Vaclav Smil > Quotes

“Life’s great dichotomy is between autotrophs, organisms that can nourish themselves, and heterotrophs, or life forms that must feed on other organisms.”
― Vaclav Smil, Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature

“the world now consumes in one year nearly as much steel as it did during the first post-World War II decade, and (even more incredibly) more cement than it consumed during the first half of the twentieth century.”
― Vaclav Smil, Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization

“The last time such a loss occurred was during the 1930s, and what makes it such a concern this time is that the dismal job creation statistic has been accompanied by huge and rising budget deficits, large and persistent trade deficits, enormous indebtedness, a low saving rate, a worsening state of indispensable modern infrastructure, poor achievements in education for the masses, worrisome public health (marked by a historically unprecedented incidence of obesity)—and a grossly dysfunctional government to run it all. When seen from this perspective, the state of US manufacturing is a clear cause for concern.”
― Vaclav Smil, Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing

“China’s ruling party, as firmly in control of the government as ever, attracts foreign companies and enormous direct investment by guaranteeing the stability of a police state and by supplying a docile workforce that labors with minimum rights, commonly for extended hours under severe discipline, and is housed in substandard conditions.”
― Vaclav Smil, Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing

“A useful analogy is to see traditional societies as relying on instantaneous (or minimally delayed) and constantly replenished solar income, while modern civilization is withdrawing accumulated solar capital at rates that will exhaust it in a tiny fraction of the time that was needed to create it.”
― Vaclav Smil, Energy: A Beginner's Guide

“And why do we measure the progress of economies by gross domestic product? GDP is simply the total annual value of all goods and services transacted in a country. It rises not only when lives get better and economies progress but also when bad things happen to people or to the environment. Higher alcohol sales, more driving under the influence, more accidents, more emergency-room admissions, more injuries, more people in jail—GDP goes up. More illegal logging in the tropics, more deforestation and biodiversity loss, higher timber sales—again, GDP goes up. We know better, but we still worship high annual GDP growth rate, regardless of where it comes from.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

“For every dollar invested in vaccination, $16 is expected to be saved in healthcare costs and the lost wages and lost productivity caused by illness and death.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

“Could such a shift be accomplished without eventually converting to a no-growth economy and reducing the current global population? For individuals, this would mean a no less revolutionary delinking of social status from material consumption.”
― Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History

“Now most people in affluent and middle-income countries worry about what (and how much) is best to eat in order to maintain or improve their health and extend their longevity, not whether they will have enough to survive.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future

“Physics is indisputable, but economics rules.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

“What is the actual link between material consumption and objective and subjective quality of life once the basic needs for food, clothes, shelter, and mobility are well satisfied? Going from material misery to modest material comfort will make many things in life better but, obviously, the link is not an endless escalator. But if so, where is the saturation point? Can such a level actually be quantified in a meaningful way? These questions must be asked even if there are no easy answers, mainly because of the situation that is the very opposite of the material poverty outlined at the beginning of this section: too many people live in the condition of material excess and this does not endow them with a higher physical quality of life than that enjoyed by moderate consumers and it does not make them exceptionally happy. At the most fundamental level, the question is about the very nature of modern economies. All but a tiny minority of economists (those of ecological persuasion) see the constant expansion of output as the fundamental goal. And not just any expansion: economies should preferably grow at annual rates in excess of 2%, better yet 3%. This is the only model, the only paradigm, and the only precept, as the economists in command of modern societies cannot envisage a system that would deliberately grow at a minimum rate, even less so one that would experience zero growth, and the idea of a carefully managed decline appears to them to be outright unimaginable. The pursuit of endless growth is, obviously, an unsustainable strategy (Binswanger, 2009), and the post-2008 experience has shown how dysfunctional modern economies become as soon as the growth becomes negligible, ceases temporarily or when there is even a slight decline: rising unemployment, falling labor participation, growing income inequality, and soaring budget deficits.”
― Vaclav Smil, Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization

“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. Both the high relative share and the scale of our dependence on fossil carbon make any rapid substitutions impossible: this is not a biased personal impression stemming from a poor understanding of the global energy system – but a realistic conclusion based on engineering and economic realities.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“The story of humanity – evolution of our species; prehistoric shift from foraging to permanent agriculture; rise and fall of antique, medieval, and early modern civilizations; economic advances of the past two centuries; mechanization of agriculture; diversification and automation of industrial protection; enormous increases in energy consumption; diffusion of new communication and information networks; and impressive gains in quality of life – would not have been possible without an expanding and increasingly intricate and complex use of materials.”
― Vaclav Smil, Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization

“My own choice of a single-variable measure for rapid and revealing comparisons of quality of life is infant mortality: the number of deaths during the first year of life that take place per 1,000 live births. Infant mortality is such a powerful indicator because low rates are impossible to achieve without having a combination of several critical conditions that define good quality of life—good healthcare in general, and appropriate prenatal, perinatal, and neonatal care in particular; proper maternal and infant nutrition; adequate and sanitary living conditions; and access to social support for disadvantaged families—and that are also predicated on relevant government and private spending, and on infrastructures and incomes that can maintain usage and access. A single variable thus captures a number of prerequisites for the near-universal survival of the most critical period of life: the first year.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

