Measurement and Climate Change – Part 3
Vaclav Smil’s four pillars for modern civilization.
In his book How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going, Vaclav Smil further describes data rarely addressed in climate policy discussions, namely:
[W]e have no readily deployable commercial-scale alternatives for energizing the production of the four material pillars of modern civilization solely by electricity. This means that even with an abundant and reliable renewable electricity supply, we would have to develop new large-scale processes to produce steel, ammonia, cement, and plastics.
Not many people have an appreciation for the role steel, ammonia, cement, and plastics play in modern society:
Food and energy supply, the two existential necessities covered in the preceding chapters, would be impossible without mass-scale mobilization of many man-made materials—metals, alloys, non-metallic and synthetic compounds—and the same is true about all our buildings and infrastructures and about all modes of transportation and communication. Of course, you would not know this if you were to judge the importance of these materials by the attention they get (or rather do not get), not only from mass media “news” but also from supposedly much more exalted economic analyses or forecasts of notable developments … [C]ement, steel, plastics, and ammonia … are needed in larger (and still increasing) quantities than are other essential inputs. In 2019, the world consumed about 4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, 370 million tons of plastics, and 150 million tons of ammonia, and they are not readily replaceable by other materials—certainly not in the near future or on a global scale. [O]nly an impossibly complete recycling of all wastes voided by grazing animals could, together with near-perfect recycling of all other sources of organic nitrogen, provide the amount of nitrogen annually applied to crops in ammonia-based fertilizers. Meanwhile, there are no other materials that can rival the combination of malleability, durability, and light weight offered by many kinds of plastics. Similarly, even if we were able to produce identical masses of construction lumber or quarried stone, they could not equal the strength, versatility, and durability of reinforced concrete. We would be able to build pyramids and cathedrals but not elegant long spans of arched bridges, giant hydroelectric dams, multilane roads, or long airport runways. And steel has become so ubiquitous that its irreplaceable deployment determines our ability to extract energies, produce food, and shelter populations, as well as ensuring the extent and quality of all essential infrastructures: no metal could, even remotely, become its substitute. Another key commonality between these four materials is particularly noteworthy as we contemplate the future without fossil carbon: the mass-scale production of all of them depends heavily on the combustion of fossil fuels, and some of these fuels also supply feedstocks for the synthesis of ammonia and for the production of plastics. Iron ore smelting in blast furnaces requires coke made from coal (and also natural gas); energy for cement production comes mostly from coal dust, petroleum coke, and heavy fuel oil. The vast majority of simple molecules that are bonded in long chains or branches to make plastics are derived from crude oils and natural gases. And in the modern synthesis of ammonia, natural gas is both the source of hydrogen and processing energy. As a result, global production of these four indispensable materials claims about 17 percent of the world’s primary energy supply, and 25 percent of all CO2 emissions originating in the combustion of fossil fuels—and currently there are no commercially available and readily deployable mass-scale alternatives to displace these established processes.
Regarding ammonia:
Of the four substances (and despite my dislike of rankings!), it is ammonia that deserves the top position as our most important material. As explained in the previous chapter, without its use as the dominant nitrogen fertilizer (directly or as feedstock for the synthesis of other nitrogenous compounds), it would be impossible to feed at least 40 percent and up to 50 percent of today’s nearly 8 billion people. Simply restated: in 2020, nearly 4 billion people would not have been alive without synthetic ammonia … Ammonia is a simple inorganic compound of one nitrogen and three hydrogens (NH3), which means that nitrogen makes up 82 percent of its mass … Maturing agronomic science made it clear that the only way to secure adequate food for the larger populations of the 20th century was to raise yields by increasing the supply of nitrogen and phosphorus, two key plant macronutrients. The mining of phosphates (first in North Carolina and then in Florida) and their treatment by acids opened the way to a reliable supply of phosphatic fertilizers. But, there was no comparably assured source of nitrogen. The mining of guano (accumulated bird droppings, moderately rich in nitrogen) on dry tropical islands had quickly exhausted the richest deposits, and the rising imports of Chilean nitrates (the country has extensive sodium nitrate layers in its arid northern regions) were insufficient to meet future global demand … The best account of recent nitrogen flows in China’s agriculture shows that about 60 percent of the nutrient available to the country’s crops comes from synthetic ammonia: feeding three out of five of the Chinese population thus depends on the synthesis of this compound. The corresponding global mean is about 50 percent. This dependence easily justifies calling the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia perhaps the most momentous technical advance in history … [W]ithout the synthesis of ammonia, we could not ensure the very survival of large shares of today’s and tomorrow’s population … Africa, the continent with the fastest-growing population, remains deprived of the nutrient and is a substantial food importer. Any hope for its greater food self-sufficiency rests on the increased use of nitrogen …
Regarding plastics (which we explored from a different angle in a previous essay series):
