We are fans, more after the jump.
The only other person I can think of who was as clear-eyed about the subject was David J.C. MacKay, more on him after the jump as well.
From the journal Science, March 21:
Meet Vaclav Smil, the man who has quietly shaped how the world thinks about energy
As a teenager in the 1950s, Vaclav Smil spent a lot of time chopping wood. He lived with his family in a remote town in what was then Czechoslovakia, nestled in the mountainous Bohemian Forest. On walks he could see the Hohenbogen, a high ridge in neighboring West Germany; less visible was the minefield designed to prevent Czechs from escaping across the border. Then it was back home, splitting logs every 4 hours to stoke the three stoves in his home, one downstairs and two up. Thunk. With each stroke his body, fueled by goulash and grain, helped free the sun's energy, transiently captured in the logs. Thunk. It was repetitive and tough work. Thunk. It was clear to Smil that this was hardly an efficient way to live.
Throughout his career, Smil, perhaps the world's foremost thinker on energy of all kinds, has sought clarity. From his home office near the University of Manitoba (UM) in Winnipeg, Canada, the 74-year-old academic has churned out dozens of books over the past 4 decades. They work through a host of topics, including China's environmental problems and Japan's dietary transition from plants to meat. The prose is dry, and they rarely sell more than a few thousand copies. But that has not prevented some of the books—particularly those exploring how societies have transitioned from relying on one source of energy, such as wood, to another, such as coal—from profoundly influencing generations of scientists, policymakers, executives, and philanthropists. One ardent fan, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in Redmond, Washington, claims to have read nearly all of Smil's work. "I wait for new Smil books," Gates wrote last December, "the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie."
Now, as the world faces the daunting challenge of trying to curb climate change by weaning itself from fossil fuels, Smil's work on energy transitions is getting more attention than ever. But his message is not necessarily one of hope. Smil has forced climate advocates to reckon with the vast inertia sustaining the modern world's dependence on fossil fuels, and to question many of the rosy assumptions underlying scenarios for a rapid shift to alternatives. "He's a slayer of bullshit," says David Keith, an energy and climate scientist at Harvard University.
Give Smil 5 minutes and he'll pick apart one cherished scenario after another. Germany's solar revolution as an example for the world to follow? An extraordinarily inefficient approach, given how little sunlight the country receives, that hasn't reduced that nation's reliance on fossil fuels. Electric semitrailers? Good for little more than hauling the weight of their own batteries. Wind turbines as the embodiment of a low-carbon future? Heavy equipment powered by oil had to dig their foundations, Smil notes, and kilns fired with natural gas baked the concrete. And their steel towers, gleaming in the sun? Forged with coal.
"There's a lot of hopey-feely going on in the energy policy community," says David Victor, an expert on international climate policy at the University of California, San Diego. And Smil "revels in the capability to show those falsehoods."
But Smil is not simply a naysayer. He accepts the sobering reality of climate change—though he is dubious of much climate modeling—and believes we need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. He has tried to reduce his own carbon footprint, building an energy-efficient home and adopting a mostly vegetarian diet. He sees his academic work as offering a cleareyed, realistic assessment of the challenges ahead—not as a justification for inaction. And he says he has no ax to grind. "I have never been wrong on these major energy and environmental issues," he says, "because I have nothing to sell."
Despite Smil's reach—some of the world's most powerful banks and bureaucrats routinely ask for his advice—he has remained intensely private. Other experts tap dance for attention and pursue TED talks. But Smil is a throwback, largely letting his books speak for themselves. He loathes speaking to the press (and opened up to Science only out of a sense of duty to The MIT Press, his longtime publisher). "I really don't think I have anything special to say," he says. "It's out there if you want to know it."
An Iron Curtain childhood
This past December, Smil stepped out of a hotel in Washington, D.C., and pulled on a knit cap—he'd allow no wasted heat, especially given a persistent head cold. He had given a lecture the previous day and now was making a beeline for a favorite spot: the National Gallery of Art. He was a regular in the nation's capital during the 1980s and '90s, consulting with the World Bank, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other government agencies. But the United States's security clampdown after 9/11—its the increasing political dysfunction—soured him on the country's leaders. "This government is so inept," he said. "It cannot even run itself in the most basic way."
