Book: How The World Really Works

Another of Bill Gates' summer read recommendations.  In this one Vaclav Smil mansplains how dependent we are on fossil fuels, not just for transportation, but for food production, heating, plastics and concrete manufacture and a thousand other things.  Going carbon neutral won't happen in 40 years, probably not in a hundred years, maybe as long as several hundred.  We're just too dependent on cheap energy.

It is what has allowed us to grow to 7 billion people with only 10% at starvation level.

Honestly, it's not a "feel good" book.

The book perfectly illustrates the paradox of our species. Individuals can be so smart, can predict where we are heading, what we're doing wrong, and how it will lead to our species' demise.

Yet, as a species, we are totally incapable of making the changes necessary to save ourselves. We are lemmings stampeding off the cliff. As a species, we are dumb as bricks.

Vaclav Smil wrote:

Grazing animals produce three times as much manure as do mammals

And this manure replaces the nitrogen in the soil so plants continue to thrive.  The herbivores + plants closed loop has developed over millions of years to be balanced and self-sustaining.

Carnivores are outside this loop, and ecologically must remain a minority population to remain stable. There simply is no sustainable way to have carnivores as the dominant species on the planet.

100 pages in, almost halfway, and I think I've gotta quit this book. It's too damn depressing. I'm seriously questioning the future.

Perhaps ignorance is preferable, if I can't do a fucking thing about it.