Not long ago, I randomly opened Vaclav Smil’s recent book “Size: How It Explains the World.”
The first paragraph I read, in a chapter about good and bad design,
concerned rubber flip-flops, which Smil described as among the world’s
most widely owned individual possessions even though “they provide
neither good lateral support nor basic vertical stability.” The
following paragraph, about furniture, mentioned “the steadily
diminishing share of the rich world’s population that grows food,
catches fish, cuts wood, mines minerals and builds structures.” The next
touched on religious pilgrimages, airports, and commuting to work. In
2018, Elizabeth Wilson, who is the founding director of the Arthur L.
Irving Institute for Energy and Society at Dartmouth, told Science, “You could take a paragraph from one of his books and make a whole career out of it.”
Smil
is an emeritus professor of environmental studies at the University of
Manitoba, in Winnipeg. He is best known for his writing about global
issues, among them energy, agriculture, population, economics, and
climate. He has served as a consultant with the World Bank, the U.S.
Agency for International Development, and other institutions. His
scholarly interests are eclectic, and he is prolific. “Size,” which was
published last May, is not his most recent book; the second edition of “Materials and Dematerialization,”
which was first published a decade ago as “Making the Modern World,”
came out a month later. Altogether, by his count, he has published
forty-eight, beginning with “China’s Energy: Achievements, Problems,
Prospects,” in 1976. He has four more under way: one about
globalization, one about food, a “Size”-like study of speed, and a
combined reissue, by Oxford University Press, of two earlier books,
which examine the years between 1867 and 1914, the period that he
believes did more than any other to shape the modern world. His books
typically begin at a trot and maintain the same daydream-defying pace
until the final paragraph. The fifth chapter of “Size” includes a
detailed critique, with formulas, of what he identifies as the
impossible proportions of various characters in “Gulliver’s Travels”:
“Properly scaled, an adult Lilliputian would thus have a body mass more
than 10 times larger than Swift’s erroneous attribution, and instead of
being equivalent to a tiny shrew he would be more like an eastern gray
squirrel.” Smil has a sense of humor, but he uses it sparingly; even
passages that seem at first to be personal or anecdotal sometimes turn
out to be footnoted.
Smil is a ruthless dissector of what he believes to
be unwarranted assumptions, and not just those of eighteenth-century
Anglo-Irish satirical novelists. The first book of his that I read,
twenty years ago, was “Energy at the Crossroads,”
published by the M.I.T. Press, in which he wrote that the power under
the direct control of an affluent American household, including its
vehicles, “would have been available only to a Roman latifundia
owner of about 6,000 strong slaves, or to a nineteenth-century landlord
employing 3,000 workers and 400 big draft horses.” He was making a
characteristically vivid point about the impact of modern access to
energy, most of it produced by burning fossil fuels. No one can doubt
that twenty-first-century Americans’ lives are easier, healthier,
longer, and more mobile than the lives of our ancestors, but Smil’s
comparison makes it clear that most of us underestimate, by orders of
magnitude, the scale of the energy transformations that have made our
comforts possible.
More recently, Smil has written about ongoing efforts to address climate change, and about the feasibility of achieving “net zero” by 2050. In “How the World Really Works,”
published in 2022, he writes that, in the first two decades of the
twenty-first century, “despite extensive and expensive expansion of
renewable energies, the share of fossil fuels in the world’s primary
energy supply fell only marginally”—from eighty-six per cent to
eighty-two per cent—and that, during the same period, global consumption
of fossil fuels actually increased, by forty-five per cent. Those
numbers surprise people whose sense of environmental progress is shaped
by car commercials and by news stories about breakthroughs in solar
panels, algae-based fuels, and organisms that turn carbon dioxide into
stone. They also annoy environmentalists who view Smil’s observations as
backward-looking and counterproductive, and they contribute to what one
journalist described to me recently as Smil’s reputation as “a
sourpuss.”
Smil
dislikes giving interviews. He believes that his books contain
everything that anyone needs to know about him, and he told me that he
had agreed to be profiled in Science, in 2018, only as a favor
to his publisher—a gesture he later regretted. When I approached him
about this article, I did so with trepidation. We exchanged e-mails
almost daily for most of a month, and we had a lengthy telephone
conversation. But when I suggested meeting in person, he replied, “As
for flying to Manitoba, nobody ever does that (much like nobody ever
flies to Topeka).” A quality that runs through all his writing, and that
I find both appealing and challenging, is his stubborn skepticism.
Toward the end of “How the World Really Works,” he quotes a line,
usually attributed to Descartes, that could serve as his own guiding
principle: de omnibus dubitandum. Doubt everything.