Still, Smil can't shake his affection for the United States. It goes back to his childhood: During World War II, U.S. soldiers—not Soviet troops—liberated his region from the Nazis. And it was to the United States that Smil and his wife, Eva, fled in 1969, after the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia to stymie a political uprising.
Nothing was exceptional about his childhood, Smil says. His father was a police officer and then worked in manufacturing; his mother kept the books for a psychiatric hospital's kitchen. But even as a boy, he was aware of the miasma of falsehood that surrounded him in Cold War Czechoslovakia, and it spurred his respect for facts. "I'm the creation of the communist state," he says, recalling how, as a child, he heard that the Soviet Union had increased production of passenger cars by 1000% in a single year. "I looked at it and said, ‘Yeah, but you started from nothing.’" Officials would claim they had exceeded their food plan, yet oranges were never available. "It was so unreal and fake," Smil says. "They taught me to respect reality. I just don't stand for any nonsense."
As an undergraduate, Smil studied the natural sciences at Charles University in Prague. He lived in an old converted cloister. Its thick stone walls kept it chilly, summer and winter. And in the first of Smil's personal energy transitions, heat came not from wood, but from coal—hard black anthracite from Kladno or dirty brown lignite from North Bohemia.
He got to indulge his curiosity, taking 35 classes a week, 10 months a year, for 5 years. "They taught me nature, from geology to clouds," he says. But Smil decided that a traditional scientific career was not for him. No lab bench called: He was after the big picture.
After graduation, he also realized that his future would not be in his homeland: He refused to join the Communist Party, undermining his job prospects. He worked in a regional planning office while Eva pursued her medical degree. After Soviet troops invaded, many friends and neighbors panicked and left. But the couple waited for Eva's graduation, dreading a travel ban. They finally departed in 1969, just months before the government imposed a travel blockade that would last for decades. "That was not a minor sacrifice, you know?" Smil says. "After doing that, I'm not going to sell myself for photovoltaics or fusion or whatever and start waving banners. Your past always leads to who you are."
The Smils ended up at Pennsylvania State University in State College, where Vaclav completed a doctorate in geography in 2 years. With little money, they rented rooms from a professor's widow, and Smil made another energy transition: Periodically, an oil truck arrived to refuel the basement furnace. Smil then took the first job offer he received, from UM. He's been there ever since.
For decades until his retirement, Smil taught introductory environmental science courses. Each year ended with a 10-question, multiple choice final exam, with a twist: "There could be no right answer, or every answer was correct, and every combination in between," says Rick Baydack, chair of the environmental science department at UM, who was once Smil's student.
Otherwise, Smil was a ghost in his department, taking on only a few graduate students. Since the 1980s, he has shown up at just one faculty meeting. But as long as he kept teaching and turning out highly rated books, that was fine for the school. "He's a bit of a recluse and likes to work on his own," Baydack says. "He's continued down a path he set for himself. What's happening around him doesn't really matter."
Rootless bohemian cosmopolitan
Today, Smil straddles the line between scientist and intellectual, flashing the tastes of a "rootless bohemian cosmopolitan," as his old communist masters used to call him. He's fluent in a flurry of languages. He's a tea snob and foodie who is reluctant to eat out because so much restaurant food is now premade. Stand in a garden and he can tell you the Latin names of many of the plants. He's an art lover: Mention the Prado Museum in Madrid and he might tell you the secret of finding 5 minutes without crowds to appreciate Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas, his favorite painting, which depicts a Spanish princess encircled by her retinue. And then he'll say, "I appreciate and love blue-green algae," which helped kick off Earth's oxygen age. "They are the foundation."
