Vaclav Smil
Penguin ISBN 978-0-241-45439-8
Vaclav Smil’s latest, How the World Really Works, is a summary of the case he’s been making in more than 40 books since 1976 that solving the world’s energy problems is harder, more complex, and more unpredictable than much of the breezy rhetoric from advocates of particular policies, politics, and technologies.
The word that is inescapably associated with Smil is “real.” He is a realist, a pragmatist, one who, with pleasure, bursts the overly optimistic balloons floating in the policy air around limiting carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. As Smil sees it, the idea of zero net emissions by 2050 is a pipedream.
His discussion of net zero emissions focuses on “net.” He writes that “carbon neutrality…allows for continued emissions to be compensated by (as yet nonexistent!) large-scale removal of CO2 from the atmosphere and its permanent storage underground, or by such temporary measures as the mass-scale planting of trees.”
Coincidentally, my reading of Smil coincided with a Twitter thread led by Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins, who studies, among other things, the transition to a zero carbon world. The thread looked at the practicality of carbon dioxide removal (with a predicable acronym CDR), meaning sucking CO2 out of the air and hiding it somewhere.
In the thread, climate scientist Genevieve Guenther comments that the “amount of net-negative emissions that CDR could theoretically deliver seems likely to be a lot less than the amount of ‘legacy CO2’ that is currently in the atmosphere.” Jenkins responds, “Oh yes. It’ll take decades or a century+ to meaningfully draw down atmospheric levels at a pace of a few gigatons per year.” Smil would smile and nod at that exchange.
A New York Times interview sums up Smil’s approach: “Implicit in the renowned energy scientist’s usage is the idea that most of us are uninformed or just plain wrong about the fundamentals of the global economy. He aims to correct that — to recenter materials rather than electronic flows of data as the bedrock of modern life.”
In the book, Smil focuses on four hard materials that demand fossil fuels, and that evangelists of carbon reduction tend to ignore. He calls them “The four pillars of modern civilization” and they are cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia. Writes Smil, “Physically and chemically, these four materials are distinguished by an enormous diversity of properties and functions. But despite these differences in attributes and specific uses, they share more than their indispensability for the functioning of modern societies.” All four require enormous quantities of fossil fuels.
Who is Vaclav Smit, Bill Gates’s favorite author? Smil, 79, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the faculty of environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. His interdisciplinary research interests encompass a broad area of energy, environmental, food, population, economic, historical and public policy studies.
He was born in what was then the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and is now the Czech Republic. He graduated from Charles University in Prague with a focus on natural sciences, and refused to join the Communist party, as Czechoslovakia was then part of the Soviet Union. He and his wife emigrated to the U.S. in 1969, following Russia’s invasion to put down a democratic uprising, leaving the country just prior to a Soviet-imposed travel ban.
He then earned a PhD in geography from Penn State in 1971 and joined the University of Manitoba faculty in 1972.
Smil’s books are not easy reading, which is true of The Way Things Really Work. But they are worth the work.
–Kennedy Maize
Twitter (kennedymaize)