1. In this thread, I pull out the interesting facts I learned from the incredible Energy and Civilization by Vaclav Smil. I’d pitch it as a quantitative Sapiens - one of the best books I've read in ages
2. Opening lines: “Energy is the only universal currency: one of its many forms must be transformed to get anything done. ‘We can think thoughts wildly, but if we do not have the wherewithal to convert them into action, they will remain thoughts’ – Richard Adams”
3. @ProfFeynman – “It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount”
4. New prime movers like draft, water, and wind amplify human behavior, but also limit development in non-obvious ways. Because of the wind patterns and currents, the Spanish never discovered Hawaii despite traveling annually from Mexico to the Philippines for 250 years
5. Quick measures – 1 calorie is about 4.2 joules. Moderately active adults consume 2-2.7kcal, ~10MJ, or about 1kg of bread daily. The average person is powered by about 90 watts, or less than a lightbulb. 1 horsepower is ~750 watts, a car is 50kW, coal plant is 2GW
6. An average horse can’t sustain a steady work rate of 1 horsepower. James Watt used an exaggerated rating to ensure customer’s satisfaction with his horsepower denominated engine.
7. Preindustrial cities needed a wooded area at least 100 times their size to ensure a continuous supply of fuel
8. The first prime mover was draft power from animals, but surprisingly domestication was not the limiting factor. The hard part was inventing a harness that allowed you to translate draft potential into effective performance
9. Horses aren’t the only draft animals. In peasant society, the good life isn't associated with abundant material goods, but minimal labor expenditure. Since the energy cost of pregnancy is low compared to a child’s labor contribution, peasants rationally had as many as possible
10. Until the invention of horseshoes and roads, humans were still more effective at moving large objects. In southern Peru, Incan builders managed to coordinate 2400 men to pull a 140 ton stone, required 600kW of power.
11. Building roads was a massive undertaking – the Roman road system required about 1.2 billion labor days, or the work of 20,000 full time workers for 600 years.
12. The first fossil fuels didn’t come easily, and some of the hardest work was actually done by women. They would bring up to 4000 pounds of coal to the top of a pit daily, requiring about 350 watts over a ten hour day. This is typically considered the maximum of human capacity
13. He claims the industrial revolution is actually mostly a myth, and the British economy looked almost unchanged between 1760-1850. The main difference was that between 1650 and 1850 energy consumption increased 15x.
14. A horse’s mass to power ratio is about 1 g/w, same with a person. The first steam engines in the early 1700s weighed 700g/w, 1800s was 500g/w. By the early 1900s locomotive steam engines weighed about 60g/w.
15. Daimler and Maybach changed things when they made a practical internal combustion engine at 30g/W, low enough for personal vehicles. Interestingly, the first internal combustion powered vehicle wasn’t a car, but a motorcycle. Makes sense I guess.
17. Diesel’s motivation was actually political. He wanted to create a light, small engine and decentralize industry so people didn’t have to crowd in cities. He considered his chief accomplishment his writing on social policy.
18. Found this graph of coal production in England between 1700-2016 interesting. When looking for a higher quality picture online, stumbled across another graph that looks quite similar. 
19. The Haber-Bosch process replaced crop cycling in the early 1900s as a means of converting nitrogen in the air to useful forms. It consumes 1% of our global energy supply, but the first use actually wasn’t fertilizers; it was to produce ammonium nitrate explosives during WWI.