“energy is the only truly universal currency, and nothing (from galactic rotations to ephemeral insect lives) can take place without its transformations.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“But if today's low-income countries are to move from poverty to an incipient affluence... then none of those factors could make a difference without the rising consumption of fuels and electricity: a decoupling of economic growth and energy consumption during early stages of modern economic development would defy the laws of thermodynamics." (p. 350, italics added)”
― Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History

“Crises expose realities and strip away obfuscation and misdirection.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: A Scientist's Guide to Our Past, Present and Future

“Unfortunately, motor vehicles are also responsible for 1.25 million accidental deaths every year (and more than ten times as many serious injuries),”
― Vaclav Smil, Energy: A Beginner's Guide

“The principal reason for this limited mastery of materials was the energy constraint: for millennia our abilities to extract, process, and transport biomaterials and minerals were limited by the capacities of animate prime movers (human and animal muscles) aided by simple mechanical devices and by only slowly improving capabilities of the three ancient mechanical prime movers: sails, water wheels, and wind mills. Only the conversion of the chemical energy in fossil fuels to the inexpensive and universally deployable kinetic energy of mechanical prime movers (first by external combustion of coal to power steam engines, later by internal combustion of liquids and gases to energize gasoline and Diesel engines and, later still, gas turbines) brought a fundamental change and ushered in the second, rapidly ascending, phase of material consumption, an era further accelerated by generation of electricity and by the rise of commercial chemical syntheses producing an enormous variety of compounds ranging from fertilizers to plastics and drugs.”
― Vaclav Smil, Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization

“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: “Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?” Despite”
― Vaclav Smil, Energy: A Beginner's Guide

“The accelerated deindustrialization of North America, Europe, and Japan, and the shift of manufacturing to Asia in general and to China in particular, has been the leading reason for this reappraisal.[93] This manufacturing switch has brought changes ranging from risible to tragic. In the first category are such grotesque transactions as Canada, the country with per capita forest resources greater than in any other affluent nation, importing toothpicks and toilet paper from China, a country whose wood stocks amount to a small fraction of Canada’s enormous boreal forest patrimony.[94] But the switch has also contributed to tragedies, such as the rising midlife mortality among America’s white non-university-educated men. There can be no doubt that America’s post-2000 loss of some 7 million (formerly well-paying) manufacturing jobs—with most of that loss attributable to globalization, as most of that production moved to China—has been the principal reason of these deaths of despair, largely attributable to suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-induced liver disease.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“Shakespeare’s plays and poems in their entirety amount to 5 megabytes, the equivalent of just a single high-resolution photograph, or of 30 seconds of high-fidelity sound, or of 8 seconds of streamed high-definition video.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

“In 1871 about 24% of all workers were in “muscle power” jobs (in agriculture, construction, and industry) and only about 1% were in “caring” professions (in health and teaching, child and home care, and welfare), but by 2011 caring jobs claimed 12% and muscle jobs only 8% of the labor force, and many of today’s muscle jobs, such as cleaning and domestic service and routine factory line jobs, involve mostly mechanized tasks.”
― Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History

“Milk has been a key growth factor, be it in Japan or in the Netherlands. Before the Second World War, Dutch males were smaller than American men, but post-1950 US milk consumption declined while in the Netherlands it rose until the 1960s—and it remains higher than in the US. The lesson is obvious: the easiest way to improve a child’s chances of growing taller is for them to drink more milk. Is life expectancy finally topping out?”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World

“Energy will do anything that can be done in the world. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)”
― Vaclav Smil, Energy: A Beginner's Guide

“modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on the fossil fuels used in the production of these indispensable materials. No AI, no apps, and no electronic messages will change that.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

“Later studies estimated that at least 6.4 Mt of plastic litter enters the oceans every year; that some 8 million pieces are discarded every day; that the floating plastic debris averages more than 13 000 pieces per km2 of ocean surface; and that some 60% of all marine litter stems from shoreline activities”
― Vaclav Smil, Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization

“Battle death rates—expressed as fatalities per 1,000 men of armed forces fielded at the beginning of a conflict—were below 200 during the first two modern wars involving major powers (the Crimean War of 1853–1856 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871); they surpassed 1,500 during World War I and 2,000 during World War II, and were above 4,000 for Russia (Singer and Small 1972). Germany lost about 27,000 combatants per million people during World War I but more than 44,000 during World War II.”
― Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History

“despite the decline in consumer spending brought on by the greatest economic downturn since World War II, the difference between jobs in manufacturing and in retail had reached nearly three million workers, a depressing reality of a failing economy where most new opportunities were low-paid, part-time positions to sell Chinese apparel and electronics bought on credit.”
― Vaclav Smil, Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing

“Energy conversions are the very basis of life and evolution. Modern history can be seen as an unusually rapid sequence of transitions to new energy sources, and the modern world is the cumulative result of their conversions.”
― Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going