Vaclav Smil

Vaclav Smil is a walking contradiction. He’s reportedly Bill Gates favorite scientist. He’s a prolific author of books with densely packed data, that nobody ever reads. He’s personally an environmentalist who lives in a modest, heavily insulated home and limits his meat consumption, but who’s almost contemptuously dismissive of renewable energy and “sustainability” (in this book he notes that “sustainability” is poorly defined and, when claims are closely examined most show more “sustainable” practices aren’t). A believer in climate change but dismissive of climate models. And not afraid to admit when he was wrong (so far, on the speed of collapse of the Soviet Union and the speed of expansion of China).

This is my first Smil book, although there are a lot of them on the wish list. I expect it’s typical; lots of examination of actual data rather than claims by the interested parties, resulting in something that will make neither the National Cattleman’s Beef Association nor the American Vegetarian Association happy. Smil notes that meat is a protein rich food and is especially desirable for children (he allows it’s possible to raise healthy children on a vegetarian diet, but you have to be very careful about it – and Smil’s definition of “vegetarian” includes eggs, milk, and fish). It’s historically a “prestige” food, and is frequently subject to religious restrictions (there are religions that prohibit pork, beef, and meat in general. Nobody bans carrots as sinful). And meat consumption correlates with affluence – or at least escape from poverty.

After pages of data and careful analysis, Smil concludes that moderate meat consumption is environmentally acceptable (as mentioned, he eschews the term “sustainable”). I do think he’s overlooked some of the technological advances possible – especially genetic engineering. I also wish he had taken a lot of the data given in-line in text and displayed it in charts and tables. But on the whole, I think his analysis is accurate and thought provoking. (Among the interesting things: meat consumption in China is rising faster than anywhere else in the world, and despite the claims of methane generation by ruminants and feedlots, the production of soybeans and maize for cattle feed generates far more greenhouse gas – by two orders of magnitude). show less

Summary: A scientific, data-based assessment of how our advanced technological global civilization has developed, the challenges we face, and what it realistically will take to address these challenges.

Can we get to “carbon zero” by 2050? Why has it been so hard to get everything from computer chips to PPE? Why didn’t the dire predictions of The Population Bomb come true? Vaclav Smil would maintain that to respond to these questions, we need to understand the science, the data, of how show more the world really works. And it is often the case in our public discussions, we have refused to take a hard look at the scientific realities and the technological possibilities.

Take the Population Bomb illustration for example. Back in 1968, Paul Ehrlich predicted massive deaths from famine resulting from overpopulation. At that time, the world population was 3.7 billion. Now it is over 8 billion, and no mammoth famines have occurred (yet). How could this be? It was the result of vastly increased grain yields resulting from hybrids and the intensive application of nitrogenous fertilizers manufactured with carbon-based fuels. Could we go back? Not easily–manure, the primary source of nitrogen before chemical fertilizers provides far less fertilizer, weighs far more and requires far more labor.

Or those shortages of chips and PPE. Facilitated by global supply chains, far-flung factories with lower wage scales, and container shipping, it was economically feasible to “offshore” manufacturing throughout the world. But is it wise, Smil asks, to manufacture 70 percent of rubber gloves in a single factory, or all our computer chips elsewhere? Manufacturing shutdowns and transport delays during the pandemic exposed this supply chain that all of us took for granted.

Smil challenges us to face the realities of modern life. Take our dependence on electric power. Apart from nuclear, carbon-fueled power plants offer the maximum of power-generating capability and reliability. Hydro, wind, and solar are both less efficient and reliable. And our increased energy usage offsets the gains we are making in renewables. Getting free of carbon-based power generation is not happening in places like China and India who are increasing their usage of such power.

Then there are what Smil calls “the four pillars of modern civilization”: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia. Ammonia is what feeds the world in terms of those nitrogenous fertilizers. The lightweight durability and moldability of plastic makes it widely used in everything from water bottles to airframes, yet also troublesome as it breaks down and infiltrates our water, and our bodies. The world runs on concrete in our highways and buildings, yet it also deteriorates over time as witnessed in bridge and high-rise collapses. Likewise, steel is ubiquitous in our building, various utensils, our vehicles, our tools and more. It is very recyclable. The fundamental truth we need to face is that, at present, the manufacture of all of these are massively dependent on fossil fuels. As yet, no renewable power sources exist to manufacture these.

