The road to decarbonization

I recently had a phenomenal conversation with the leading thinker on energy, Vaclav Smil. Smil has published extensively on the history of energy, fossil fuels, agriculture, innovation, growth and development. One of his biggest fans is Bill Gates, who once said that he waits for the new Smil book the way some people wait for a new Star Wars movie. Smil's latest book is Growth: From Microorganisms to Global Cities.

Smil has been described as a "dour realist". He certainly relies on deep empirical evidence to make his claims. I love talking to him, although I do disagree with a number of his analyses and conclusions. You'll get a lot out of the discussion.

Listen to our full discussion here.

Why doesn’t the modern mantra of constant growth make sense?

Vaclav Smil: It's quite obvious that trees don't grow to heaven, but people always resent that because they have seen in their experience in recent decades that many things have grown very rapidly. I see nothing which has caused more trouble to deepen this perception than the growth of electronics. People mistook one particular thing for all of it, and that's a basic mistake because nothing else can grow like electronics.

People say, oh, why not Moore's Law? Things double every two years, a 35% growth in a year. Well, [they think] it applies to all these things, but no, it applies only to those things which are running on a microchip.

But when you grow corn or smelt iron or produce aluminum or assemble a car, well, it may be helped at certain point by some microchip, but fundamentally it still requires lots of physical labor, lots of material input, and these things can never improve by 35% a year, never.

How do those cultural expectations of everything growing bigger and better forever feed into the issue of decarbonisation and climate change?

Vaclav Smil: We could make the biggest size and biggest chunks of change without any fantastic new super innovation. We just should waste less. We are a society, which is defined not by being clever or smart or [having] AI, but being horribly wasteful.

We could save more energy by not wasting 40% of the food we grow than by developing photovoltaic cells. And the same goes for everything else. We waste water. We waste raw materials. We produce 300 million pounds of plastic. We just throw most of it away, we don't even bother recycling. If we would become a less wasteful society, we could decarbonize a lot faster than inventing some unknown and stunning gizmos.

The problem is the price. It's so cheap. If every plastic bottle which people drink water from would cost $35 they wouldn't throw it away every night. But it costs basically nothing. Unless we start paying for the real cost of that plastic bottle to the environment, the cost to the ocean and the microplastic particles that will linger there for a zillion years... So if you would be paying the real cost on everything, that will be the safest or fastest and easiest way to decarbonisation.

One of the ideas in your book is this notion that we've got comfortable with the amount of energy that a decent quality of life requires. And I would say that that is implying a concomitant waste footprint.

Vaclav Smil: But you see, this is just the thing: we could be equally as well off as we are by using less energy. What we are using, it's nice, it's comfortable, but it's not required actually. I always ask people this question or people of certain age, was the life unbearable in 1970s really? Since 1970s we've increased our energy consumption massively and it hasn't changed our quality of life very much, really. We could design a Western civilization using 20, 30, 40% less energy than we use today and still be very comfortable and very affluent.

It would not lower our real standard of living, but for many people the thought of it is unbearable. No SUVs, no long-distance flying, no wasting of 40% of food, not living in a 3000 square foot house.

So it's all doable. It's all rational. But going down, going back, going less, it's always a very painful and politically hard sale to make.

Listen to my full discussion with Vaclav Smil here.