This is quite a short work, a couple of hundred pages of text, padded-out with another hundred pages of references and indexes, but packed with information and argument. Smil has a lot to say about energy, maybe one third of the book. A subject that he ties closely to population. For instance, to bring the three billion poorest 40% of the world’s population up near a dignified standard of living means doubling or tripling their use of energy. In the face of the unfolding issue of climate change, the much touted switch to renewables comes up against the uncomfortable fact that ours is a ‘fossil-fueled civilization’ and ‘we cannot walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years’. In the introduction Smil advocates moving away from extreme views. The world is not going to end in 2030, nor is artificial intelligence going to fix everything. He promises an agnostic view of how the world really works and what the chances are of ‘better prospects for the next generation’.
And so to energy, ‘the only true universal currency’, even though it is one which does not much concern the economists except when prices spike! Energy is also poorly understood by the general population and many journalists, witness the frequent mix ups between kilowatts and kilowatt-hours. Following a short history of the rise of fossil fuels and the unfortunate consequences of CO2 as a greenhouse gas Smil acknowledges that ‘according to most climate models, keeping global warming under 1.5°C would mean reducing CO2 emissions to zero by 2050’. Nothing new there. ‘Net zero’ requires continued CO2 emissions to be ‘compensated’ by (as yet nonexistent) large-scale removal of CO2. Net zero has led to a ‘me too’ game with many companies pledging allegiance. Smil take some pleasure (Schadenfreude?) in unpicking Germany’s struggling Energiewende transition.
Getting back to energy as currency, Smil turns to food production, taking a Socratic middle way through the debate. While vegan ‘is a waste of valuable biomass’ (due to indigestible cellulose), ‘carnivory’ has no proven nutritional benefits. But fossil fuels and (energy laden) fertilizers crop up everywhere. Energy and mechanization have hiked food productivity by orders of magnitude. In two centuries, the human labor required to produce a kilogram of wheat has been reduced from ten minutes to less than two seconds. ‘That is how the world really works!’ Another fascinating energy and food fact is that ‘putting a kilogram of roasted chicken on the table requires at least 300mg of diesel. And out of season tomatoes from heated greenhouses need 500mg/kg of diesel. Once that tomato has been trucked to a consumer in Scandinavia, the cost in diesel climbs to 650mg/kg. Adding up the whole food-related supply chain and we find that around 20% of US energy is devoted to food. ‘Even if we try to change the global food system as fast as possible we will still be eating transformed fossil fuels for decades to come’.
Smil has little time for current focus on intangibles (GDP growth, debt, IPOs), nor for trendy technology (5G, AI). The four pillars of modern civilization come from the material world and are ammonia, plastics, steel and concrete. He digs deep and insightfully into each of these pillars, all of which are closely linked to energy. Moreover, ‘until all the energy used [ making the four ‘pillars’] comes from renewables, modern civilization will remain dependent on fossil fuels’. ‘No AI, no apps, no electronic messages will change this’.
Other chapters cover globalization and risk, with up to date (Covid 19 but not Ukraine) insights. On risk, Smil compares humanity’s knee-jerk reaction to some low probability events that hit home (9-11 and the ensuing billion dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) and the blind eye that the American people turn to gun violence.
By now you will be wondering what exactly Smil’s take on anthropogenic global warning actually is and what exactly ‘we should be doing’ as promised up front. His opinion is tucked away in a chapter on ‘understanding the environment’ where he promises an ‘unorthodox’ approach explaining how the ‘life-enabling’ greenhouse gas effect has been ‘enhanced’ (mostly by fossil fuels) to become the main driver of anthropogenic global warming. Smil claims that the physics behind AGW were well understood over a century ago and that it didn’t take either computer modeling or the establishment of an ‘international bureaucracy’ (the GIEC) to make us aware of the problem. He is fairly dismissive about the efforts that the world has put into countering CO2 emissions. Progress in Solar PV and wind turbines has been ‘completely negated’ by rising emissions in Asia.
Smil’s own position on what should be done is hard to pin down. He is dismissive of both the GIEC’s advocacy for water wind and solar coming (WWS) to the rescue in any reasonable time frame. He is equally dismissive of the more catastrophic claims of the environmentalists. His main argument is that WWS is being developed too slowly and will have a hard time supporting the four pillars of civilization and that anyhow, the energy needs of the developing world will blow apart all the targets. So Smil’s ‘unorthodox’ position is that ‘the sheer scale, cost and technical inertia of carbon-dependent activities make it impossible to eliminate all of these uses in just a few decades’. At the same time he advocates switching from coal to natural gas (remember, this was written before Ukraine) and from SUVs to electric cars, all of which is hardly unorthodox.
Non carbon energies ‘could completely displace fossil carbon in one to three decades only if we were willing to take substantial cuts to our standard of living’. One takes it that Smil considers this unlikely. More achievable CO2 reduction is possible but over what timescale this may take effect is moot. ‘We cannot know to what extent [such measures] will succeed by 2050’ and ‘thinking about 2100 is truly beyond our ken’.
In this reviewer’s quest to figure out what Smil’s position on AGW, whole chunks of his reasoning and commentary have been left aside. He takes some great swipes at the forecasters, computer modelers and AI brigade. His analysis of world population growth and past prediction errors is fascinating. The size of the world’s population is as key to our future as it is uncertain. Smil is an entertaining, erudite and engagingly curmudgeonly writer. He is better at knocking current orthodoxies than proposing solutions. Perhaps he is right that there are no silver bullets to fixing climate change.
* How the World Really Works Viking Press 2022, ISBN 9780241454398
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