Smil assesses our environmental challenges. These do not come in terms of oxygen, food, and water, basic constituents of life but in terms of decarbonization. He argues that none of the “zero carbon” goals even begins to wrestle with the “four pillars” of modern life, nor the challenges of electricity generation globally. This doesn’t prevent him for arguing that we must do what we can, from reducing waste in food production to converting to cleaner forms of transport and reducing energy use (such as installing triple-paned windows, and reducing meat consumption. But that won’t get us anywhere close to carbon zero and he excoriates the magical thinking of so many public pronouncements without substantive changes.

Smil includes a chapter on understanding risk, which seemed a bit of a diversion from the other subjects in the book, but also connects to his basic theme of how the world works. He illustrates that many of the risks we fear are less than the ones to which we are daily exposed–for example the risk of dying at the hands of a foreign terrorist are infinitesimal to that of dying from domestic gun violence of various sorts and that often we do not make policies on the basis of rational factors.

His final chapter deals with understanding the future, the flaws in all our future predictions (again, remember The Population Bomb). The reality is that we are navigating a space that is somewhere between apocalypse and singularity. While the future is uncertain, understanding in realistic terms our past and our present helps us recognize one thing–our actions do matter.

This is a daunting book, both in terms of technical detail and its dose of hard empirical reality–a bucket of cold water drenching our idealistic dreams of a carbon-free world. Smil does not say we shouldn’t work toward these things. Instead, I hear him saying, “Let’s get real and talk about how we are going to get there and how long it will take and what that will mean.” He resists pessimism, but also points tellingly to the lack of little more than empty promises on the global stage. He wants us to stop thinking we can evacuate to other planets. We’re not going to terraform Mars. As a scientist, he wants us to focus on how modern life in the only world we have really works. show less

Numbers fill almost every paragraph of this book, and it was honestly hard not to glaze over a lot. This is the fault of myself and not the book; a book like this is all about numbers, as it's about facts, how the world "really" works, after all.

The "four pillars of modern civilization" for Smil are: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia. Overall this book is about that material, tangible, real-world "stuff" of civilization; and Smil casts snarky asides at every opportunity towards show more microprocessors, smartphones, AI, and anything else that isn't "stuff." We need the "stuff", continuously, and in abundance, and the non-stuff isn't going to save us.

You might recognize cement, steel, and plastic as literal building blocks of civilization; but just in case you can't see how ammonia fits into the top four, it's due to importance as fertilizer. And abundant synthetic fertilizer was a crucial input to Earth's population boom. Simply put, "nearly 4 billion people would not have been alive without synthetic ammonia." More existentially important than silicon wafers, to be sure.

Cement? "Yet another [!] astounding statistic is that the world now consumes in one year more cement than it did during the entire first half of the 20th century."

And as for fossil fuels, and hopes for our conversion to renewable sources of energy? "Until all energies used to extract and process these materials come from renewable conversions, modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on the fossil fuels used in [their] production." It's the oil and natural gas that get us all this steel, cement, plastic, and ammonia. Electric cars are great. But renewable electricity is not going to be able to perform the herculean job that fossil fuels do today in terms of producing the material that makes our world go round.

Smil is neither an optimist nor a pessimist, but a scientist, and it comes through. It is refreshing to read someone who neither is gung ho about how we're gonna solve everything, nor ready to lay down and die. He thinks we'll muddle through. But here he cuts through the "muddle" of misleading information that comes from both optimists and pessimists. show less

Using quantities and statistics to explain energy supply, materials, risks and environmental concerns
I thouroughly enjoyed this clear-eyed look at the scale of energy and material needs in the world today. Smil explains the futility of green energy, the need for material and food, and the history of climate change, using the data readily available in the public record. He is not on any one side, he only uses facts and history for his explanations. It is the best book on current environmental show more concerns that I have read. show less