Energy, food, the environment, raw materials: the answers science can give us
Decarbonising the planet, the energy transition, changing the production paradigm. These are all slogans that sound strong and radical, but when put to the test they oversimplify – sometimes naively, sometimes opportunistically – questions whose full scope can only be understood by starting with a less superficial grasp of how the world we live in actually works: how it was built, how long it took to build, and what processes were required to make it what it is.
Vaclav Smil's book is the perfect invitation to resist the temptation to take certain slogans at face value and instead consider just how complex it would be to restructure the scientific, economic and productive foundations of the way we live.
Smil, a scientist and author of numerous books on energy, the environment and the systems that sustain contemporary society, starts with a question that is both simple and ambitious: how well do we really understand the physical, energetic and material mechanisms on which our way of life depends? The answer, after reading this book, is probably: much less than we think.
The starting point is energy. From there, Smil constructs a kind of anatomy of contemporary civilisation, moving through food production, materials, globalisation, risks and the environment. His method is simple enough to explain: before discussing what we would like to happen, it is worth understanding what is actually happening today.
It may sound almost obvious. In reality, it is one of the most interesting things about the book.
Smil constantly invites the reader to look behind the objects and services we take for granted. Behind a food product there are fertilisers, machinery, fuels, water, transport and infrastructure. Behind a city there are steel and concrete. Behind countless everyday objects there is plastic. And behind a huge part of contemporary agricultural production lies ammonia, and therefore the industrial system that makes nitrogen fertilisers possible.
These four materials – ammonia, plastic, steel and concrete – are precisely what Smil identifies as the “four pillars of modern civilisation”. It is probably one of the book's most effective ideas, because it forces us to shift our gaze away from the digital and apparently immaterial surface of our society towards its physical infrastructure. Smartphones, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and instant communication can give us the impression that we live in an increasingly immaterial economy. In the meantime, however, we continue to extract raw materials, produce cement and steel, manufacture plastic and consume enormous amounts of energy.
This is where How the World Really Works becomes particularly interesting for anyone concerned with the environment.
Smil is much less interested in slogans than he is in time, quantities and proportions. His recurring criticism concerns precisely the distance between what we imagine to be possible and what physical systems actually allow, especially when we talk about the energy transition. Transforming energy and industrial infrastructures requires time, investment, new technologies and, above all, the replacement of systems that are currently deeply interconnected.
This does not mean that the book should be read as a manifesto against the ecological transition. That would be an oversimplification. Its most useful contribution is something else: reminding us that sustainability is also a question of physics, materials, energy and scale.
And this is precisely where, as a reader who works every day with the environment and communication, I found the book particularly stimulating. We are accustomed to talking about trees, forests, biodiversity, agriculture, emissions and climate change through concepts that are often necessary but inevitably simplified. Smil does almost the opposite: he takes some of those concepts and restores their material substance.
How much steel is needed? How much concrete? How much energy? Where does a fertiliser come from? How large is a supply chain? What infrastructure is required to bring food from a field to our table?
The answers to these questions are not particularly spectacular. They are often highly complex, but certainly much more instructive than some of the excesses of rhetoric.
The book, naturally, is not without its weaknesses. The quantity of data is considerable and, in some passages, it can be difficult to keep track of all of it. Smil has little interest in making every part of the book easy to read: numbers, proportions, industrial processes and comparisons take up a great deal of space. Some critics have pointed precisely to this density, as well as to the fact that the book devotes less space than might be expected to possible technological solutions and concrete strategies for addressing the problems it describes.
Yet this is also its most recognisable characteristic. Smil does not want to reassure the reader. He wants to make the reader a little harder to fool.
As a lecturer, perhaps this is what interests me most about the book. Good science communication should not simply transfer information: it should improve the tools we use to interpret that information. How the World Really Works does exactly that. After reading it, when faced with a story about energy, the announcement of a new technology, a promise of decarbonisation or even a simple product on a shop shelf, you naturally find yourself asking: yes, but how does it actually work, materially speaking?
It is a question that does not always produce simple answers. And that is precisely its value.
Because Smil's book is not, ultimately, a book about energy. Nor is it simply a book about the environment. It is a book about the need to understand reality before trying to change it.
And for anyone working in sustainability, I think that makes it a particularly healthy reading exercise.