How the World Really Works – Vaclav Smil

The world seems kinda fucked.

If you ask me, the world is severely fucked. I wrote the word ‘kinda’ in the sentence above because there are some people, morons if you ask me, who are still in denial about the totallity of anthropogenic climate change. Even those of us who agree that it is happening, and it is anthropogenic do not agree on the extent of the damage we can expect. So what the fuck is a poor humanities major to do when those various sources we trust give us conflicting information.

What we do is drink. But that isn’t the solution.

There isn’t anything to do except wallow in our epistemic angst, and bitch that we ‘need to stop using oil.’

The issue is that the opinion that we ‘need to stop using oil’ is painfully silly, and that is what Smil’s book is all about. In short, it goes over all the ways in which our society is hopelessly, cripplingly, oil dependent. Spoilers: we aren’t just putting it in our fucking cars. I won’t bother going into all the details. If you are oblivious and interested, then this book becomes worth a read. It is for that matter, well written and accesable. If you already know who well and truly we are fucked, you can also skip this one.

Someone on reddit claimed that Smil recently spoke at any event that was largely climate-denying in spirirt, and that could be the case. In this era of extreme epistemic angst it is hard for a lay person to be informed, and such sophisticated opinions from ‘transforming our energy sector to something greener is difficult’ to ‘every aspect of our current society including food production is massively dependant on fossil fuels’ can be spun to a climate-denier friendly “see? These eco-friendly liberals have silly impossible ideas that are just here to waste your tax money” and before you know it, the US president is telling the world that you hate cows. We are oil dependent, and we need to face that intelligently, and at the same time, things do need to change.

At the end of the day, this book didn’t help. But it gave me a better idea about the complexity of the problem.