Smil's breadth feels anachronistic. In modern academic science, all the incentives push to narrow specialization, and Smil believes his eclectic interests have complicated his career. But his ability to synthe-size across disparate fields also has proved a strength, enabling him to trace how energy courses through every capillary of the world's economy.
Smil's writing career kicked off in the mid-1970s, just as an embargo on oil sales by Middle Eastern nations woke up developed nations to just how hooked they were on petroleum, for transportation, heating, farming, chemicals, even electricity. The jolt came just after the publication of The Limits to Growth, an influential study that, using a simple computer model, warned of a pending depletion of the planet's resources.
Smil was intrigued and taught himself programming to re-create the model for himself. "I saw it was utter nonsense," he recalls; the model was far too simple and easily skewed by initial assumptions. He constructed a similar model of how carbon dioxide emissions affect climate and found it similarly wanting. He understood the physics of the greenhouse effect and the potential for a carbon dioxide buildup to warm Earth, but models seemed too dependent on assumptions about things like clouds. Ever since, he's held models of all kinds in contempt. "I have too much respect for reality," he says.Instead, he scoured the scientific literature and obscure government documents for data, seeking the big picture of how humanity generates and deploys energy. What ultimately emerged in several blandly titled books—including General Energetics: Energy in the Biosphere and Civilization (1991), Energy in World History (1994), and Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects (2010)—is an epic tale of innovation and transformation, worked through one calculation at a time.
That work has guided a generation to think about energy in the broadest sense, from antiquity to today, says Elizabeth Wilson, director of the Institute for Energy and Society at Dartmouth College. "You could take a paragraph from one of his books and make a whole career out of it," she says. And yet Smil has avoided mental traps that could come with his energy-oriented view, she adds. "[He] does a really good job of being nuanced."In essence, Smil says, humanity has experienced three major energy transitions and is now struggling to kick off a fourth. First was the mastery of fire, which allowed us to liberate energy from the sun by burning plants. Second came farming, which converted and concentrated solar energy into food, freeing people for pursuits other than sustenance. During that second era, which ended just a few centuries ago, farm animals and larger human populations also supplied energy, in the form of muscle power. Third came industrialization and, with it, the rise of fossil fuels. Coal, oil, and natural gas each, in turn, rose to prominence, and energy production became the domain of machines, as such coal-fired power plants.Now, Smil says, the world faces its fourth energy transition: a move to energy sources that do not emit carbon dioxide, and a return to relying on the sun's current energy flows, instead of those trapped millions of years ago in deposits of coal, oil, and natural gas.The fourth transition is unlike the first three, however. Historically, Smil notes, humans have typically traded relatively weak, unwieldy energy sources for those that pack a more concentrated punch. The wood he cut to heat his boyhood home, for example, took a lot of land area to grow, and a single log produced relatively little energy when burned. Wood and other biomass fuels have relatively low "power density," Smil says. In contrast, the coal and oil that heated his later dwellings have higher power densities, because they produce more energy per gram and are extracted from relatively compact deposits. But now, the world is seeking to climb back down the power density ladder, from highly concentrated fossil fuels to more dispersed renewable sources, such as biofuel crops, solar parks, and wind farms. (Smil notes that nuclear power, which he deems a "successful failure" after its rushed, and now stalled, deployment, is the exception walking down the density ladder: It is dense in power, yet often deemed too costly or risky in its current form.)
One troubling implication of that density reversal, Smil notes, is that in a future powered by renewable energy, society might have to devote 100 or even 1000 times more land area to energy production than today. That shift, he says, could have enormous negative impacts on agriculture, biodiversity, and environmental quality.To see other difficulties associated with that transition, Smil says, look no further than Germany. In 2000, fossil fuels provided 84% of Germany's energy. Then the country embarked on a historic campaign, building 90 gigawatts of renewable power capacity, enough to match its existing electricity generation. But because Germany sees the sun only 10% of the time, the country is as hooked as ever on fossil fuels: In 2017, they still supplied 80% of its energy. "True German engineering," Smil says dryly. The nation doubled its hypothetical capacity to create electricity but has gotten minimal environmental benefit. Solar can work great, Smil says, but is best where the sun shines a great deal.
