Getting real

I just started Vaclav Smil’s How the World Really Works, and it looks like it’s going to be an interesting read.

To start out:

Why then do most people in modern societies have such a superficial knowledge about how the world really works? The complexities of the modern world are an obvious explanation: people are constantly interacting with black boxes, whose relatively simple outputs require little or no comprehension of what is taking place inside the box. This is as true of such ubiquitous devices as mobile phones and laptops (typing a simple query does the trick) as it is of mass-scale procedures such as vaccination (certainly the best planetary example of 2021, with, typically, the rolling up of a sleeve being the only comprehensible part). But explanations of this comprehension deficit go beyond the fact that the sweep of our knowledge encourages specialization, whose obverse is an increasingly shallow understanding even ignorance of the basics.

Urbanization and mechanization have been two important reasons for this comprehension deficit. Since the year 2007, more than half of humanity has lived in cities (more than 80 percent in all affluent countries), and unlike in the industrializing cities of the 19th and early 20th centuries, jobs in modern urban areas are largely in services. Most modern urbanites are thus disconnected not only from the ways we produce our food but also from the ways we build our machines and devices, and the growing mechanization of all productive activity means that only a very small share of the global population now engages in delivering civilization’s energy and the materials that comprise our modern world.

The things we actually need to survive as a society: food, shelter, heating, transportation, etc. employ relatively few people, leaving the rest entirely ignorant of how things actually work.

The work-via-Zoom class has simplistic and naïve solutions to all of these problems, such as driving a Tesla, eating organic tofu or producing a tiny fraction of your energy needs with solar panels, that offer no real solution to the very real climate and energy crisis humanity is going to face over the next few decades. Then Pandemic™ was illustrative: come up with a bunch of cosmetic “solutions” that actually made everything worse (as a reminder: Sweden had the lowest all-cause mortality rate in Europe in 2021 and one of the lowest for the entire span of the Pandemic™).

Smil is huge proponent of nuclear power, which seems like the only reasonable medium-term solution to our energy needs. Going all in on nuclear now would buy us decades, maybe even a century to get the technology on renewables put to speed. That still leaves agriculture and others sectors dependent on fossil fuels (there are no electric fertilizers, after all), but it’s a start.

Not a point made by Smil thus far, but I can’t help but notice how narrow-minded and parochial most Americans are. California is the banner blue state; Texas is the banner red state. Both are have serious energy and environmental issues. Yet every American I’ve talked to about these matters is convinced that the other party is entirely to blame for the energy crisis. The need to see everything through the prism of American partisan politics is stifling pragmatic solutions.

Holding to a partisan dogmatism is easier when the vast majority of people have no real experience of the world beyond their computer and highly artificial urban environments.

Not that the US is without hope, all but a few fringe voices on the far Left and far Right have come together cement the alliance at the heart of the collective West. I hope this unity can be sustained to tackle some of our longer-term problems together.