Quotes from Vaclav Smil

In contrast, Midgley's TEL patent—titled, unhelpfully, "Method and means for using motor fuels"—filed on April 15, 1922 (and issued on February 23, 1926), gave the company full control of an effective low-volume additive that could be dispensed at a very low cost: a penny's worth of TEL would prevent knocking from consuming a gallon of gasoline (fig. 2.3).

More efficient photovoltaic cells would be most welcome because of their relatively high power densities: efficiencies close to twenty percent would translate to electricity generation rates between 20–40 W/m2, two orders of magnitude better than biomass conversion, and one better than most hydro and wind projects.

una gota de agua no perfora la piedra por la fuerza, sino por repetición»).

Fortunes of all major nations have followed specific trajectories of rise and retreat, but perhaps the greatest difference in their paths has been the time they spent at the top of their performance: some had a relatively prolonged plateau followed by steady decline (both the British empire and the 20th-century United States fit this pattern); others had a swift rise to a brief peak, followed by a more or less rapid decline. Japan is clearly in the latter category.

DDT now belongs to the category of inventions that were not just welcome but seen as truly transformative, only to be relegated to the class of undesirable advances.

Because the year has 8,760 hours, this average mortality prorates to 0.000001 or 1 × 10–6 deaths per person per hour of living. This means that the average additional chance of dying while flying is just 5/1,000th of the risk of simply being alive. Smoking risks are 100 times as high; ditto for driving in a car. In short, flying has never been safer.

Every modern refrigeration system has the same four parts: compressor, condenser, expansion valve, and evaporator, and the Perkins cycle became the foundation of new industrial refrigeration projects. In 1855 came the first ice-making plant, in Cleveland; in 1861 the first meat-freezing plant, in Sydney.

in the country that is most addicted to excessive driving. Detailed

Rigid ranking based on minuscule differences misleads rather than informs. Rounding and approximation is superior to unwarranted and unnecessary precision. Doubt, caution, and incessant questioning are in order—but so is the insistence on quantifying the complex realities of the modern world. If we are to understand many unruly realities, if we are to base our decisions on the best available information, then there is no substitute for this pursuit.

Among the great twentieth-century advances I cannot think of a better example than the first patent for a solid-state electronic device, granted to the German physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld first in Canada in 1925 and then in the US in 1926.

Crises expose realities and strip away obfuscation and misdirection.

Another side effect of fertilization that is receiving more attention is the generation of nitrous oxide by bacterial decomposition of nitrates. Not only is N2O a greenhouse gas but, on a hundred-year time scale, it has a nearly three hundred times higher global warming potential than carbon dioxide, the dominant greenhouse gas. But because of its relatively small emissions, N2O is responsible for only about 6 percent of recent anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

Between 1800 and 2020, we reduced the labor needed to produce a kilogram of grain by more than 98 percent—and we reduced the share of the country's population engaged in agriculture by the same large margin.50 This provides a useful guide to the profound economic transformations that would have to take place with any retreat of agricultural mechanization and reduction in the use of synthetic agrochemicals.

To believe that our understanding of these dynamic, multifactorial realities has reached the state of perfection is to mistake the science of global warming for the religion of climate change.

Finding out how much food actually is consumed is a challenging task, and neither dietary recalls nor household expenditure surveys yield accurate results.

Peter Menzel's Material World: A Global Family Portrait

While Wilbur watched, Orville Wright made the first powered flight, or rather a short hop of 36 meters lasting twelve seconds, above the sandy beach at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina on December 17, 1903. Then they switched places and completed three more short flights: the last, and the longest one, lasted fifty-nine seconds. Remarkably, almost four years went by before anybody else could fly a heavier-than-air machine for more than a minute.

steel, ammonia, cement, and plastics.

This resulted in an exponential rise in CFC production. The annual global output of the two dominant compounds, F-11 and F-12, later known as CFC-11 and CFC-12 or R-11 and R-12, rose from less than 550 tons in 1934 to more than 50,000 tons in 1950, to about 125,000 tons in 1960, and then it soared to the peak of 812,522 tons in 1974, with the US accounting for nearly half of the total

The first commercial jetliner, the ill-fated British Comet (whose four deadly accidents were not caused by jet engines but by stress around square window frames that eventually led to catastrophic decompression), entered its brief service in 1952 at M 0.7, and the first successful and widely adopted jetliner, Boeing's 707, began its scheduled flights in October 1958 at M 0.83.

The verdict was obvious: CFCs were staying in the atmosphere, and because of their inertia nearly their entire post-1930 output was accumulating aloft. But did the presence of these compounds, as Lovelock's group concluded, pose "no conceivable hazard" because they did "not disturb the environment"—or could their accumulation have undesirable consequences?

Erwin Schrödinger, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933, summed up the basis of life: "What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy" (negative entropy or negentropy = free energy).

Heat thus occupies a unique position in the hierarchy of energies: all other forms of energy can be completely converted to it, but its conversion into other forms can never be complete, as only a portion of the initial input ends up in the new form.

primarily in Venezuela and Canada) that were previously excluded from annual summaries, the global total rose to 1.292Tb in 2005, and in 2017 it stood at 1.7Tb.