20. 40% of our current food supply depends upon the Haber-Bosch Synthesis. “[The] industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy, now he eats potatoes partly made of oil” – Howard Odum
21. I didn’t realize that Moore predicted his law in 1965 when the number of transistors on a chip doubled from 32 to 64. He identified that trend super early - really didn't have that many data points
22. In 1983 ARPANET opened up as a protocol for communication, and by 1989 it had more than 100,000 hosts. Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web a year later, but it wasn’t easy to navigate until the invention of Netscape in 1993
23. A car weighs 10,000x more than a smart phone (1.4 tons vs 140g), but only embodies 100 more energy (100GJ v 1 GJ). Phones last 2 years, and their production embodies about 1EJ per year of use. Cars last ten, so making cars embodies 0.72 EJ per year – 30% less than cell phones
24. Granted a phone consumes about 3% of its embodied energy cost during operation, while cars consume ~500%.
25. The US consumption of cement added up to about 4.5Gt during the entire 20th century. China emplaced more (4.9 Gt) in its new construction projects during just the three years of 2008-2010
26. Although early fossil fuels made manual labor easier, they disproportionately helped men; women’s work actually got harder. Electricity was the liberator that eased the demands of modern household, and set the stage for women’s suffrage.
27. I had knew there was an oil crisis, but I didn’t realize how extreme it was. OPEC quintupled oil prices between 1973-1974 and then quadrupled them again between 1979-1980
28. A sword hits with 15 joules, a crossbow 100 joules, a rifle 1000 joules, a tank round 1000000 joules. A German V1 hit with 15000000 joules even when it didn’t explode. The largest B-18 bomb releases 3800000000 joules, and the Tsar Bomba released 209000000000000000 joules
29. The advance in weaponry accelerated from gunpowder with the nitration of organic compounds like cellulose, glycerin, and toluene. Nobel made it practical by mixing nitroglycerin with diatomaceous earth to make dynamite and introducing a practical detonator.
30. During the largest raid of its kind, 334 B-29 bombers dropped 1,500t of incendiary on wooden Tokyo. Including the energy of the resulting inferno, 18PJ of energy was released, almost 300 times larger than the energy released by the Hiroshima bomb.
31. In August 1914 Britain only had 154 military aircraft, but four years later the country’s aircraft factories employed 350,000 people producing 30,000 airplanes per year.
32. 5% of all US and Soviet commercial energy consumed between 1950 and 1990 went into developing and amassing nuclear weaponry.
33. Human and animal exertion accounted for 85% of all power in 1500, and 87% in 1800, but only 27% by 1900. In 1900, with 30% of the population, the United States consumed 95% of the fossil fuels.
34. On the shift away from fossil fuels - “Two breakthroughs would accelerate the shift, swift construction of new nuclear plants best on the best designs, and the availability of new, inexpensive ways to store wind and solar electricity on massive scales” Sweet sweet validation
35. If you factor in the time needed to earn the money to buy a car, fuel it, maintain it, and insure it, your average speed is no higher than 5 km/hr, or about 3 mph. That’s comparable to the speed of simply walking.
36. McNeil conceptualized microparasites as standard bacteria, insects, etc but also macroparasites as special interest groups, oligopolisitic cartels, and labor unions. He briefly treats macroparasitic diversions of energy in inefficient ways in an interesting framing.
37. All in all, I only scratched the surface of the wealth of information in this rich book. If you made it this far, definitely consider checking it out, and maybe share this thread.
38/38 Some inspirations to write longer-form content include @pmarca, @BenMcC's summary of Lessons of History by Durant, @patrick_oshag 's two things I learned every day thread, @naval, @mimeticvalue, @kevinsimler: all accounts you should definitely follow.
@vgr I remember you were interested in something like this a while back - the book goes into way more detail. Fascinating read
16. Daimler came up with the high revolution engine, Benz the electric ignition, Maybach the float-feed carburetor. When they started to sell their car, they took on heavy investment from an Austro-Hungarian consul general, and named the company after his daughter Mercedes.
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I'd also throw in @tylercowen @vgr @ESYudkowsky @robinhanson and @sarahdoingthing @Meaningness . Really gonna consider blogging because of the excellent work of these people
16. Daimler came up with the high revolution engine, Benz the electric ignition, Maybach the float-feed carburetor. When they started to sell their car, they took on heavy investment from an Austro-Hungarian consul general, and named the company after his daughter Mercedes.
