Discovered: Nov 11, 2022 11:52 Running the numbers on the journey to insight - McGee’s Musings <– QUOTE: Smil lays out his case for the relevant information about the real world that we ought to share. He starts with energy and food. Hard to get much more fundamental than that. If you’ve got eight billion people on the planet, that’s going to call for a lot of food to produce and distribute. That production and distribution depends on energy and most of that energy comes from fossil fuels. Fossil fuels that won’t be easily displaced by renewable sources at the scale implied by a population of eight billion. This is a theme that Smil continues to hammer on; that you have to look at systems and scale in sync. He drives that home in a series of chapters examining his candidates for the four material systems that underpin our current economic environment; steel, cement, plastics, and ammonia. Not exactly the “software is eating the world” message that we’ve become accustomed to. <— Sounds like How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going  might be worth reading!

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