What this episode is about
Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz, oil prices soar, and the whole world shakes—yet plenty of people are saying, ‘The oil age is almost over.’ Really? After you hear about How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going, the book by Bill Gates’s favorite author (written by Vaclav Smil), you may come to a rather different conclusion: Iran could probably keep using oil to hold the whole world hostage for several more centuries. Fossil energy has seeped into modern civilization a thousand times more deeply than you imagine. Using the cold, hard reality of physics, this book completely smashes the popular ‘green illusion’: for the foreseeable future, humanity can forget about breaking free from fossil energy!
Highlights:
• You’re ‘eating’ oil: why is modern agriculture, at bottom, really the oil industry? How much diesel is hiding behind a kilogram of tomatoes and a single loaf of bread?
• The four load-bearing pillars of modern civilization: steel, cement, plastics, and ammonia. Without fossil energy, the physical world of human society would collapse in an instant.
• Busting the sci-fi fantasy of ‘100% new energy’: why is a total shift to wind and solar power both dangerously risky and wildly impractical? Just how unshakable is fossil energy’s ‘base load’ really?
• The three prerequisites for human survival: in the face of global warming, are breathing, drinking water, and eating all under mortal threat? How should we deal pragmatically with the long energy transition ahead?
Jump to a section
- 00:00 Forget about breaking free from fossil energy: the brutal reality hidden by ‘green slogans’
- 02:32 Food and oil: why is modern agriculture actually the oil industry?
- 10:41 The core technology of agriculture: without ammonia, 4 billion people on Earth would starve
- 14:17 The four pillars of modern civilization: the truth about steel, cement, plastics, and ammonia
- 20:23 The transportation dead end: why can’t batteries replace jet fuel in the foreseeable future?
- 21:43 The cold, hard numbers: just how enormous is fossil energy’s ‘base load’?
- 26:10 First-principles analysis: will a warming climate really bring about a human extinction crisis?
- 29:25 The ultimate takeaway: more dangerous than our dependence on fossil energy is society’s ignorance
The book
- Title: How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going
- Author: Vaclav Smil
- Publisher: The Commercial Press
- Publication date: 2022-05
- ISBN：9780593297063
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