The best way to appreciate the ubiquity of plastic materials in our daily lives is to note how many times a day our hands touch, our eyes see, our bodies rest on, and our feet tread on a plastic: you might be astonished at the frequency of such encounters! As I am typing this: the keys of my Dell laptop and a wireless mouse under my right palm are made of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, I sit on a swivel chair upholstered in a polyester fabric, and its nylon wheels rest on a polycarbonate carpet protection mat that covers a polyester carpet … [P]lastics have found their most indispensable roles in health care in general and in the hospital treatment of infectious diseases in particular. Modern life now begins (in maternity wards) and ends (in intensive care units) surrounded by plastic items. And those people who had no prior understanding of plastics’ role in modern health care got their lesson thanks to COVID- 19. The pandemic has taught us this in often drastic ways, as doctors and nurses in North America and Europe ran out of personal protective equipment (PPE)— disposable gloves, masks, shields, hats, gowns, and booties … Plastic items in hospitals are made above all from different kinds of PVC: flexible tubes (used for feeding patients, delivering oxygen, and monitoring blood pressure), catheters, intravenous containers, blood bags, sterile packaging, assorted trays and basins, bedpans and bed rails, thermal blankets, and countless pieces of labware. PVC is now the primary component in more than a quarter of all health-care products, and in modern homes it is present in wall and roof membranes, window frames, blinds, hoses, cable insulation, electronic components, a still-growing array of office supplies, and toys—and as credit cards used to purchase all of the above … [I]rresponsible dumping of plastics is not an argument against the proper use of these diverse and often truly indispensable synthetic materials.
Regarding steel and cement:
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. The World Steel Association puts the average global rate at 500 kilograms of carbon per ton, with recent primary steelmaking emitting about 900 megatons of carbon a year, or 7–9 percent of direct emissions from the global combustion of fossil fuels. But steel is not the only major material responsible for a significant share of CO2 emissions: cement is much less energy-intensive, but because its global output is nearly three times that of steel, its production is responsible for a very similar share (about 8 percent) of emitted carbon. Cement is the indispensable component of concrete, and it is produced by heating (to at least 1,450°C) ground limestone (a source of calcium) and clay, shale, or waste materials (sources of silicon, aluminum, and iron) in large kilns—long (100–220 meters) inclined metal cylinders. This high-temperature sintering produces clinker (fused limestone and aluminosilicates) that is ground to yield fine, powdery cement. Concrete consists largely (65–85 percent) of aggregates and also water (15–20 percent). Finer aggregates such as sand result in stronger concrete, but need more water in the mix than do coarser aggregates that use different sizes of gravel. The mixture is held together by cement—typically 10–15 percent of concrete’s final mass—whose reaction with water first sets the mixture and then hardens it. The result is now the most massively deployed material of modern civilization, hard and heavy and able to withstand decades of punishing use, particularly when it is reinforced with steel. Plain concrete is fairly good in compression (and the best modern varieties are five times stronger than those of two generations ago)—but weak in tension. Structural steel has tension strength up to 100 times higher, and different types of reinforcing (steel mesh, steel bars, glass or steel fibers, PP) have been used to narrow this huge gap. Since 2007, most of humanity has lived in cities made possible by concrete … [S]kyscrapers and tall apartment buildings stand on concrete piles, concrete goes not only into foundations and basements but also into many walls and ceilings, and it is ubiquitous in all urban infrastructures—from buried engineering networks (large pipes, cable channels, sewers, subway foundations, tunnels) to aboveground transportation infrastructure (sidewalks, roads, bridges, shipping piers, airport runways). Modern cities—from São Paulo and Hong Kong (with their multistoried apartment towers) to Los Angeles and Beijing (with their extensive networks of freeways)—are embodiments of concrete … [T]he entire Interstate system contains about 50 million tons of cement, 1.5 billion metric tons of aggregates … But by far the most massive structures built of reinforced concrete are the world’s largest dams … [In] 2018 and 2019—China produced nearly as much cement (about 4.4 billion tons) as did the United States during the entire 20th century (4.56 billion tons) … Yet another astounding statistic is that the world now consumes in one year more cement than it did during the entire first half of the 20th century. And (both fortunately and unfortunately) these enormous masses of modern concrete will not last as long as the Pantheon’s coffered dome … Between 1990 and 2020, the mass-scale concretization of the modern world has emplaced nearly 700 billion tons of hard but slowly crumbling material. The durability of concrete structures varies widely: while it is impossible to offer an average longevity figure, many will deteriorate badly after just two or three decades while others will do well for 60–100 years … This means that during the 21st century we will face unprecedented burdens of concrete deterioration, renewal, and removal (with, obviously, a particularly acute problem in China), as structures will have to be torn down—in order to be replaced or destroyed—or abandoned … In affluent countries with low population growth, the main need is to fix decaying infrastructures. The latest report card for the US awards nothing but poor to very poor grades to all sectors where concrete dominates, with dams, roads, and aviation getting Ds and the overall average grade just D +. This appraisal gives an inkling of what China might face (mass- and money-wise) by 2050. In contrast, the poorest countries need essential infrastructures and the most basic need in many homes in Africa and Asia is to replace mud floors with concrete floors in order to improve overall hygiene and to reduce the incidence of parasitic diseases by nearly 80 percent.
