What’s the biggest country in the world?

Russia.

If you split Russia in two, the European part would be the biggest country in Europe and the Asian part would be the biggest country in Asia. Russia has just under seven million square miles of the earth’s surface.

If Antarctica were a country, it would be second. Its land mass is over five million square miles.

Canada has almost two percent of the earth’s area—almost four million square miles. It’s the second biggest nation.

China edges out the United States for third place with just over 3.7 million square miles, the U.S. just under that number. Brazil comes in fifth, Australia sixth. Australia, with not-quite three million square miles, represents one-and-one-half percent of the earth’s surface. All other countries are under one percent. India (#7), Argentina (#8), and Kazakhstan (#9) all occupy over one million square miles. After and including number ten, Algeria, all the remaining countries have less than that.

So by land area the U.S. is fifth, by nation-size it is fourth.

Does it matter? Is bigger better?

It might when it comes to mineral wealth. After all more land area means more chances of finding something useful. Like coal or oil or gold or copper or whatnot.

And there’s population density. Life in the U.S. and Canada means a only a few people per square mile. Canada, with all its vast wilderness and semi-wilderness, comes in at ten. Russia is about twice that. The U.S. is at eighty-eight. China has almost four hundred people per square mile, Bangladesh almost three thousand.

But people don’t live that way. We don’t space out eighty-eight people every square mile. Huge swaths of land in any country are uninhabitable. Here in the West most of the land is too arid to occupy. Thus most of our population resides in cities, suburbs, and exurbs. Even in a rural county the bulk of the residents live clustered into towns rather than dispersed over the countryside.

I remember traveling in Ireland and the United Kingdom and finding that they were beautiful and comfortable places to live. But from the airplane they were tiny. The immense landscape of the American West dwarfed the Isles. There were no comparable stretches of wild land that we Westerners take for granted.

I knew then I couldn’t live on an island. California is twice the size of the U.K. It is five times the size of Ireland. And that’s just California! I find the immensity of North America comforting.

But it is also worrisome. Life in a big place like the American West means food, water, fuel, and electricity all have to travel long distances. Far-flung regions are dependent on great, overlapping grids of wires, towers, roads, pipelines, and railways. We need a massive infrastructure, coupled with high energy expenditures, just to live what we think of as a normal life.

The fires and the severe drought conditions have made this a difficult summer. When our forests burn, they burn big. When our reservoirs dry up, they dry up big, too.

I guess we’ll need some big solutions going forward. We are number four, after all.

The sun delivers about 1000 Watts for every square meter of land. This is why we burn fossil fuels. These substances (peat, coal, petroleum, natural gas) store ancient—and concentrated—solar energy. This energy density makes them desirable as they can be transported from their source of origin and exploited elsewhere.

Pipelines are inherently safer than railroads and highways when it comes to the transport of these fuels, but pipelines are no longer politically popular. Resistance to things like LNG facilities is no longer the province of environmentalists. Cities are even banning natural gas from new construction, citing its climate impacts.

Of course the burning of fossil fuels is replete with ecological consequences, well-known and well-documented consequences, I should point out. This point is not arguable.

There is a great deal of enthusiasm for solar power and other renewable sources like wind. But there’s a limit to what these can do.

Let’s start with 1000.

A square meter of land can collect, in theory, 1000 watts worth of the sun’s energy. Imagine a plot of land one square kilometer in size, that is, one thousand meters by one thousand meters. That’s one million square meters. One million times 1000 watts is one billion watts or one gigawatt (GW).

That’s about power-plant size. The Palo Verde Nuclear Station in Arizona is the biggest power plant in the US and is rated about 3 GW.

A square kilometer, with a perfect collector, is limited to one GW. But there is no such thing as a perfect collector. Modern single-junction solar panels are about 25% efficient. There is a physical limit, called the Shockley-Queisser, that says it can’t get better than 33.7%. That’s physics, not economics.

Multi-layered (multi-junction) solar cells can bypass this limit and achieve up to 68.7% in normal sunlight. Right now such cells are imaginary, the best we can do is about 40% efficiency in specialized applications.

The sun is capricious, too. It doesn’t shine all day. And if varies from place to place and day to day. That 1000 watts per square meter is an average. It’s not a steady stream. So you have to store the electricity for the lean times. Fossil fuels are the first storage devices. Plants collected solar energy and photosynthesized carbohydrates. When they died and were buried that carbon was preserved and later ingenious humans learned to burn it.

But nature’s storage devices come at a cost. All that carbon gets released and messes with the atmosphere and the climate. So ingenious humans are inventing new storage devices (like batteries) to capture sunlight that won’t release carbon by-products when the energy is used.

And these storage devices come with a cost, mostly the mining of the materials needed to make them. And they are just a link in the chain. Sun –> PV panel –> battery –> wires –> end user. Another limit is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In effect, it says that at each step you’ll lose some of the energy. You can’t convert it perfectly.

We already cut our 1000 down to 400 with our ideal (past the Shockley-Quiesser Limit) solar cell, by the time we get to the end we’ll have even less. And this is true of EVERY energy transition, whether you use coal or nuclear or hydro- or whatever.

Two things are competing. One is the continuing increase in energy demand and energy use. The other is the need to conserve, to prevent continuing environmental degradation.

We need to figure out how to do both. People in poor countries want to gain the benefits of the modern world and the only way to do that is to use energy. People in rich (high energy use) countries want to maintain their wealth and comfort. It takes energy to do that.

Nature sets the limits. 1000 watts per square meter, for example. It’s up to us to live within them.