include things like variable valve timing, multiple cylinder cut-out, forced induction, and direct fuel injection. They also need to be up to operating temperature (sometimes from as cold as -40) for all the emission control systems to be properly working.
This also doesn’t include other vehicle advances like further recessing the engine in the cradle so it can be lower to the ground and, therefore, making the vehicle more aerodynamic (reducing drag) and easier to handle or creating transmissions with up to 8 different gears (some even have continuously variable transmissions).
The majority of the time, we just put the key in, fill it with gas (gripe about prices), and then complain when it needs any form of maintenance or repair. Needless to say, this is just the car and this doesn’t include all the infrastructure that goes along with manufacturing, roadways, repair and refueling.
My Thoughts on the Book
Anyways, enough about that. I won’t go through the parts that resonated with me as the list is very long and exhaustive but, instead I’ll highlight some things that I took away from this book:
We used 60x more fossil fuels in the 19th century compared to the 18th century and a further 16x in the 20th century vs. 19th century.
Many electrical grid operators shoot for 99.999% availability, which translates into less than one minute per year without electricity.
Is it me or are there more electrical outages today than there was a few decades ago?
It was only a few generations ago that it was merely the wealthy elites who didn’t have to worry about running out of food, let alone having a balanced diet.
I think we forget this. We have such a surplus of calories in the developed world.
The human labor required to produce 1kg of American wheat has gone from 10 minutes to less than 2 seconds in the last 2 centuries.
We are very bad at assessing risk. In general, we are more afraid of a terrorist attack than a car accident, yet we are obviously way more likely to die from one than the other.
This reminded me of during covid when I was a bit frustrated when many of our educators were saying that we closed the schools for “the safety of the children”. Well, when my kids weren’t in school they spent lots of time outside on my trampoline. There chance of being hospitalized from the trampoline was many multiples of the risk of being hospitalized from covid. Oh well, I digress.
The first world wastes up to 1/3 of their food.
There was no modeler, on record, in 1980 who predicted the most important anthropomorphic factor to global warming for the next 30 years: the rise of China.
There were also some points that I laughed at, as the author seemed to think along the same lines as me.
Decarbonizing has become a “MeToo” game. Countries are tripping over each other to set arbitrary target dates to be carbon neutral. The years always end in 0 or 5 for some reason.
Despite the constant conventions, models and virtue signaling, three unsexy things that could be adopted are:
Some sort of mandatory insulation rating on new homes (and likely some incentives to retrofit existing homes). This is done in pockets in certain geographies, but I don’t think it’s universally applied. Similarly, triple pain windows could be mandated.
Some sort of disincentive on SUVs. Much of the technologic gain in fuel efficiency has been offset by larger and larger vehicles.
A meaningful way to encourage reduced food waste in wealthy countries.
He mentioned how much more complicated it will be to overhaul our electrical grid with all it’s complexities compared to moving from landlines to smart phones. Despite this massive difference, he felt that many modern technology CEOs and politicians over simplify how hard and costly the change will be.
If you choose to read this book, you will likely have different parts that resonate with you based on your personal experiences. I would, however, appreciate your perspective on this book if you have read it and even some of your takeaways. I could see myself revisiting this book in the future and handing it out as a gift.
If you are interested in some additional reading from Vaclav Smil, he recently presented at a conference. I don’t know which one because I deleted whatever email it was attached to. Sorry.
Please comment below or email or DM or whatever you would prefer. I would love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks for reading.
Dean