How The World Really Works Smil
Harry Marks wrote: ↑Fri Jan 20, 2023 11:04 pm
Smil’s review of fuels and energy is a good introduction, particularly for non-specialists. He underlines several useful perspectives before moving on to the more applied discussion.
Hi Harry, thanks very much for taking on the leadership of this discussion. Your economic expertise and broad scholarship offer a great basis to see where there are important themes in Smil’s argument, and also to open up critique and dialogue. I hope we can encourage more people to participate.
Harry Marks wrote: ↑Fri Jan 20, 2023 11:04 pm
It’s worth a few minutes to take on board his overall orientation, which is explained in the Introduction: he believes that extreme opinions are formed out of ignorance.
As a general principle the avoidance of extremes is an essentially wise position. If you do find yourself attracted by an extreme opinion, you should exercise the humility of asking yourself, or even better asking others in conversation, if there may be some factor that you have not fully understood. Even so, it may on occasion happen that expert conversation can lead to a rejection of the social consensus. The risk in Smil’s principle of moderation is the ad populum fallacy, the belief that because an opinion is popular it must be true.
Harry Marks wrote: ↑Fri Jan 20, 2023 11:04 pmTwo of his examples are the notion that human ingenuity can overcome all problems, so we don’t need to worry about, e.g. global warming, and the contrasting notion that we must magically convert all energy use to renewables in a decade or two. These are both based on empty wishful thinking rather than basic understanding.
I find the debate around ingenuity troubling. One of the big issues in climate change is around the need to change thinking. Greta Thunberg argues in her latest book, where she provides the popular public face for numerous expert contributions on climate change, that reliance on ingenuity simply continues the “same domineering thinking” that caused the problem. It seems she sees climate change as requiring a religious reformation to solve, given how deeply the psychology of human dominion is entrenched in social and economic values. The problem with that Thunberg line is that climate change is like a flood that is about to swamp the levee, and if we don’t focus on ingenuity to fix the levee then it will break. So I don’t see what else can overcome problems other than ingenuity.
Harry Marks wrote: ↑Fri Jan 20, 2023 11:04 pm
Several of his well-considered background ideas are found in the first subsection “Fundamental Shifts”. He goes through the gradual progress of organisms in exploiting the environment, emphasizing the dramatic change that came when hominins learned to control fire, giving access to “extrasomatic” energy sources. This was followed eventually by crops and then domestication of animals, a new source of power used for plowing, carrying and, of course, warfighting.
Finding a way to tell the story of Big History is central to seeing who we are and where we should go. These themes have been discussed by big authors like Hariri and Diamond, with the whole Promethean story of reliance on fire and technology, and the risks that involves as told in the cautionary myth of Prometheus on Mount Caucasus.
Harry Marks wrote: ↑Fri Jan 20, 2023 11:04 pm
As a benchmark against which to compare industrial power, he notes that in 1500 more than 90 percent of useable power was from humans or animals (about equally divided). Presumably the rest was in windmills, waterwheels and the like. Moving into the later stages, he begins to emphasize the time required for shifts. The first 30 years of steam engines, up to 1800, only managed to replace a small percentage of animate power. I would have liked some detail fleshed out, such as all the carts and barnraising and plowing of fields that did not suddenly change to steam engines, but the reader can fill that in. Similarly, by 1950 coal still dominated energy sources, although oil had been on the scene for more than 70 years.
It is remarkable how much the First World War still relied on horses. All this material reminded me of the work of Will Steffen on The Great Acceleration. His observation is that numerous key social and economic indicators have followed an L-shaped curve, flatlining close to zero until 1950, and then basically going vertical. An extract of this phenomenon is in the chart below from his paper. His article is available at
https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu ... N_2015.pdf and provides excellent context for Smil’s argument. But where Smil derives optimism from this triumph of technology, Steffen is far more fearful and cautionary, saying we have so fundamentally transformed our relation to our planet that collapse is very likely.
Harry Marks wrote: ↑Fri Jan 20, 2023 11:04 pm
Smil wants us to take seriously the amount of time it takes to make dramatic shifts, and there is nothing wrong with that point as a generality. But after watching the amount by which Zoom meetings scaled up during Covid, permanently reducing business travel below its former trend, it seems clear that the point has its limits.
You can’t extrapolate from the simple and convenient and enforced enablement of online meetings, driven by the twin factors of technology and lockdown, to the challenge of decarbonisation. I think Smil’s assessment of the momentum and power and inertia involved in shifting energy systems is spot on. There is immense false hope vested in renewable energy. To that I would add that this religious-style hope around renewables is fundamentally unscientific, failing to look at cause and effect in systemic ways. Fossil fuels are so convenient, effective and familiar that the latent constituency for their retention has been systematically underestimated by advocates of renewable energy. I will come back to this in regard to how geoengineering fits with Smil’s analysis.
Harry Marks wrote: ↑Fri Jan 20, 2023 11:04 pm
First, the pace of technological development and adaptation has stepped up considerably. Shifts to electric cars, for example, have proceeded much faster than forecast. Second, his historical examples are “unpromoted” shifts (though some changes such as railroad development did have considerable governmental assistance).
I predict a backlash against electric cars. Just as the wave of enthusiasm for emission reduction in the 1990s led those whose interests were challenged to mobilise, so too I expect to seen a lot more criticisms of the problems with this shift.
Harry Marks wrote: ↑Fri Jan 20, 2023 11:04 pm
Prices change gradually with learning curves, infrastructure locks in some of former methods, and in other ways the normal transitions “drag their feet.” But a truly dramatic change could happen rapidly even in previous centuries such as with the building of railroads and the adaptation of small-scale manufacturing to the availability of electric power. Normal inertia can be overcome, in other words, when dramatic opportunity makes an appearance or government policy decides to speed things up.
Acceleration of a technology shift needs broad consensus. With renewable energy, there has been a tendency just to ignore some fundamental problems, namely the environmental impact of new transmission systems, the need for full cost accounting, and most crucially in my view, the fact that a shift to renewables will be marginal to actually cooling the planet, which will rely firstly on increasing albedo and then on converting CO2 into useful products.
Harry Marks wrote: ↑Fri Jan 20, 2023 11:04 pm
This is background to the discussion of transition away from fossil fuels toward renewables, which is his real subject for the chapter.
Many thanks for kicking off the conversation Harry. Here are the graphs of the Great Acceleration from Steffen’s paper that I mentioned.