Matter on my mind
My review of 'How the World Really Works: A Scientist's Guide to Our Past, Present and Future' by Vaclav Smil, entered for the ACX Book Review 2023 competition. It didn't win.
1. Bill Gates made me do it
OK, I admit it: it was Bill Gates who told me to read this book. Here’s what he, or his email factotum/bot, wrote in June 2022 under ‘5 great books for the summer’[1] The email also included this picture of a smiling Bill with the beguiling books against a bucolic background.
The bit about How the World Really Works says:
“Another masterpiece from one of my favorite authors. Unlike most of Vaclav’s books, which read like textbooks and go super-deep on one topic, this one is written for a general audience and gives an overview of the main areas of his expertise. If you want a brief but thorough education in numeric thinking about many of the fundamental forces that shape human life, this is the book to read. It’s a tour de force.”
I’m a sucker for the fundamental forces that shape human life. Also I’m not averse to a few stats, plus at 200 pages what could go wrong? I didn’t comply because I think Bill has great literary taste, but I do admire his philanthropy and appreciate his influence as a leading funder of global health, the area in which I work.
By amazing coincidence, as I raced to finish this review on deadline day, 5 April, Bill emailed me again to remind me “Vaclav Smil’s books are always phenomenal”[2]. And now I can confirm that, I feel virtuous both for obeying the will of Gates by reading Smil, and for writing this review so you don’t have to.
2. From the middle of somewhere: Bohemia to Manitoba
Q: How many Winnipeggers does it take to change a light bulb? A: CHANGE?!
If continents had navels, North America’s might be the lake called winipīhk or "murky water" in Western Cree.
The University of Manitoba in Winnipeg was founded as a Provincial University in 1877 a now ‘ranked among the top research and teaching institutions in the Canadian Prairies’[3]. Here, Baldur Stefansson pioneered the development of canola, a commercial variety of rapeseed now widely grown as a vegetable oil and animal feedstock.
But our story begins two years before Baldur’s breakthrough began to turn fields bright yellow. In 1972, a Bohemian refugee named Vaclav Smil turned up at the university as a junior lecturer in the environment faculty. It was his first job, and he ended up staying for over 50 years. By his own account "intensely private", Smil assiduously avoided faculty meetings but continued to teach introductory environmental science courses until his retirement.
Perhaps his reclusive nature helped power his prolific scholarship. Over five decades, Smil has published some 500 research papers and 40 books. These focus mainly on energy, population and economic development, food production, climate change, the history of technical innovation, risk and public policy.
Far from the bold frontiers of the futurist AI matrix - he doesn’t even own a smartphone – his subject matter is the real world of material, energy, production and consumption. This world is measured not in memes, pixels or singularities, but in tonnes and terawatts – and plenty of them!
So how did this shy scholar from the sticks become a darling of Davos, adviser to presidents, Bill Gates’ favourite author and the very model of a modern major public intellectual? There are some clues in his origin story, recounted in a rare interview in Science Magazine in 2018[4].
Vaclav Smil was born in 1943 in the mountains of Plzeň province, Bohemia, in the middle of war-torn Europe. As a boy, he recalls cutting wood for hours every day to keep the home fires burning, an early lesson in the economics of energy and the primacy of primary industry.
Life in post-war Czechoslovakia was cold and hard, but it gave him a solid grounding in science, and imbued a healthy scepticism of official untruths and magical thinking. At Charles University in Prague, Smil studied 35 science classes a week 10 months a year for five years. His diligence was due to both enthusiasm - "They taught me nature, from geology to clouds," he told Science – and necessity - it was much warmer in the classroom than his lodgings.
On graduating, he self-sabotaged his academic and career prospects by refusing to join the Communist party. Instead, he got a junior job at a regional planning office, and married his fiancée Eva, a medical student.
In 1969, the Soviet invasion chilled the political climate even more, so as soon as Eva graduated, they emigrated to the USA. Here, despite having to learn English and survive in a new world, Vaclav managed to get his PhD in geography from Penn State University.
