The real wrench in the works: we are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years.

Rudolf Diesel deliberately set out to design a new, more efficient, prime mover, and by 1897 his first (heavy and stationary) engine had reached an efficiency of 30 percent, double the performance of the best steam engines.[40] But the first marine engine was installed only in 1912 on Christian X, a Danish freighter. Diesel-powered ships carried mu

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.

the abundance of fossil fuels and their increasingly more efficient conversions have been the dominant energizers of modern economic growth, bringing us the benefits of greater longevity and richer lives—but also concerns about the long-term effects of CO2 emissions on the global climate (commonly referred to as global warming).

Among the world’s more than 200 nations and territories, Japan has had the highest average longevity since the early 1980s, when its combined (male and female) life expectancy at birth surpassed 77 years.[12] Further gains followed, and by 2020 Japan’s combined life expectancy at birth was about 84.6 years. Women live longer in all societies, and b

America now has only about 3 million men and women (farm owners and hired labor) directly engaged in producing food—people

Several hundred thousand years ago, the probes detect the first extrasomatic use of energy—external to one’s body; that is, any energy conversion besides digesting food—when some of these upright walkers master fire and begin to use it deliberately for cooking, comfort, and safety.[6] This controlled combustion converts the chemical energy of plant

If you want to eat wild fish with the lowest-possible fossil carbon footprint, stick to sardines. The mean for all seafood is stunningly high—700 mL/kg (nearly a full wine bottle of diesel fuel)—and the maxima for some wild shrimp and lobsters are, incredibly, more than 10 L/kg (and that includes a great deal of inedible shells!).[43] This means th

Crude oil became a global fuel, and eventually the world’s most important source of primary energy, thanks to the discoveries of giant oil fields in the Middle East and in the USSR—and, of course, also thanks to the introduction of large tankers. Some Middle Eastern giants were first drilled in the 1920s and 1930s (Iranian Gachsaran and Iraqi Kirku