"Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities Vaclav Smil, MIT Press (2019)" Reviewed in Nature

Vaclav Smil is one of the heavyweights in the Thinking about Energy biz.
We are fans.
From the journal Nature, September 16:

Computing a hard limit on growth
Vaclav Smil’s latest book investigates the cost of energy use on a planet with finite resources. Melanie Moses praises the result.

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities Vaclav Smil MIT Press (2019)

Agriculture now has much bigger yields than it did a century ago, but also requires vastly more energy input.Credit: Paulo Fridman/Bloomberg via Getty

In 70,000 years, Homo sapiens has grown from thousands of hunter-gatherers teetering on the brink of extinction to a global population of 7.7 billion. In Growth, Vaclav Smil explains how we have peopled the planet through our growing capacity for harvesting energy from our environment: food from plants, labour from animals and energy from fossil fuels. Civilization has developed by dominating Earth’s resources. Smil, whose research spans energy, population and environmental change, drives home the cost of growth on a finite planet. It is high: polluted land, air and water, lost wilderness and rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

He argues that most economic projections predict growth by ignoring the biophysical reality of limited resources. Economists emphasize that efficient use enables growth without pumping up energy consumption. Smil does not deny that energy efficiency has increased. For example, he details how agriculture now extracts ten times as much food energy from each parcel of land as it did a century ago. But the 10-fold increase in yield has been driven by a 90-fold boost in energetic inputs — caused by fossil-fuelled farm machinery, and electricity for irrigation and fertilizer production. When this complexity is accounted for, the story of efficiency is turned on its head: we now put more fossil-fuel energy in for each unit of food we get out.

On a crowded Earth, we mostly address this challenge by eating up more land. A 2019 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, called Climate Change and Land, shows that we are in danger of running out of space: humans shape more than 70% of ice-free terrain, much of it for crops and livestock. As grasslands and forests are converted to agriculture, the land is no longer available for carbon storage or biodiversity-sustaining wilderness. Human history is a story of innovation and increased efficiency, but also of relentless depletion of Earth’s resources. Is there a path to prosperity and well-being that does not rely on overconsumption?

Growth is not optimistic. There are no solutions to reconcile our species’ burgeoning consumption with a viable future. Instead, Smil focuses on simple equations that can be used to model (but rarely predict) growth and the energetic, physical and biological principles that are its foundations. He amasses examples of seemingly disparate systems that start small, enter a phase of exponential increase and then plateau.

In some cases, the trajectories tip into dramatic decline, as happened with video tapes and CDs. In others, a decline can rebound. US oil production, for instance, was in decline from 1970; with the expansion of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a decade ago, it rebounded. In 2018, it surpassed its 50-year-old peak. Smil shows repeatedly how beautifully fitting models have failed to predict the future.

Lurking beneath the modelling suppositions and assumptions lie some inescapable facts, he shows: the physical law of conservation of energy, the limited resources on our planet and mathematical constraints on how those resources can be converted to human use. On this foundation, we cannot continue to add 2 billion people every 25 years....

....MUCH MORE

This leads to some very contentious politics.
See for example 2017's
Needed: 800 Million Jobs For Africa

By now most of our readers have seen a version of the U.N. projections for world population in 2050 and 2100. If not, here's a post from April with the graphic:

IMF: Sub-Saharan Africa has Just Completed One of its Best Decades of Growth--It's Not Enough (UPDATED)
Update below.
Original post:
This may be one of the more important graphics you are likely to come across today.
Africa's population is projected by the United Nations to reach 2 billion people by 2045, 4 billion before the end of the century:

via CityLab

We followed up with "To Jumpstart Development, Should We Give Africa Bonds a Whirl?"

The problem, as always, is keeping the money from sticking to the hands of the kleptocrats,
And whether investment will actually do any good.

Following on "IMF: Sub-Saharan Africa has Just Completed One of its Best Decades of Growth--It's Not Enough" here are a couple women who have thought about this stuff, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala a former two-time Finance Minister of Nigeria and World Bank Managing Director, currently a senior advisor at Lazard and Nancy Birdsall, former EVP at the Inter-American Development Bank where she ran a $30 billion loan portfolio....

And today it's the population analysts at Populyst, September 28:....MORE

It's for this reason that U.S. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders wants to promote abortion in Africa. See WaPo, September 5:
On Bernie Sanders, abortion and 'population control' - The ...

Frankly it is much easier to 1) pretend that there isn't a problem or to just 2) intellectuallize the whole thing without getting down into the political mud.

If you choose door #2, we are here to serve as your enabler.

Although it is the now sadly deceased David J.C. Mackay (Cavendish Lab, Regius Prof, polymath, probable genius etc.) I mention if someone wants to talk to me about energy i.e. "have you read his book?", Vaclav Smil is almost in the same league.

Previously on Smil:
Meet The Guy Who Taught Bill Gates About Energy
"Vaclav Smil Takes on Jeremy Grantham Over Peak Fertilizer"
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:

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"