From Canada's America's (I was thinking of The Walrus, sorry)The Baffler, January - February 2024 issue:
The acclaimed environmental scientist is annoyed with the eco movement and shunning media—just when we need him most
In 2019, the environmental scientist and energy historian Vaclav Smil published Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. In the book, Smil charts the expansion of everything from algae blooms and embryos, domesticated chicken breasts and corn harvests, mountain ranges and skyscrapers and air travel to the destructive power of human weaponry, the storage capacity of microchips, the rise and fall of trees, forests, empires, and the economic outputs of country after country. The commonality among them, Smil finds, is disturbing: after a period of rapid, often exponential growth, any number of unpleasant things can happen, including precipitous collapse. Growth was Smil’s fortieth book; he’s published seven more since.
The renowned physicist and inventor David Keith has called Smil “a slayer of bullshit,” and Growth reads like a 513-page assassination of one of civilization’s most cherished delusions: that a finite planet can accommodate infinite growth. Smil is quick to acknowledge the benefits of economic growth—dramatic gains in food production, life expectancy, energy access, and countless other indices of human progress. But unlike the Steven Pinkers of the world who downplay or ignore the costs of that progress, Smil emphasizes their central harm: “a multitude of assaults on the biosphere.” These range from the obliteration of global forests and terrifying declines in biodiversity to hundreds of gigatons of fossil carbon being released into the atmosphere.
“Without a biosphere in a good shape, there is no life on the planet,” he told the Guardian around Growth’s publication. “That’s all you need to know.” Smil was seventy-five when the book came out, eight years after he retired as a professor (now distinguished emeritus) at the University of Manitoba’s department of environment and geography. He was living with his wife in the humble, super-energy-efficient Winnipeg home he’d designed more than three decades earlier. For many, this would be a happy career denouement. But Smil’s action was rising. He was writing two or three books a year, delivering keynote speeches in international capitals, publishing articles and Q&As in prestigious publications. He became friendly with Bill Gates, who has blurbed most of his books since 2010, calling Growth not just a “masterpiece” but “Smil’s latest masterpiece.” (In 2017, Gates wrote: “I wait for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie.”) In other words, Smil gave every indication of enjoying a surge of late-career fame that many Canadians had entirely failed to notice.
He also seemed to resent that fame. It was around the time of Growth’s publication that something, or rather several things, clearly began to shift, causing Smil to sour on his audience and the public at large. One of those shifts was the surge in climate catastrophes that marked the late 2010s. These helped spark a global wave of environmental activism whose slogans rang like a dumbed down echo of Smil’s writing. In 2018, Extinction Rebellion began paralyzing traffic in London with theatrical protests that spurred the UK into declaring a climate emergency. The following year, Greta Thunberg headlined the historic global climate strike of 2019. Millions of protesters flooded streets in over 160 countries, covering every continent. The epicentre of that strike was New York City, where Thunberg’s presence drew 250,000 protesters ahead of the UN’s Climate Ambition Summit. Here the echo became uncanny. On September 21, 2019, Smil told the Guardian, “Growth must come to an end. Our economist friends don’t seem to realize that.” Two days later, Thunberg told an assembly of world leaders gathered in the UN’s New York headquarters, “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”
But Smil does not seem to appreciate Thunberg. He’s never expressed a word of encouragement for the movement she represents. To the contrary, since 2019, in books and articles and interviews, Smil has directed his bullshit slaying almost exclusively against popular climate-activist arguments: he called Bill McKibben America’s “leading climate catastrophist” in the magazine IEEE Spectrum; about the goals spelled out in the Paris Agreement—“People call it aspirational. I call it delusional,” he told the New York Times in 2022; and he has accused the climate scientists writing reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of inventing “a new scientific genre where heavy doses of wishful thinking are commingled with a few solid facts.”
This has made him more famous than ever. In his 2022 book, How the World Really Works: The Science behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going (a New York Times bestseller that has been translated into more than twenty-five languages—by far his most successful), Smil argued that “complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat.” The entire passage reads like a press release from Exxon—not because Smil is wrong about the enormity of the energy-transition challenge but because he doesn’t address the equally unthinkable cost of failing to meet that challenge. That one-sidedness is new for Smil. And it hasn’t gone unnoticed. “Vaclav Smil continues pursuing the project he has chosen for his twilight years: convincing all those silly kids that they can’t do big things, by telling them ‘how the world really works,’” posted the energy journalist David Roberts on social media in a typical appraisal.....
....MUCH MORE
Professor Smil is not shy about expressing dissatisfaction. As recounted in a 2018 post:
....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 Facts
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.
Some of our posts on Mr. Smil....
