Sorting out the truth

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Smil thinks there are major gains in efficiency which can be had, over and above the enormous gains so far. He points to water use as an example: in 2015, the US only used about 4% more water than it did in 1965, but in the meantime, its population had gone up by two thirds actual per capita water use has dropped by 40%, even while the country has got richer and better fed. Perhaps similar efficiencies can be found with energy and carbon.

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The quote is from How long can humans survive? - at UnHerd published January 17. Without stating it outright the author, Tom Chivers, makes it clear that many popular arguments about the threat of overpopulation are uninformed. His quotes from Czech-Canadian scientist and policy analyst Vaclav Smil in Smil's new book, How the World Really Works, underscore the point.  

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For Smil, our discussions about climate and energy are hamstrung, because so few people actually understand how the world really works. 

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Smil explains that one of the four key building blocks of modern society is ammonia, of all things:

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In the beginning of the 20th century, a German chemist called Fritz Haber invented a process for getting nitrogen out of the air by making ammonia. It requires huge amounts of energy, and hydrogen, usually taken from natural gas. We now spread hundreds of millions of tons of ammonia on our fields — about 50% of the total nitrogen going into food production comes from it. Smil quotes an author, writing in 1971: “industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy; now he eats potatoes partly made of oil.”

This means the world is able to eat. The share of the global population that is underfed has plummeted, even as the actual population has ballooned – about 65% of people could not get enough to eat in 1950, compared to about 9% in 2019. So, “in 1950 the world was able to supply adequate food to about 890 million people,” as Smil puts it: “but by 2019 that had risen to just over 7 billion”. That is not entirely down to ammonia, but ammonia is a large part of the story. If fertiliser were removed, perhaps half the world’s population would starve.

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Calls for radical reduction in carbon fuel use don't factor in ammonia production. They don't factor in a great many other crucial points, as Chivers makes clear.  

Books such as Vaclav Smil's can help us sort of the truth of matters, but not if government funding, propaganda, and fads in published 'authoritative' opinions promote solutions ignorant of the truth.

So how to sort out the truth? Science survives on disagreements; if too many scientists are in lockstep about a broad and complex issue, I take that as a warning to keep an open mind about the conclusions.

Keeping one's news sources varied is also some help. I learned about the article by Chivers and about Smils from a headline link at DRUDGE REPORT 2022®. Drudge's news aggregator team(s) cast a wide net. The John Batchelor Show for CBS Eye on the World radio/podcasts is another news source that casts a wide net.

Another tactic is to avoid accepting sweeping generalizations.  And to always ask if an idea sounds true just because it's attractive to you, because it 'makes sense.'

You can't make sense out of the invisible, which is what the truth can be when it reflects facts that are unknown to you.  

In this era we're trying to know everything about everything. Here, incrementalism is a big help.

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