How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

Blue water includes rainfall entering rivers, water bodies, and groundwater storage that gets incorporated into products or evaporates; the green water footprint accounts for water from precipitation that is stored in soil and subsequently evaporated, transpired, or incorporated by plants; grey water includes all the freshwater required to dilute p

Certainly, the affluent world—given its wealth, technical capabilities, high level of per capita consumption and the concomitant level of waste—can take some impressive and relatively rapid decarbonization steps (to put it bluntly, it should do with using less energy of any kind). But that is not the case with the more than 5 billion people whose e

After the Second World War, crude oil tankers were the first vessels to grow in capacity as the rapid economic growth of Western Europe and Japan coincided with the availability of newly discovered Middle Eastern giant oil fields (Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar, the world’s largest, was found in 1948 and began flowing in 1951), and exports of this inexpensi

The first law of thermodynamics states that no energy is ever lost during conversions: be that chemical to chemical when digesting food; chemical to mechanical when moving muscles; chemical to thermal when burning natural gas; thermal to mechanical when rotating a turbine; mechanical to electrical in a generator; or electrical to electromagnetic as

There are obvious opportunities for running field machinery without fossil fuels. Decarbonized irrigation could become common with pumps powered by solar-

The total energy requirement of global steel production in 2019 was about 34 exajoules, or about 6 percent of the world’s primary energy supply. Given the industry’s dependence on coking coal and natural gas, steelmaking has been also a major contributor to the anthropogenic generation of greenhouse gases.

Given the fact that annual CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion surpassed 37 billion tons in 2019, the net-zero goal by 2050 will call for an energy transition unprecedented in both pace and scale. A closer look at…

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The combined area devoted to food production is now more than twice as large as it was a century ago, but in all affluent economies the land under cultivation has either stabilized or has slightly decreased, while the overall global growth of new farmland has slowed down considerably.[23] Given the continent’s still-high fertility rates, further ex

primary steelmaking still dominates, producing more than twice as much hot metal every year as is recycled—almost