Vaclav Smil
The great hope for a quick and sweeping transition to renewable energy is wishful thinking.Collection: Hope
The history of energy use is a sequence of transitions to sources that are cheaper, cleaner, and more flexible.Collection: History
Killing animals and eating meat have been significant components of human evolution that had a synergistic relationship with other key attributes that have made us human, with larger brains, smaller guts, bipedalism, and language.Collection: Relationship
Collaboration and augmentation are the foundational principles of innovation.
There is no doubt that human evolution has been linked to meat in many fundamental ways. Our digestive tract is not one of obligatory herbivores; our enzymes evolved to digest meat, whose consumption aided higher encephalization and better physical growth.
No human civilization could ever sever our dependence on photosynthesis.
The problems that ail the U.S. economy and American society are one and the same: Both consume too much and refuse to make badly needed changes. This is true above all in the realm of energy.
In every society, manufacturing builds the lower middle class. If you give up manufacturing, you end up with haves and have-nots, and you get social polarization. The whole lower middle class sinks.
People shouldn't be living in certain places - on earthquake faults or on flood plains. But they do, and there are consequences.
I studied what the Germans call the Naturwissenschaften, the natural sciences. Everything from biology to geology. How the clouds are formed, how the animals live, and what makes the rocks. So I know about nature. Period.
I am probably one of the last people on the planet without a cell phone.
Behind every morsel of bread, fruits, or meat is a large amount of transformed fossil fuels.
If everyone wants to eat like people in Bangladesh, then we would have food coming out of everybody's ears.
Renewable energy is very significant.
Your past always leads to who you are.
Exceptional circumstances can accelerate the gradual process of energy transitions: France's decision to develop nuclear energy on a grand scale is perhaps the best example of how that can be done by government fiat. In contrast, America's accelerated shift from coal has been driven by an inevitable embrace of cheaper natural gas.
Without any physical, chemical, and biological fundamentals, and with equally poor understanding of basic economic forces, it is no wonder that people will believe anything.
A brilliant mind having a eureka moment could not create an Intel microprocessor containing a billion transistors any more than one person could dream up a Boeing 787 from scratch.
Meat is undoubtedly an environmentally expensive food.
Some countries that grow lots of pork, like Denmark and the Netherlands, are either eliminating antibiotics or reducing them. We have to do that. Otherwise we'll create such antibiotic resistance, it will be just terrible.
You cannot increase the efficiency of photosynthesis. We improve the performance of farms by irrigating them and fertilizing them to provide all these nutrients. But we cannot keep on doubling the yield every two years. Moore's law doesn't apply to plants.
We're a society that demands electricity 24/7. This is very difficult with sun and wind.
Meat eaters don't like me because I call for moderation, and vegetarians don't like me because I say there's nothing wrong with eating meat. It's part of our evolutionary heritage! Meat has helped to make us what we are. Meat helps to make our big brains.
Economic and technical imperatives - not any preconceived directives - will keep propelling the process of energy transition.
This is the question I'm asking: Do Americans live twice as long because they consume twice as much energy as Europeans? Are you people twice as smart as the average Frenchman? Do you enjoy life twice as much as the average Danish guy? What have we gotten for consuming twice as much energy as Europe? What have we gotten in return?
When you talk in terms of electricity, renewable is very important. Hydro in Manitoba. Hydro in Sweden. Wind in Denmark. Of course, those are very important.
I live in a province where we have the cheapest electricity in North America - indeed, in the Western world - but all of it is perfectly renewable because we have beautiful Manitoba Hydro. Every few tens of kilometers, we can put a river dam. Bingo. One gigawatt here. One gigawatt here.
Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing - from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What's very important is in-house research.
Innovation usually arises from somebody taking a product already in production and making it better: better glass, better aluminum, a better chip. Innovation always starts with a product.
Mass adoption of renewable energies would thus necessitate a fundamental reshaping of modern energy infrastructures.
I appreciate and love blue-green algae.
I really don't think I have anything special to say.
I just don't stand for any nonsense.
I wouldn't put a big trust in what people in Silicon Valley say. They may be good at manipulating ones and zeroes and writing software, but beyond that, their contribution to human progress has been pretty dismal. I'm not impressed.
I'm old fashioned. I'm not one of these young guys who think they are so smart that they can prescribe what humanity ought to do. Humanity never learns any lessons. Prescriptions don't matter. We already know exactly what to do. We just don't do it.
There is no reason we can't design a car to last for 35 years instead of six or seven.
Evolution has made us omnivores, and substantial quantities of meat can be produced by feeding plant matter whose production does not directly compete with growing food crops: crop residues, food processing waste, low-quality grain, and controlled grazing by ruminants.
All I want is to be left alone to write my books.
Most of the energy in North America is just consuming - Wal-Mart, shopping centres, government offices - or personal consumption: houses, cars, flying to Hawaii, gambling in Las Vegas. We could live affluent lifestyles with half as much energy.
Harvesting the biosphere is still the most fundamental human activity. Without that, everybody's dead, really. We could do quite well without microchips, or the business site of 'Atlantic Monthly,' the gated communities, Guccis, and high-growth GDP. But we cannot do without harvesting the crops and cutting down the wood.
I'm the product of the classical, old-fashioned European education that is broad-based. You want to get your degree in the world, you have to study all sorts of things.
Our increasingly electrified, electronic, and data-driven society places steadily rising demand on reliable baseload power - that is, on electricity available 24/7/365. Servers never sleep, nor does air conditioning during hot nights, and in Asia's megacities, subways and electric trains take only brief naps between midnight and 5 A.M.
America tends to assume Silicon Valley-style innovators can drive quick and transformative changes, but even Silicon Valley's would-be masters of the universe have discovered that energy transitions are subject to time spans and technical constraints that defy their reach.
Canadians are hardly assertive or demanding. We don't expect U.S. presidents to bow down to our prime ministers when they visit us in Ottawa, nor are we looking for the occasional kickback on an F-16 deal.
Energy use is merely a means to many rewarding ends: economic security, education, health.
U.S. industries from steel-making to plastics synthesis are among the world's most energy-efficient; American agriculture is highly productive, as are America's railroads. But for decades, Americans themselves have been living beyond their means, wasting energy in their houses and cars and amassing energy-intensive throwaway products on credit.
Meat is undoubtedly an environmentally expensive food. Large animals have inherently low efficiency of converting feed to muscle, and only modern broilers can be produced with less than two units of feed per unit of meat.
Meat consumption is a part of our evolutionary heritage; meat production has been a major component of modern food systems. Carnivory should remain, within limits, an important component of a civilization that finally must learn how to maintain the integrity of its only biosphere.
Most scientific or engineering discoveries would never become successful products without contributions from other scientists or engineers. Every major invention is the child of far-flung parents who may never meet.
We insist on celebrating lone heroic path-finders, but even the most admired and the most successful inventors are part of a more remarkable supply chain of innovators who are largely ignored for the simpler mythology of one man or one eureka moment.