As Smil summarizes the situation regarding steel, cement, ammonia, and plastics:
[I]t is unlikely that by 2050 all of these industries will eliminate their dependence on fossil fuels and cease to be significant contributors to global CO2 emissions. This is especially unlikely in today’s low-income modernizing countries, whose enormous infrastructural and consumer needs will require large-scale increases of all basic materials … Replicating the post-1990 Chinese experience in those countries would amount to a 15-fold increase of steel output, a more than 10-fold boost for cement production, a more than doubling of ammonia synthesis, and a more than 30-fold increase of plastic syntheses. Obviously, even if other modernizing countries accomplish only half or even just a quarter of China’s recent material advances, these countries would still see multiplications of their current uses. Requirements for fossil carbon have been—and for decades will continue to be—the price we pay for the multitude of benefits arising from our reliance on steel, cement, ammonia, and plastics … Two prominent examples illustrate this unfolding material dependence. No structures are more obvious symbols of “green” electricity generation than large wind turbines—but these enormous accumulations of steel, cement, and plastics are also embodiments of fossil fuels. Their foundations are reinforced concrete, their towers, nacelles, and rotors are steel (altogether nearly 200 tons of it for every megawatt of installed generating capacity), and their massive blades are energy-intensive—and difficult to recycle—plastic resins (about 15 tons of them for a midsize turbine). All of these giant parts must be brought to the installation sites by outsized trucks and erected by large steel cranes, and turbine gearboxes must be repeatedly lubricated with oil. Multiplying these requirements by the millions of turbines that would be needed to eliminate electricity generated from fossil fuels shows how misleading any talks are about the coming dematerialization of green economies. Electric cars provide perhaps the best example of new, and enormous, material dependencies. A typical lithium car battery weighing about 450 kilograms contains about 11 kilograms of lithium, nearly 14 kilograms of cobalt, 27 kilograms of nickel, more than 40 kilograms of copper, and 50 kilograms of graphite—as well as about 181 kilograms of steel, aluminum, and plastics. Supplying these materials for a single vehicle requires processing about 40 tons of ores, and given the low concentration of many elements in their ores it necessitates extracting and processing about 225 tons of raw materials. Again, we would have to multiply this by close to 100 million units, which is the annual worldwide production of internal-combustion vehicles that would have to be replaced by electric drive. Uncertainties about the future rates of electric vehicle adoption are large, but a detailed assessment of material needs, based on two scenarios (assuming that 25 percent or 50 percent of the global fleet in 2050 would be electric vehicles), found the following: from 2020 to 2050 demand for lithium would grow by factors of 18–20, for cobalt by 17–19, for nickel by 28–31, and factors of 15–20 would apply for most other materials from 2020. Obviously, this would require not only a drastic expansion of lithium, cobalt (a large share of it now coming from Congo’s perilously hand-dug deep shafts and from widespread child labor), and nickel extraction and processing, but also an extensive search for new resources. And these, in turn, could not take place without large additional conversions of fossil fuels and electricity. Generating smoothly rising forecasts of future electric vehicle ownership is one thing; creating these new material supplies on a mass global scale is quite another … Modern economies will always be tied to massive material flows, whether those of ammonia-based fertilizers to feed the still-growing global population; plastics, steel, and cement needed for new tools, machines, structures, and infrastructures; or new inputs required to produce solar cells, wind turbines, electric cars, and storage batteries. And until all energies used to extract and process these materials come from renewable conversions, modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on the fossil fuels used in the production of these indispensable materials. No AI, no apps, and no electronic messages will change that.
