How the World Really Works

 I got a lot out of [a:Vaclav Smil|5003|Vaclav Smil|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1619861469p2/5003.jpg]'s [b:How the World Really Works: A Scientist's Guide to Our Past, Present and Future|56587388|How the World Really Works A Scientist's Guide to Our Past, Present and Future|Vaclav Smil|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1641444915l/56587388.SY75.jpg|88381378] despite lacking the background to understand fairly large chunks of it. I probably fully understood about 80 percent of it, at best. (That's not a slam on the book but on me. I had to go to summer school one year because I flunked math and squeaked by other years. A large factor in deciding which college to attend was whether or not they required a year of math, as many did when I was applying.)
 This book will shatter any notions you might have about getting off fossil fuels in the time frame many hope for and consider feasible. It did for me, and I'm the starry-eyed optimistic type who's been using reusable bags, bicycling and taking mass transit when possible, recycling everything I can, using as little of possible of everything else, and keeping the thermostat low in winter and off or high (usually off) in summer since the early 1980s.
 Smil describes what he calls the four pillars of our current civilization. They are: Concrete, plastic, steel and ammonia. I know what you're thinking: Ammonia? Yes, because its synthesis is what has made fertilizing crops possible. Without it, we'd be unable to feed nearly half the people alive today. None of us has spent a day of our lives without all four of those items being a major part of our lives, except maybe ammonia if you fast for a day now and then.
 Although Smil may look like the angry uncle you have who denies climate change even now, he is not and he is in favor of taking action. One thing he highlights that would make a huge difference, for example, is drastically reducing the huge amount of food we waste.
 This book took me ages to read but it's just 229 pages long, not counting the notes. I usually prefer fiction, but How the World Really Works gave me the kind of insights you can't often get from fiction, and they're just as interesting.
Excerpt:

 How soon will we fly intercontinentally on a wide-body jet powered by batteries? News headlines assure us that the future of flight is electric—touchingly ignoring the huge gap between the energy density of kerosene burned by turbofans and today's best lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries that would be on board these hypothetically electric planes. Turbofan engines powering jetliners burn fuel whose energy density is 46 megajoules per kilogram (that's nearly 12,000 watt-hours per kilogram), converting chemical to thermal and kinetic energy—while today's best Li-ion batteries supply less than 300 Wh/kg, more than a 40-fold difference. Admittedly, electric motors are roughly twice as efficient energy converters as gas turbines, and hence the effective energy gap is "only" about 20-fold. But during the past 30 years the maximum energy density of batteries has roughly tripled, and even if we were to triple that again densities would still be well below 3,000 Wh/kg in 2050—falling far short of taking a wide-body plane from New York to Tokyo or from Paris to Singapore, something we have been doing daily for decades with kerosene-fueled Boeings and Airbuses.