Review: Energy and Civilization
thepsmiths.com
thepsmiths.com
There are a lot of renewable/green energy advocates that don't like him and try to paint him in a bad light.
The reason mainly is that Smil takes a look at energy transitions and tells you: it's hard. He just analyzes in a very methodical way and paints the picture that is just grim because of the numbers and momentous challenge.
Smil himself is very much pro green energy, pro rational energy use and all the jazz. He just is not that optimistic that this is going to be easy or even see how the global warming problem is solvable.
It's a bit sad that some green energy advocates are missing the whole point of Smil and attack him personally even tho he is in fact one of the most useful allies.
If you want to have his views/analysis in an hour long youtube video instead of the (well worthy of a read) stack of books he has written then there is this lecture [0].
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szikg74kgnM
Edit: I have really crappy internet so I believe I actually meant this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJxmlNyu4sE
Quote:
> Vaclav Smil: ‘Growth must end. Our economist friends don’t seem to realise that’
Which is at least logically consistent, but bad timing as most of his boosters are currently trying to pivot from "climate change isn't real" to "bloody hippies are holding back rapid rollout of renewables with their environmental regulations" and hoping no one notices the contradiction and their history of fossil fuel apologism.
It's entirely possible to run human civilization at its current level of complexity without fossil fuels or uranium, entirely using the sun's energy output and the planet's energy output in the form of solar, wind, geothermal and storage.
Smil is entirely opposed to this notion, likely because the people who've promoted him don't want to see the value of their fossil fuel and uranium investments drop to zero. Wanna buy a kerosene lamp, anyone?
He does not say that anything about staying on fossils. He does not say anything about there not being enough green resources.
He just quantifies what it would take and the result is that we need to build like a reactor per week or massive amounts of PV/wind/etc. Much more and much quicker than we do.
The main example here is the cost of solar and wind - in his earlier books he assumes that the transition to renewables must go slower than it has, simply because solar and wind couldn't possibly be cost competitive with fossil fuels. (Yes, it's not cheaper in many circumstances, but I'm talking about cost-competitive against coal unsubsidized, for instance, something he would not have predicted would happen in the mid 2010s)
He's a fantastic historian of energy, but falls into one of Clarke's laws: _When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong_
Yes, the energy transition is very hard and will take longer than many boosters want, and the history suggests this, but he also doesn't realize that history can also be changed by _learning from_ that history.
Even though we don't need them, there is actually an enormous amount of technical improvements in the research pipeline of course. Major breakthroughs in material science, energy efficiency, energy density, cost, etc. Failing to take that into account is what makes many predictions wrong. Some of that stuff is very close to market readiness. E.g, 500 wh/kg batteries are coming to market this year. Better ones might follow a few years later. That stuff will revolutionize aviation and and a few other things. Also, several Chinese cars are now shipping with sodium ion batteries (no lithium, no cobalt, or other precious metals). So, we now have a viable path to electrification that isn't bottle-necked on relatively expensive/rare metals.
Most of the progress in the energy transition is cost driven. Green technology is achieving a lot of things but the most important one is that it makes things that used to be really expensive, really cheap. And this is not over yet. There are still some orders of magnitude cost improvements coming our way. Any predictions assuming this isn't happening are basically off by orders of magnitude as well. They overestimate cost. They underestimate effect. Most importantly they under estimate the levels of investment that are unlocked by this. Which is speeding all this up.
Historians tend to be weak on their math and economic skills. That's why this one got his assumptions wrong. The rest is still informative but basically an intellectual sand castle.
He's in good company of course. Lots of people got their predictions wrong based on assumptions they were making that were simply wrong. There's still a lot of that going on. Some of it is intentional even. People in the fossil fuel industry for example have been downplaying a lot of this stuff because they need to delay the moment that they go out of business. There is a lot of lobbying related to expected timelines and predictions. The stakes are really high. But what it boils down to is that a lot of fossil fuel based energy generation is effectively obsolete right now.
It's a bizarre narrative in my opinion because one of the most fundamental modern technologies, the semiconductor and micro-technologies in general are the result of relentless pursuit of efficiency, doing more on the same space, consuming less energy. Far from a symptom of stagnation it's a significant driver of civilization advancement.
Dematerializion and digitalization drastically reduce energy consumption but do not reduce rate of information processing. And that should be the yardstick for where a civilization is going.
He has one premise I agree with, that we can't decarbonize as quickly or easily as some hope. He then bludgeons the reader to death with it. I get it, okay!
Worse, much worse, he is incredibly myopic. For someone professing love and faith in science, he strangely seems to firmly believe we'll be stuck at our current technological level forever, the "end of history" fallacy on a whole other level. Have some faith in scientists, would you?
Factually, I don't doubt he's correct. But his assumptions and innuendo come off so strongly it completely ruined the book for me.
In general, I find this false dichotomy between efficiency and abundance so maddening. Why not both??
Let’s worry about that in 1400 years. _If_ we make it that far. As things stand we may not have to worry about it at all because we wont.
I’m one of those people, so this argument doesn’t work for me. There indeed appears to be a slowing of global population growth and an abundance of headroom to grow further.
Among said stars. I think earth should become a green utopia but humanity should colonise space starting with our own solar system.
I think we should expand everywhere we can. But keep home safe and clean.
Then why don’t they say so?
We can keep both space and home clean. But as a species we should grow into space. You know, there’s virtually endless … space in space.
I fully agree that we should be a society that produces a vast surplus of energy to perform actions or work that need doing.
With an abundance of energy, we can move mountains on this planet. What's holding us back is this silly belief we need to be living in the dark ages and not turning on the heater and staying inside a bunker so we don't freeze to death outside.
Electricity should be incredibly cheap coming out of outlets in our homes. We have the ability but not the political and social will to do this.
This is one of the more important sentences in this piece and I'm surprised they didn't expound on it.
marx is obviously linked to socialism (for good reason) but Marx was hardly unique in this leaning at that point in history. For example, Abraham Lincoln sounds an awful lot like Marx here [1] eg:
> Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.
Sounds an awful lot like the Labor Theory of Value [2] doesn't it?
Anyway, what the authors are referring to here is Dialectical materialism [3], which is the more important output of Das Kapital. Why? Because it frames economics, politics and history in terms of material outcomes, which is a far better predictor and explainer of such events than principles, philosophy or other "superficial" factors.
Put another way: you can analyze events through the lens of capital and wealth. War and revolution can be viewed as the ultimate means of wealth redistribution and an inevitable outcome of extreme wealth inequality.
So that's the similarity the authors alluded to when this reference to marx. Marx referred to material conditions. This piece used energy as the basis for analysis.
[1]: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/first-annual-messa...