Surveilled 89 — How the World Really Works book review
Shocker! Good policies are based on facts
How the World Really Works, Vaclav Smil, 2022
Over the last few years, climate change has come to dominate the business and policymaking agenda, to the extent that every publication in that space weighs in. Business schools eagerly join in, and that is how I came to find this book, recommended as part of a list of must-reads on climate change in London Business School's strategy and management update. I had heard of Vaclav Smil before, primarily the fact that Bill Gates is a fan, and to be honest the title was an irresistible hook. Some cursory Wikipedia-reading clarified that Smil is an energy expert, so his expertise seems relevant. And, it turns out, this book delivers what it promises.
Smil focuses on the four materials that he labels the pillars of modern civilisation. The first is ammonia, the most important component in the fertiliser that is fundamental to our ability to grow enough crops to feed eight billion people. Despite being available in plentiful supply in the air we breathe, nitrogen is the key limiting factor in plant growth, and hence fertiliser that contains large amounts of ammonia is indispensable. The amount of ammonia that could be sourced from organic matter, like excrement, is not even close to sufficient, and hence synthetic production by the chemical industry is the only option we have.
The second and third materials are cement (considered together with concrete) and steel, which together are the literal foundation of nearly every infrastructure and machine on the planet, whether roads, bridges, dams, cars, lorries, trains and ships. Smil explains in detail why these materials came to occupy such an important place. For concrete, it is its unmatched ability to withstand pressure. For steel, it is the tensile strength, hardness and resistance to heat, all multiples higher than other metals like copper or gold.
The fourth material is plastic, or more accurately the plural plastics. Their versatility means that a myriad of products that we rely on incorporate plastics, from healthcare to clothing to cars and everything in between.
Two common strands link these four materials. First, their physical properties make them impossible to replace in practical terms, and certainly not in the very short term of a couple of decades. Second, they all require large amounts of energy to produce, consuming some 17% of the world’s primary energy supply and accounting for 25% of carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels.
Moreover, the use of these four materials keeps increasing, fuelled by the economic growth that the rest of the world pursues with the aim of reaching similar levels of wealth as the West. Nor is this dynamic likely to reverse any time soon. Today’s globalised society couldn’t exist without the four materials, but neither can a future, greener society:
No structures are more obvious symbols of “green” electricity generation than large wind turbines—but these enormous accumulations of steel, cement, and plastics are also embodiments of fossil fuels
This is where the implications for policymaking start coming into focus. Smil calls out climate accords and emissions reduction pledges, like those reached at the COPs, as unmoored from reality. Although Smil is careful to couch the argument in academic terms, the message is that achieving near-complete decarbonisation in a matter of decades is impossible without giving up many of the huge advances in human development that we have achieved over the last 300 years. Countries like China and India, who now account for the largest and still-growing share of emissions, would have no choice but to condemn swathes of their population to poverty, an outcome that they are unlikely to accept, to say the least.
Even in the West, support for such policies is weak. There are proponents of a number of ideas that we could loosely group under the term “degrowth”, but they are unlikely to constitute a majority anytime soon, if ever. Arguably, a majority of the population agrees that climate change is the most important issue of our time. But the popular discontent that surfaces whenever a perceived threat to an existing benefit emerges—for example, increasing the retirement age—doesn't indicate any willingness to accept sacrifices towards that goal. Smil doesn’t say it out loud, but you can feel his frustration with the politicians who refuse to engage with the issue of climate change in an intellectually honest manner as a result, and resort to making empty promises instead.
He is no less frustrated with the techno-optimists, who to him commit the sin of extrapolating the exponential advances in semiconductor processing power or smartphone adoption to the greening of our energy infrastructure. This thinking partly enables the fanciful pledges and targets for emissions reduction. In Smil’s view, not only do the dynamics of information technology and consumer electronics not apply to any industry related to the four materials, their impact on our lives pales in comparison: imagine a world without smartphones compared to one without concrete, he asks us.
It could be tempting at this point to dismiss Smil as an old crank. And indeed, that mindset is palpable in parts of the book. But his expertise and experience are too vast and his academically-buttressed arguments are too strong. He does not deny or minimise climate change, and even offers remedies, although they are not many and almost appear quaint at times. The most notable is to fight against food waste—about 25% of the food produced does not get eaten. But while it may be short on solutions, the highest merit of the book is how it highlights the vacuousness of the policies that are being proposed by others, at a time when the opposite is needed.
From a literary perspective, the book is impressive. Despite the never-ending stream of numbers in hard-to-grasp quantities (quadrillions, trillions…), it remains engaging and illuminating on every page. Readers who enjoy learning and having their existing knowledge challenged will be delighted by the authoritative array of facts and figures deployed here, and will indeed walk away with a vastly improved understanding of how the world really works.
It would also be tempting, faced with this mountain of evidence, to give up, and accept our warmer global fate. The book finishes with a half-hearted call to action, but at best, Smil’s argument's logical endpoint is a call for more fact-based and realistic policy making. This is unlikely to form a suitable rallying cry to mobilise the masses. What to do with the knowledge gained is therefore left to the reader, and sadly it is debatable whether something like an informed vote, for example, is likely to achieve anything in our current political context.