In a 2024 study for the National Center for Energy Analytics, Jonathan Lesser considers the expense of just one aspect of the proposed transition from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles (EVs), namely the changes needed to support a country in which citizens primarily drive electric cars (beyond the cost of the cars themselves). He writes:
In their stated efforts to reduce carbon emissions, 18 states (as of this writing) have approved regulations that will require all new vehicle sales to be electric vehicles (EVs) beginning in 2035. Similar mandates have been enacted for heavy trucks, which transport most goods in the country, although they will begin later. Meanwhile, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has introduced stringent carbon dioxide emissions standards for new vehicles, which the agency admits can only be met by automakers selling more EVs and fewer gasoline-powered vehicles. While “make-it-so” mandates may be politically popular, physical and economic realities will ultimately prevail. The move to enforce an all-EV future, regardless of claimed environmental merits (which are hotly disputed), requires infrastructure to support it. However, that means far more than installing charging stations at home and work. Too little discussion has been devoted to the scale and cost of the infrastructure needed to deliver the electricity to those charging stations. Even if the additional electricity can be supplied, it must still be delivered—and that remains the least-discussed aspect of this new transformation … [T]he physical infrastructure needed to support an all-EV future will entail overall costs ranging between $2 trillion and almost $4 trillion. That is before considering the impact of higher demand on the costs of materials and labor to build it all and also before considering the additional costs to build more electricity generation … To enable an EV future that provides the same freedom of movement we enjoy today will require massive upgrades to the entire electrical delivery system. Home chargers, which are called “Level 2” chargers, will require dedicated circuits, like electric stoves and electric clothes dryers do. The main circuit boxes in millions of older homes to which electricity is delivered will need to be upgraded. To accommodate the increased electricity needed for EV charging (and other electrification goals), electric utilities will also have to upgrade their local distribution systems—the poles and wires running down streets—with millions of larger transformers, thousands (if not millions) of miles of larger wires, and even bigger utility poles to handle the additional weight.
As Bjorn Lomborg writes in the Wall Street Journal:
What causes us to change our relative use of energy? One study investigated 14 shifts that happened over the past five centuries, such as when farmers went from plowing fields with animals to tractors powered by fossil fuels. Invariably, the new energy source would be better or cheaper. Solar and wind fail on both counts. They aren’t better, because unlike fossil fuels, which can produce electricity whenever we need it, they can produce energy only according to the vagaries of daylight and weather. At best they are cheaper only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing at just the right speed. The rest of time they are expensive and mostly useless. When we factor in the cost of four hours of storage, wind and solar energy solutions become uncompetitive with fossil fuels. Achieving a sustainable transition to solar or wind would require orders of magnitude more storage, making these options unaffordable. Solar and wind address only a smaller part of a vast challenge. They are almost entirely deployed in the electricity sector, which makes up a mere one-fifth of all global energy use. We are struggling to find green solutions for most transportation and haven’t even begun to address the energy needs of heating, manufacturing or agriculture. We are all but ignoring the hardest and most crucial sectors like steel, cement, plastics and fertilizers. An energy transition would require far greater subsidies for solar and wind, as well as batteries and hydrogen. We would have to accept less-efficient technologies for important needs like steel and fertilizers. Politicians would have to impose massive taxes on fossil fuels to make them less desirable. McKinsey & Co. estimates that achieving a real transition would cost more than $5 trillion annually. This splurge would slow economic growth, making the real cost five times as high. For rich-world voters, the annual cost could be more than $13,000 a person, according to energy researcher Vaclav Smil. Voters are unlikely to welcome that pain.
Regarding electric cars, regulatory agencies often simply ignore how much fossil fuel is necessary to produce “clean energy” devices by simply ignoring the costs of production of those devices in their analyses. As David Henderson writes: “They [the Biden Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency] start by assuming that an EV [electric vehicle] already exists. That’s how they figure that EVs would use less fossil fuel, be less polluting, and be cheaper in the long run. Once you delve into the life cycle of electric vehicles, though, starting with production, you can reasonably conclude that all three of these views are questionable … [T]he EPA assumes something it knows to be false, namely that emissions from producing electricity to power EVs are zero.”