3. Limits to Growth and failures of forecasting
As the Smils settled in Manitoba in 1972, the Limits to Growth report was published by The Club of Rome. Not as fun as it sounds, this club was an earnest think tank of great and good founded by Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei. Its modern Malthusian vision was set out in a 1969 manifesto: The Predicament of Mankind; Quest for Structured Responses to Growing Worldwide Complexities and Uncertainties.
"It is this generalized meta-problem (or meta-system of problems) which we have called and shall continue to call the "problematic" that inheres in our situation", The Predicament intoned. Put simply, the earth’s resources are limited, and that there are too many humans consuming too many of them too quickly.
Limits to Growth was a much more substantial work, with the added gloss of state-of-the-art computing power. Its authors used the World3 model to simulate the consequence of interactions between the earth and human systems. They concluded that without substantial changes in global resource consumption, "the most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity".
Limits to Growth was hugely influential, but like most prophesies of imminent doom, this report of the planet’s demise was greatly exaggerated.
Vaclav Smil was one of the early sceptics, his nose for bullshit having been well trained in Prague. He taught himself programming to re-create the model, and as he told Science:
“I saw it was utter nonsense,” he recalls; the model was far too simple and easily skewed by initial assumptions. He constructed a similar model of how carbon dioxide emissions affect climate and found it similarly wanting. He understood the physics of the greenhouse effect and the potential for a carbon dioxide buildup to warm Earth, but models seemed too dependent on assumptions about things like clouds. Ever since, he's held models of all kinds in contempt. “I have too much respect for reality,” he says.
Much if his work, including this latest book, concerns the failures of forecasting, and the absurdity of many of the models, targets and projections that continue to be churned out by governments, policy think tanks and advocacy groups. He is particularly scathing about high-level goals such as ‘net-zero by 2050’, which are meant to be motivating, but end up undermining trust.
4. Energy transition is really hard work
This respect for reality earned Smil kudos among policy makers. Following the oil shocks of the mid-1970s, his work on energy transitions gained currency. He wrote a series of books: General Energetics: Energy in the Biosphere and Civilization (1991), Energy in World History (1994), and Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects (2010).
These books were never an easy or popular read, but they have become increasingly influential. The grinding, systematic accumulation of detail, data-crunching and cautious scepticism went down well with government technocrats wrestling with intractable problems of energy supply and production. And amid the forest of facts and figures, large ideas lurk.
Smil’s basic thesis is that humanity has experienced three major energy transitions: fire, farming and fossil fuels. Historically, these enabled huge increases in human population, consumption and comfort. Now, in the face of anthropogenic climate change, we are trying to push through a fourth transition – to decarbonise the global economy by moving to renewable energy sources.
The problem is our massive legacy of dependence on coal, gas and oil. We use these not only for energy generation and fuel for transport and manufacturing, but also as chemical feedstock for the fertilisers we rely on to grow enough food, and for the concrete and plastics we use to build our world.
In 2018, Smil pointed out that despite decades of growth in renewable energy technologies, fossil fuels now account for 90% of the world's primary energy. The worldwide proportion of energy supplied by fossil fuels actually increased in the two decades since 2000, as energy use has rocketed in low and middle income countries, as they have transitioned from burning biomass (wood and dung) to coal, oil, and gas.
For all the hype, and despite genuine technological progress and economic scale-up of solar and wind energy, the renewables revolution is barely scratching the surface of the ‘problematic’. And even if we could achieve a solarpunk utopia of cheap renewable electricity generation and storage, it wouldn’t break our dependence on fossil fuels for transport and industrial production.
Because of this scepticism, Smil has attracted the ire of climate activists and advocates. But far from denying the reality or magnitude of the climate crisis, Smil is acutely aware it. However, he does not believe either the projections or the proposed solutions are realistic. Even simple back-of-the-envelope calculations show that transition to sustainable energy will involve genuine sacrifices in consumption and living standards.
As he laboriously points out, the policy ‘goals’ of ‘net zero’ by 2030, 2050 or whenever are a pipe dream, and the models retro-fitted to support them are built on fairy dust. For him, both facile forecasts of eco-apocalypse and the panaceas pushed by techno-optimists are worse than useless. Blatantly false and fantastical, they undermine both public trust and decision-makers’ ability to act effectively.
