Talk
14 5.1.
The ‘‘really’’ in the title of Vaclav Smil’s
newest book, ‘‘How the World Really
Works: The Science Behind How We
Got Here and Where We’re Going,’’ is
doing some heavy lifting. 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 fl ows of data as the bedrock of
modern life — largely through examining
what he calls the four pillars of modern
civilization: cement, steel, plastics and
ammonia. (The production and use of
all four currently require burning huge
amounts of fossil carbon.) Which brings us
back to that ‘‘really.’’ In the context of Smil’s
book, which will be published May 10, the
word is also a rebuke to those calling for
rapid decarbonization in order to combat
global warming. ‘‘I am not talking about
what could be done,’’ says Smil, who is 78
and who counts Bill Gates among his many
devotees. ‘‘I’m looking at the world as it is.’’
One fundamental argument in your new
book^1 is that in order to have a serious
discussion about an energy transition
that gets us away from burning fossil car-
bon, we need a shared acknowledgment
of the material realities of the world.
Which is to say, an acknowledgment
that our current way of life is dependent
on burning that fossil carbon. But do
you believe decarbonization should be
the goal? And if rapid decarbonization
isn’t feasible, then what’s the best way to
stop heating the planet? The most import-
ant thing to understand is the scale. An
energy transition aff ecting a country of
one million people is very diff erent from
a transition aff ecting a nation of more than
one billion. It is one thing to invest a few
billion dollars, another to fi nd one trillion.
This is where we are in terms of global
civilization: This transition has to hap-
pen on a billion and trillion scales. Now,
according to COP26,^2 we should reduce
our carbon dioxide emissions by 45 per-
cent by 2030 as compared with 2010 levels.
This is undoable because there’s just eight
years left, and emissions are still rising.
People don’t appreciate the magnitude of
the task and are setting up artifi cial dead-
lines which are unrealistic. Now, to answer
your question. If you assume that carbon
dioxide is our deadliest problem, then of
course we should decarbonize totally. But
is it realistic that we’ll be sequestering so
rapidly on such a scale?^3 People toss out
these deadlines without any refl ection on
the scale and the complexity of the prob-
lem. Decarbonization by 2030? Really?
You know Pascal’s wager?^4 Yes, of course.
Couldn’t we think about the problem of
decarbonization in similar terms? Like,
yes, maybe all the eff ort to transition to
renewables won’t work, but the potential
upside is enormous. Why not operate
according to that logic? This is the misun-
derstanding people have: that we’ve been
slothful and neglectful and doing nothing.
True, we have too many S.U.V.s and build
too many big houses and waste too much
food. But at the same time we are constant-
ly transitioning and innovating. We went
from coal to oil to natural gas, and then as
we were moving into natural gas we moved
into nuclear electricity, and we started
building lots of large hydro, and they do
not emit any carbon dioxide directly. So
we’ve been transitioning to lower-carbon
or noncarbon sources for decades. The
world is constantly improving.
Even though we’re constantly improv-
ing, we’re also facing an imminentcatastrophe in climate change. I won-
der if that makes it hard for people to
internalize the improvement. This is also
making me think of a paper you wrote
about the future of natural gas in which
you referred to Bill McKibben as Amer-
ica’s ‘‘leading climate catastrophist.’’^5 Is
he wrong? What is ‘‘imminent’’? In science
you have to be careful with your words.
We’ve had these problems ever since we
started to burn fossil fuels on a large scale.
We haven’t bothered to do anything about
it. There is no excuse for that. We could
have chosen a diff erent path. But this is not
our only imminent global problem. About
one billion people are either undernour-
ished or malnourished. The fact of pos-
sible nuclear war these days. Remember
what they used to say about Gerald Ford?
He can’t walk and chew gum at the same
time. This is the problem of society today.
We cannot do three things at the same
time. So who decides what is imminent?
That’s not quite an answer to the ques-
tion. I may have used the word ‘‘immi-
nent’’ coarsely, but what about the
word ‘‘catastrophe’’? For more than 30
years, global warming has been makingBelow: Vaclav
Smil teaching at the
University of
Manitoba,
whose faculty he
joined in 1972.David Marchese
is the magazine’s Talk
columnist.