Beyond the four pillar of civilization, Alex Epstein, in his book Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas – Not Less, points out that fossil fuels not only power machine labor, but that the labor produced by machines frees humans to explore new opportunities for productivity:
Ultra-cost-effective energy from fossil fuels drives this unprecedented, increasing productive ability in two basic, inextricably intertwined ways: (1) through powering ultra-cost-effective machine labor and (2) through the enormous amounts of human mental labor freed up by ultra-cost-effective machine labor … Fossil-fuel-freed-up mental labor, combined with fossil-fueled machine labor, makes possible two of the most wonderful aspects of today’s productive ability: its super-specialization and its rapid innovation … Without all the time fossil-fueled machine labor frees up from manual labor to meet the most basic survival needs, the human time for all of today’s amazing specializations, from medicine to sanitation to entertainment, wouldn’t exist … Every profession today—from doctor to sanitation worker to entertainer—uses machine labor directly and indirectly, making them incomparably more productive than they would otherwise be. For example, entertainers use machine labor to record and broadcast their performances, and machine labor is used to produce every stage, movie set, and other piece of infrastructure entertainers use … Specialization works only to the extent that specialized producers can trade with one another. Trade requires transportation to move raw materials, components, and finished products from where they are to where they are needed … Today’s global super-specialization, which enables us to benefit from the best producers around the world, is made possible by ultra-cost-effective transportation in giant cargo ships, trains, trucks, and planes—almost all powered by low-cost, ultra-concentrated, highly stable oil fuels … [C]onsider scientific and technological research—fields that are rightly regarded as major drivers of prosperity and progress. It is only in an empowered world, where machine labor does enormous amounts of work for us, that we can confidently free up enormous amounts of human time for such pursuits. And those fields use enormous amounts of machine labor—most directly, high-powered computing machines.
Epstein points out that fossil fuels not only power things, but they compose them:
There is one final way in which fossil fuels amplify our productive ability that needs to be highlighted to fully understand their benefit. It is their use as materials. We live in a world of extremely versatile materials that give us amazing abilities. We have roofing materials that protect us from rain, tires made of materials that can endure tens of thousands of miles, insulation materials that keep us cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and medical materials that enable an artificial limb or even heart to be part of our body. Where do those materials come from? In thousands of cases, they are made wholly or partially using hydrocarbons, aka fossil fuels—mostly oil or natural gas … Today’s chemical engineers can “crack”—break down—the hydrocarbon molecules of oil into small parts and then reassemble them into an unbelievable variety of “polymers,” including modern plastics. While you think of the oil in your car as being in the gas tank, in fact there is more oil in the materials of the car than in the gas tank. The rubber tires are made of oil, the paint and waterproofing are made of oil, the plastic dent-resistant bumper is made of oil, the stuffing inside the seats is made of oil, and in most cars, the entire interior is one oil-based fabric or synthetic material after another—because oil is an amazingly cost-effective material to make things with. You are probably sitting in a room with at least fifty things derived from oil, from the insulation in your walls to the carpet under your feet to the laminate on your table to the screen on your computer … It’s no exaggeration to say that today’s productive ability is fossil-fueled: it depends on ultra-cost-effective fossil-fueled machine labor, fossil-fuel-freed-up time, and fossil fuel materials.
Even small electronics like smart phones require an immense amount of fossil fuel use in the course of their manufacture:
The computing machines of the Internet produce near-instantaneous and unlimited access to knowledge, making unprecedented educational opportunities accessible to billions—something no amount of manual labor can do … [T]he energy that powers a machine is only the beginning of the energy it uses. Any machine we use doesn’t just use energy in its operation, it also has used the energy that operated the hundreds or even thousands of other machines that produced it. Take a smartphone. It’s easy to think of a smartphone as a low-energy machine because it takes relatively little electricity to charge. But there is an enormous amount of unseen machine labor used in producing a smartphone—all of which factors into its cost. Think of all the raw materials in a smartphone, such as aluminum, lithium, carbon, iron, silicon, copper, cobalt, and nickel. Every one of these is mined using some mining machine. Then all the mined materials need to be refined and processed, using machines, into usable components. Then those components need to be manufactured, using machines, into smartphones. And at every stage of production, transportation machines are needed to get materials, components, or finished smartphones from where they are to where they need to be. All the aforementioned machines use energy, and the cost of all their energy goes into the cost of a smartphone. But that’s just the beginning, because all the aforementioned machines were themselves produced using hundreds of machines—and the cost of all that energy goes into smartphones, too. And on top of that, the operation of a smartphone as a communication device draws on myriad massive machines—computers and data centers—around the world. While smartphone charging is typically a small fraction of your household energy use, the streaming of data over the internet infrastructure can use significantly more energy that we aren’t taught to think about. Once we understand that the cost of machine labor is driven by the cost of powering a given machine plus the often far greater costs of powering all the other machines involved in producing that machine, we can see why the cost-effectiveness of energy production—how affordable, reliable, versatile, and scalable it is—is fundamental to the cost-effectiveness of machine labor.
In the next essay in this series, we’ll examine Alex Epstein’s case for a “Fossil Future.”