Top Reads, Listens, Follows & Takeaways of the week

How The World Really Works

Takeaways:

I recently realized I needed a system reset on my understanding of the role of fossil fuels in our world, so I read How The World Really Works by Vaclav Smil. 

People in my MBA classes, politicians, investors, those driving hybrid or electric cars, and others routinely make big claims about the renewable energy transition, ESG, and climate change. Often they add ‘green’ before words like energy, investing, and technology. Like me, few of them have an engineering or science background.

Smil’s book was eye opening. He explains the role of fossil fuels in the creation of steel, plastic, microchips, and ammonia and how fossil fuel combustion impacts the oxygen, water, and food that we need to survive (among other things). He does it in a way that anyone can understand and in only 229 pages. He doesn’t make predictions, he just provides scientific context. I highly recommend it. Below are a few snippets I found interesting:

America has only ~3 million men and women directly engaged in producing food, less than 1% of the population. China is the world’s largest producer of steel, but all of that is done by less than 3.5 million of their 1.4 billion people. 

Fossil fuels are the most important factor in explaining the advances of modern civilization. An inhabitant of the Earth now has 700x more useful energy at their disposal than their ancestors at the beginning of the 19th century.

The history of electricity generation reminds us that many complexities accompany the process, and that, despite its profound and rising importance, electricity still supplies only a small share of final global energy consumption, just 18%.

Without ammonia’s use as the dominant nitrogen fertilizer, it would be impossible to feed between 40-50% of the world’s population of nearly 8 billion people. 

Global steel and concrete production account for ~17% of all carbon emitted.

Public reaction to risks is guided more by a dread of what is unfamiliar, unknown, or poorly understood than by any comparative appraisal of actual consequences. When these emotional reactions are involved, people focus excessively on the possibility of a dreaded outcome (death by a terrorist attack or by a viral pandemic) rather than trying to keep in mind the probability of such an outcome taking place.

The economic rise of China was the main reason why global consumption of fossil fuels rose about 45% during the first two decades of the 21st century, and why, despite extensive expansion of renewable energies, the share of fossil fuels in the world's primary energy supply fell only from 87% to 84%.

The supply of new renewables rose 50-fold during the first 20 years of the 21st century, but even a tripling or quadrupling of the recent pace of decarbonization would still leave fossil carbon dominant by 2050.

Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat, or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near-miraculous technical advances. 

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Reads: If you have trouble accessing some of these reads, try this

The entrepreneurship Trough of Sorrow by Phil Bak (here)

The Business Genius in ‘Air’ Isn’t Michael Jordan (here)

ESG Delusion, Jumping the SPAC by Scott Galloway (here)

The Blockbuster Trade That Doomed the Dallas Mavericks (here)

The Robots Have Finally Come for My Job (here)

Listens: 

Geoff Rubin of the Canadian Pension Plan on the Endowment Model and Risk (here)

How I Built This: SunBum (here)

Nassim Taleb on what Bitcoiners, Anti-Vaxxers and Deadlift Maxis Get Wrong (here)

Follow, Watch & Other great content:

60 Minutes: Marjorie Taylor Greene (here)

60 Minutes: The situation at the U.S.-Mexico border (here)