Given replacement cycles, humanity now invests more energy in creating smartphones (life expectancy: ~2 years) than automobiles (~10 years). By year-of-use embedded energy, autos use only 30% of the resources of smartphones.
(p. 344, box)
Do you know if this relates, in any way, to the energy economics and diminishing marginal returns from increasing complexity that Joseph Tainter[0] covers in The Collapse of Complex Societies[1]?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter#Diminishing_ret...
Tainter is cited in the book, though unfortunately the citations / notes format is one that makes it exceedingly difficult to sort out where (this is one of my few complaints with this book, and Smil's writing generally -- he follows a social sciences citations format of (Author <year>) inline, which makes finding, and identifying, references tedious -- I'm the sort of cat who really likes either section-based endnotes or page-based footnotes for tracking things).
That said: Smil's citations are excellent, and his books are worth buying for the references alone. They're also far more worth buying (or reading) for the actual text, but good refs are a very strong bonus.
If you're interested in Tainter's view, I would suggest taking a look, if you can find a copy, at Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power, published in 2009, and covering much the same concept. Weissenbacher's approach is similar to Smil's, and the latter cites Smil's earlier book, Energy in World History (1992) extensively. Weissenbacher looks far more into the political aspects of energy regimes, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries, and arguably to a fault.
The book is also extensively researched, though far-less-evenly written than Smil's. Neither author is a native English speaker, but Smil has a far better command of the language, and the discipline and/or editorial assistance to tighten up and clean up his writing. That said, despite the similarities, the works do complement one another.
Another author I'd recommend is William Ophuls, particularly Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977, revised ~1994), which predates but also anticipates much of Tainter's work. Ophul's background and focus is politics and polity, but through the lenses of ecology and Limits to Growth particularly. His forecast of political developments strikes me as particularly good, capturing much of what actually did transpire, with few failures, save the quite notable one that we have so far managed to avoid an absolutely devastating general famine. But his national / regional assessment strikes me as pretty true -- it's based on the US, EU, USSR (still a thing, though he saw trouble for it), China, India, Africa, and Latin America, generally.
Solar energy, cheap desalination and bioscience are likely to make food ever cheaper and more abundant, wouldn't you think?
A useful concept comes from the domain of navigation:
"The Art of ship handling involves the effective use of forces under control to overcome the effect of forces not under control."
- Charles H. Cotter
First, cars weigh 10,000 times, not 1,000 times, more than a cellphone.
Embodied (not embedded) energy is 100x greater for the automobile.
The units produced annually is a major factor: 2 billion for mobile phones, 72 million for automobiles. That plus product life skews the number toward phones a lot.
I did manage to get the bottom-line value right: autos use 0.72 exajoules of energy per year of use, 30% less than mobile phones.
A longer version of the example was published in IEEE Spectrum in 2016:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/environment/your-phone-cost...
Your article actually says that cars use 7x as much embodied energy as devices, (7 to 1), but then corrects both for lifetime (10 and 2 years), thus you get 0.5 vs 0.7 for devices vs cars respectively, not 1 vs 0.7.
The article then concludes cars use 40% more embedded energy than all devices on the planet, not 30% less.
Then, we're talking about phones here, the article about devices, including 60 million laptops which the article assumes use 18x the embodied energy of a phone. i.e., next to the 1.9 billion phones, the article essentially adds in 1.08 billion phone-equivalent laptops, which carry a worse energy/mass ratio, but aren't adjusted for a much better lifetime than 2 years average. Same for smartphones, btw. The article leaves out embodied energy of cars and just assumes a car to perform without any repairs or maintenance for 10 years, like a phone does for 2 years.
It also doesn't really explicitly mention the context which is that it's a comparison is between more than 2 billion devices servicing an approximately similar amount of humans, vs 72 million vehicles.
The article does mention that a phone's energy use in 2 years would add, at most, 8% to its embodied energy, for an indexed figure of 1.08. A car uses 5x as much of its embodied energy, for a total figure of 6x. Again, this is without figuring in maintenance. In short, for a real impact figure you'd multiply the 0.72 by 6, and you end up with energy to 72m cars using more than 8x as much energy than 2 billion smartphones and more than a billion phone-equivalent laptop/tablet devices, at minimum.
The general upshot is that silicon is very energy-intensive stuff -- to manufacture, and to operate. Several authors (including Smil) have noted that the highest energy use densities, in terms of watts per unit-mass of equipment, are seen in information systems. There's a reason for all those massive cooling systems at datacentres.
(And yes, I've just shifted the discussion from embodied energy to operating energy, in the interest of the general point of energy consumption of information systems, not trying to confuse the two points, though that has been done several times already in various parts of this thread, including your own response above.)
That density still doesn't necessarily imply greater total energy use, though it starts getting you that way.
As for transport vs. information: a further point to consider is that there are constraints on moving people around in a physical environment, imposed by mass, air, rolling resistance, and braking (or regen) losses. We're relatively close -- definitely within an order of magnitude, and possibly a power or so of two, to those limits. For information, the theoretical efficiencies are high (Feynman did work on this IIRC), but our technology is nowhere near that bound, and we seem quite good at throwing additional tasks and requirements on our computing systems as efficiency improves. (This is also true of transport -- both are subject to the Jevons paradox.)
This also gets us to a sort of Amdahl's Law problem: as the operational energy of computers falls, the embodied energy costs seem to increase and become a larger portion of the overall expense. Since the operating cost == marginal cost, this also means that market dynamics alone, which function based on marginal costs, are exceedingly unlikely to discourage this trend. It's another zero-marginal-cost dynamic (see Jeremy Rifkin's recent book).
Smil has a great deal of expertise and experience here, his writing is usually pretty clear, and I'm inclined to credit his claims. Though I may need to evaluate this particular one more closely. Though at some time when my neurons are not in isolation cells....
"Large" is ~ n > 30.
Or to manufacture or to dispose of them.
> Embodied
Do you mean "embedded"? I'm not nitpicking; I want to make sure I understand.
Where does one find the embedded/embodied energy for a product? I'd be surprised if it can be calculated - the energy required to mine, transport, manufacture, dispose every bit of every raw material that eventually goes into all the parts of an automobile (or other complex modern device)? It would be a very valuable but daunting task. How is it done and who does it?
Assuming embedded energy means "battery / fuel capacity" this seems very wrong:
- typical compact car (~3000 lbs, ~1360kg) / Samsung S8 (155g) = 8800
- 50L fuel tank = 475000 Wh / Samsung S8 battery 11.55Wh = 41000
So that's ~4.6x more stored energy per kg, not 10x less.