Perhaps the most depressing implication of Smil's work, however, is how long making the fourth transition might take. Time and again he points back to history to note that energy transitions are slow, painstaking, and hard to predict. And existing technologies have a lot of inertia. The first tractor appeared in the late 1800s, he might say, but the use of horses in U.S. farming didn't peak until 1915—and continued into the 1960s.......MUCH MORE
HT: FT Alphaville's Further Reading post, March 22
Back in 2012 GMO's Jeremy Grantham was warning about the impending civilization-destroying shortage of fertilizers, specifically phosphorus and potash. His argument was published in the journal Nature, just about as prestigious a platform as one is likely to mount, save maybe Proceedings of the Royal Society—A, but that's for physics and engineering. Anyhoo. Mr. Grantham said the world was going to run out but that is not the way commodities work. A commodity's price will ration supply to the highest use (although in cases like corn the allocation function is distorted by government ethanol policies). Additionally, price will incentivize both increased production and substitution.
To date the only commodity the world has run out of is, oddly enough, a fertilizer in the form of guano. We were pretty close on whale oil before Mr. Rockefeller's mass production of kerosene saved the whales. And then there's menhaden but that's a whole 'nother story.
If we are going to run out of anything in the foreseeable future it is probably helium and because of that, in the spirit of conservation, I no longer say "That's as funny as three helium atoms, HeHeHe"
The fert fight starred in a couple posts including "Vaclav Smil Takes on Jeremy Grantham Over Peak Fertilizer" in which our hero came out swinging from the opening bell:
We posted the whole of Mr. Grantham's Nov. 15 Nature piece for fear it would go behind Nature's paywall.
To date it hasn't. Also to date I haven't come through on my assurance in Nov. 24ths "Jeremy Grantham "On the Road to Zero Growth" as His Co-head of Asset Allocation Does the Full Monty". I promise I'll get to it.
We have almost as many posts on Professor Smil as we do on Mr. Grantham. This is the first time they've been together. I feel very uncomfortable being on the opposite side of Mr. G on just about anything but in this case Smil is right.
From The American:
Jeremy Grantham, Starving for FactsSome of our posts on Mr. Smil:
A column by legendary asset manager Jeremy Grantham is more suitable for the tabloids than for one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious scientific weekly magazines....MORE.
Vaclav Smil: Planet of the Cows
Our readers may know Mr. Smil as a big deal in the Thinking-about-Energy biz. Here he is thinking about bovines....
...Previous Smil at Spectrum:
Vaclav Smil: "Advanced Economies Must Still Make Things"
Vaclav Smil: "Cellphones as a fifth-order elaboration of Maxwell’s theory"
Calories In, Kilowatts Out: Apparently Sweating Is Important
"Happy Birthday to Moore’s Law" (plus party pooper Vaclav Smil)
And non-Spectrum Smil:The other genius level thinker about energy died a couple years ago this April:
Vaclav Smil On Energy: "Revolution? More like a crawl"
Bill Gates on The Most Astounding Statistic In Vaclav Smil's New Book
Bill Gates Summer Reading List (Vaclav Smil has two entries)
Energy--'Vaclav Smil is Correct: Never Forecast'
Energy: "The man who’s tutoring Bill Gates … "
Vaclav Smil: "In energy matters, what goes around, comes around—but perhaps should go away"
Vaclav Smil: "The Manufacturing of Decline"
Serious Thinking on Energy: An Interview With Dr. Vaclav Smil
A Major Piece: "Why the tech revolution isn’t a template for an energy revolution"
Bill Gates Reviews Vaclav Smil's "Prime Movers of Globalization: The History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines"
Energy and Artificial Intelligence Expert Professor Sir David J.C. MacKay Has Died, Age 48When people want to talk with me about energy I usually start by asking if they have read his book yet.
It's a really good book, see the links in the above story if interested.
And if you don't read his book, you have no excuse. He put it on the internet for free download.