Smil
was born in 1943 in what today is the Czech Republic but at the time
was the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which the Nazis had
established after invading four years earlier. He deflected my questions
about his upbringing other than to say that his childhood,“if a label
has to be chosen,” was “normal and happy.” Between 1960 and 1965, he was
a student at Charles University, in Prague. He described his student
years and the ones immediately following them as “a long prelude to the
Prague Spring of 1968.” The Prague Spring was a period of liberalization
that began with Alexander Dubček’s election as the head of the
country’s Communist Party, on January 5th, and ended, seven and a half
months later, with a full-scale invasion by Soviet bloc soldiers and
tanks. Until the Soviets intervened, Smil said, “even ordinary students
could access Western papers and journals in the university library.” He
studied a broad range of topics related to energy, among them biology,
geology, meteorology, demography, economics, and statistics. The subject
of his undergraduate thesis was “the environmental impacts of
coal-fired electricity generation, particularly the effects of air
pollution.” His scholarly skepticism, he said, came to him naturally,
beginning when he was a teen-ager, and was “mightily reinforced by
getting trained as an old-fashioned scientist (in what the Germans call
in one of their beloved compounds Naturwissenschaften) beholden
to demonstrable realities, strengthened daily by living (until 1969)
under the Commies (with their endless lies about everything).”
Smil
met his wife while both were students, she in medical school. Like
thousands of other Czechs, they fled the country before travel
restrictions made emigration virtually impossible. They arrived in the
United States on August 31, 1969, and he spent two years earning a
doctorate, in the geography department at Penn State. (The subject of
his dissertation was global energy development.) In 1972, the University
of Manitoba offered him a job, and he took it. He is fluent in four
languages and has studied half a dozen others. His recent reading, he
told me, has included Mandelstam and Pasternak in Russian, and the New
Testament in Latin. His English is excellent but accented, and he speaks
it even faster than he writes—so fast that there were parts of our
telephone conversation that I didn’t understand until I had listened to a
recording with the speed reduced by twenty-five per cent.
A
dozen years ago, I interviewed a highly regarded chemistry professor at
a major American university. He surprised me by saying that his job
forced him to spend so much time travelling that he had the same
better-than-first-class status on American Airlines that the character
played by George Clooney has in the 2009 movie “Up in the Air.” He
needed to travel, he explained, because in many ways the most important
and time-consuming part of his job was soliciting funding, all over the
world, for the research that his graduate students performed in his lab.
When I mentioned this to Smil, he said that what I had described was
the modern ideal of the scientist, “just flying around, drumming up
monies,” and that he detested it. He has never relied on grad students.
“I used to run madly among libraries,” he said, but he now makes heavy
use of online resources, among them the Web of Science, to which the
university still gives him access, and Gallica, a multicentury digital
archive created by the National Library of France. He loves classical
music, but is “absolutely tone-deaf” and plays no instruments. He has a
good memory for big numbers and can do many calculations in his head.
His ideas come to him, he said, when he walks, reads, wakes up in the
morning, sits on airplanes, or cooks, including favorite Japanese
dishes. (He began visiting Japan in 1978, and co-wrote a book about the
evolution of the modern Japanese diet). “I just write my books, much as a
plumber fixes pipes and garbagemen haul away junk,” he said. “I mean
it, no introspection; it is just a kind of work I like and can do.”
Smil
has written a great deal about renewable-energy technologies, and he
has said that their implementation cannot continue to grow quickly
enough to fully negate the global increase in over-all energy demand
during the next two or three decades. Unrealistic expectations for such
technologies, he has written, arise in part from inappropriate
extrapolation from the extraordinarily fast and sustained evolution of
solid-state electronics, beginning, roughly seventy-five years ago, with
the invention of the transistor. In 1965, Gordon Moore—later a
co-founder of Intel—observed that the number of components that could be
etched on a single microchip doubled roughly every two years. The
number of such components grew from a few thousand in the
nineteen-seventies to tens of billions today, a phenomenon that’s often
referred to as Moore’s Law. Even for microchips, that rate may be slackening, but its application in most other areas has always been problematic. In “Invention and Innovation,”
which M.I.T. published last year, Smil writes, “We are told that rapid
exponential growth, driven by digitization and advances in AI, already
prevails in such fields as solar cells, batteries, electric cars, and
even urban farming.” Such growth, where it actually does exist, can’t
continue permanently, he argues. Belief that it can, in his view, is
consistent with what he described to me as “America’s Barnumian approach
to science and innovation, where every dubious claim is treated as
‘transformative change’ and where every patently impossible
promise”—nuclear fusion, high-temperature superconductivity, the
colonization of Mars—“is worshipped as another effusion of history’s
most brilliant minds.”
In “Growth,”
which M.I.T. published, in 2019, Smil takes the same expansive approach
to his subject that he does in “Size”—the subtitle is “From
Microorganisms to Megacities”—but he does so in smaller type and at
almost double the page count. In a brief review in Foreign Policy,
Keith Johnson wrote that “the best way to appreciate Vaclav Smil’s
latest doorstopper is to take a deep breath, walk across the room, and
pick up the book from wherever it landed after being tossed away for the
umpteenth time as impenetrable, incomprehensible mush.” But Johnson did
pick it up, and, in the next paragraph of his review, he describes
“Growth” as “fascinating, compelling—and ultimately convincing.”....