So what is the appropriate response? Smil advocates reducing demand for fossil fuels through energy conservation, and an end to the huge subsidies governments provide their coal, oil and gas industries. Renewables will only be competitive if the price of energy reflect its real costs including greenhouse gas emissions.
5. How the World Really Works: what’s not to like?
As a prophet of gloomy realism, Smil’s message has never been popular, and in previous works his writing style was boringly technocratic. It seems his growing may have prompted him, his publisher or perhaps his legion of policy-wonk admirers to cash in on his renown to push for a more populist effort.
The introduction is entitled ‘Why do we need this book?’ and at one level the answer is ‘maybe we don’t’.
HTWRW is certainly more accessible for the general reader than his previous work. But there’s very little new in terms of content, aside from a sprinkling of topical covid references to illustrate how poorly governments respond to crises.
And despite its undeniably important central thesis, the book is annoying and frustrating. I have four main criticisms.
5.1. Prolixity
First off, Smil’s style is excessively verbose, and stacked with adjectives. This passage from page 4 gives a good preview of what’s in store:
“The other major reason for the poor and declining understanding of those fundamental processes that deliver energy (as food or as fuels) and durable materials (whether metals, non-metallic minerals or concrete) is that they have come to be seen as old-fashioned - if not outdated and distinctly unexciting compared to the world of information, data and images, the proverbial best minds do not go into soil science, and do not try their hand at making better cement. Instead, they are attracted to dealing with disembodied information now just streams of electrons in myriads of microdevices. From lawyers and economists to code writers and money managers, their disproportionately high rewards are for work completely removed from the material realities of life on Earth.”
In a three-line acknowledgement section at the very end, he thanks only his London editor ‘for giving me another chance to write a wide-ranging book’ and his son David for being its first reader and critic. This doesn’t imply that either of them actually made much of an editorial contribution, and the text would have benefitted from more critical input from non-relatives.
5.2. Hectoring
Secondly, Smil comes across as a right old curmudgeon. For example, the passage above continues:
“Moreover, many of these data worshippers have come to believe that these electronic flows will make those quaint old material necessities unnecessary. Fields will be displaced by urban high rise, agriculture and synthetic products will ultimately eliminate the need to grow any food at all dematerialisation powered by artificial intelligence will end our dependence on shaped masses of metals and processed minerals, and eventually we might even do without the Earth’s environment: who needs it, If we are going to terraform Mars?
“Of course, these are all not just grossly premature predictions, they are fantasies fostered by a society where fake news has become common, and where reality and fiction have commingled to such an extent that gullible minds, susceptible to cult-like visions, believe what keener observers in the past would have mercilessly perceived as borderline or frank delusion.”
I happen to agree with this analysis, and quite enjoy this querulous and slightly vitriolic style. It is a useful corrective to the indulgent flights of fancy to which rationalist, transhumanist and other tech-adjacent forums are prone. Dare I suggest some ACX pundits are occasionally ‘susceptible to cult-like visions’?
But in railing against folly and hypocrisy, Smil is a broken record. Worse, he seems contemptuous of his contemporaries, if not his readers. Refreshing at first, the bile and sarcasm quickly become boring, and may deter more sensitive souls who prefer civil discourse.
5.3. Information overload
Thirdly, and speaking of repetition, the sheer quantity of numbers in the book is orders of magnitude larger than that needed to make his case. Smil makes no secret of his intent to bombard us with facts, figures and statistics, and there’s even an appendix about them.
Like Smaug atop his hoard, Smil knows the weight and value of each of the myriad gems his long scholarship has unearthed. He is keen to show his readers the magnitude of this wealth of information. Every numbered page is weighed down with megaton(ne)s of data.
Unfortunately, these do not always clearly support the edifice of his argument, and often seem rather random, included simply because Smil can’t bear to leave them out. Like an over-stuffed museum case, the magnificence is lost in the multitude. A few more carefully chosen and displayed pieces might have served more effectively to convey the sense.
For example on one page I chose semi-randomly (42, for hitch-hikers fans), there are eight references to specific dates or time periods, eight percentages and several large numbers and scalar comparisons. This is typical, and actually easier to digest than most of the book as the quantities are in tons, rather than Wh/kg or megajoules per kilogram.
