New Yorker has a long profile of Vaclav Smil. His books have been on my list of too-many-books-to-read-before-i-die for a long time, and have occasionally been semi-finalists, but I have not yet gotten to any of them. The latest is called How the World Really Works.
Basically, he sees himself as bringing relentless rationality and quantitativeness to discussing the world’s energy situation, and is often characterized as an anti-environmentalist as a result. He points out how much energy we really use to make modern civilization possible and how fossil fuels mostly make this possible. For example,
…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.
New Yorker
Increases in efficiency and renewable energy technology are happening, but when he does the math he finds that they are not happening fast enough to bend the curve of consumption and pollution back downwards in the face of relentlessly increasing consumption, especially in the developing world.
The recent slowing of China’s rate of industrialization—S-shaped curves eventually flatten—has not ended its reliance on fossil fuels; the Chinese are still building new coal-fired power plants at the rate of roughly two a week. Not that long ago, Beijing was still a city of bicycles; today, it’s plagued by air pollution, much of it produced by cars. China is the world’s leader in the manufacture of electric vehicles, but it’s also the world’s leader in generating electricity by burning coal. India’s road network, which is already the world’s second longest, after ours, is growing rapidly.
China’s energy consumption will likely peak before 2030, Smil said, but India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and countries in sub-Saharan Africa, among others, are already aiming to follow its growth example. “Don’t forget that at least two and a half billion people around the world still burn wood and straw and even dried dung for everyday activities—the same fuels that people burned two thousand years ago,” he continued. For many years to come, he added, economic growth in such places will necessarily be powered primarily by coal, oil, and natural gas. “They will do what we have done, and what China has done, and what India is trying to do now,” he said. The rate at which the world decarbonizes, he continued, will be determined by them, not by us.
(still New Yorker, but I’m a good little intellectual property rights respecting monkey)
I had this sense when I lived in Asia, that Asia is just so vast and the potential for explosive growth is so enormous that what we do in the US and western Europe will be overwhelmed by their impacts.
I am definitely on the side of math, logic, and reason which are in short supply in this world. I don’t like cynicism disguised as realism to be a substitute for making and having a plan. If math, logic, and reason show that the sort of half-assed plan the world has is not going to work, then the world needs to go back to the drawing board and come up with something that is going to work. It’s like saying your train is headed for a cliff and the the breaks on your train are not strong enough to stop the train before the cliff. If you throw up your hands and do nothing, you are going off the cliff which is not really an option. Trying to do literally anything is a better option than doing nothing. You would find ways to try to slow down the train or improve the brakes even if you thought the chances of success were low, right?