But the argument seems to mix apples with pears, and in the case of a key passage on the same page 42, oil with water, as well as wheat and rice:
“Annual global demand for fossil carbon is now just above 10 billion tons a year - a mass nearly five times more than the recent annual harvest of all staple grains feeding humanity and more than twice the total mass of water drunk annually by the world’s nearly 8 billion inhabitants - and it should be obvious that displacing and replacing such a mass is not something best handled by government targets for years ending in zero or five.”
Perhaps it should be, but it’s not entirely obvious. Another semi-random example from page 183, in the chapter on climate change, is similarly baffling:
"Because of the rising concentrations of greenhouse gases, the planet has been, for generations, re-radiating slightly less energy that is has been receiving from the Sun. By 2020, the net value of this difference was about 2 watts per square meter compared to the 1850 baseline."
But over 170 years, is that a lot of energy or a little? After a while, the constant cascade becomes numbing, even to those of us who are scientifically literate and really like data.
5.4. No future
The book is subtitled ‘A Scientist's Guide to Our Past, Present and Future’. While the material facts of past and present are very well-covered, there’s not a lot about the future. As previously mentioned, Smil is a critic of fatuous forecasting. He also points out several times, perhaps protesting too much, that he is neither an optimist nor a pessimist, but a scientist. However he is shy of making any actual predictions based on that science.
His seventh chapter, ‘Understanding the future: Between Apocalypse and Singularity’ is barely 25 pages long. It mostly comprises a summary of existential risks, the observation that all past predictions of catastrophe and the panaceas of techno-optimists alike have proven wrong, and a long lament over our leaders’ failure to learn from past and current crises.
The most interesting observation for me is a short passage on page 206-7, comparing forecasts of things we understand and can predict reasonably confidently over a period of years to decades, such as demographic change, with those with more parameters and dependencies we can estimate very roughly, and those we can only guess, such as the impact of new technologies.
Aptly, the only real prediction he actually makes is that the future will be as subject to error and folly as the past and present. Plus ça change, or as Auden put it: “Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.”[5]
The chapter and the book conclude:
“A realistic grasp of our past, present and uncertain future is the best foundation for approaching the unknowable expense of time before us. While we cannot be specific, we know that the most likely prospect is a mixture of progress and setbacks, of seemingly insurmountable difficulties and near miraculous advances the future, as ever, is not predetermined. Its outcome depends on our actions.”
It’s hardly a lightbulb moment, more a resigned shrug that leaves the reader feeling disempowered to act in any particular direction, apart from turning down the thermostat and checking the double-glazing. But what would one expect from a Winnipegger?
6. So what’s to recommend?
Last year, I took part in Philip Tetlock’s hybrid forecasting and persuasion tournament. This required us to make very specific predictions related to extinction risk, pandemics, bioterrorism, AI and other events, and then debate them in randomly assorted teams. It was fun, but I found myself losing patience with some of my team-mates quibbling over minute fractions of percentage probabilities of outcomes many decades ahead.
If I had read this book before participating, I probably would have quit (and missed out on a tidy payment). As an old curmudgeon myself, I tend to agree with Smil’s analysis and appreciate his ill-humour as a nice counterbalance to current wishful thinking. For all the faults, it’s hard to argue against his central thesis - don’t believe the hype.
And that should be applied equally to the praise on the back cover from Gates and others. Smil’s pose of objectivity is specious, and some of his arguments about energy are questionable[6].
And it seems ironic that Smil’s greatest cheerleader is a self-declared ‘impatient optimist’ who is using his vast wealth and influence to at least try to solve major global problems. While I enjoyed the book for all its flaws, I couldn’t help thinking Smil should return the favour by reading more Bill.
[1] 5 great books for the summer | Bill Gates (gatesnotes.com) 6 June, 2022
[2] An email from my younger self | Bill Gates (gatesnotes.com) 4 April 2023
[3] Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Manitoba
[4] The realist - interview in Science Magazine by Paul Voosen, 23 March 2018
[5] https://poets.org/poem/september-1-1939
[6] How the World Really Works in LSE Review of Books by Iancu Daramus, 17 September, 2022