The most-published and least-known thinker in Canada doesn’t want to be interviewed. He says he has 77 deadlines to meet (perhaps an exaggeration, but probably not) before he flies off to a scientific conference in Europe. Besides, he thinks media interviews are pointless. He detests our sound-bite culture, which shrinks enormously important and complex subjects into meaningless bits of info-kibble. “All I want is to be left alone to write my books,”
That may be one reason why hardly anyone in Canada has heard of Vaclav Smil. But Bill Gates has. He believes Prof. Smil is one of the smartest guys around today. He plugs several of Prof. Smil’s recent books on his website, and says that he has “opened my eyes to new ways to think about solving our energy and environmental issues.”
The sometimes irascible Prof. Smil hangs his hat at the University of Manitoba (which may be another reason everyone east of Winnipeg ignores him). He is a distinguished professor in the faculty of environment,
For example, take the notion (heavily promoted by Al Gore) that we could wean ourselves off fossil fuels in a few years if only we really wanted to. This is about as realistic as the notion that we could fly to the moon on gossamer wings if we really wanted to. Some day it may be possible – but not any time soon. “We are structurally cooked,” he recently explained. “Every new technology takes 40 to 50 years before it captures the bulk of the market. As of today, there are no clean-energy technologies that can replace fossil fuels on a large scale.”
Prof. Smil is an expert on the history of technological innovation. He points out that the U.S. energy industry – which includes production, processing, transportation and distribution, coal and uranium mines, oil and gas fields, pipelines, refineries, fossil-fuel fired, nuclear, and hydroelectric power plants, tanker terminals, uranium enrichment facilities, and transmission and distribution lines – constitutes the world’s most massive, most indispensable, most expensive and most inertial infrastructure. Its principal features change on a time scale measured in decades, not years. That’s why “we’re going to be a fossil-fuel society for decades to come.”
A lot of us don’t want to hear that. Yet the facts don’t care whether we like them. Prof. Smil methodically sets out to show that the facts do not support either the romantics, who think we’ll be saved by wind turbines, or the techno-optimists, who think that electric cars are right around the corner. Along the way he demolishes peak oil theory, biomass for fuel, carbon sequestration, and various other energy myths. He believes that weaning ourselves away from fossil fuels would be a good thing. But we need to understand that the transition from fossil fuels will be complex, protracted and nonlinear, and will require enormous investments. “Wishful thinking,” he writes, “is no substitute for recognizing the extraordinary difficulty of the task.”
Meantime, he argues, there’s plenty we should do to reduce demand. North Americans are the energy hogs of the world. Our industries are super-efficient, but our lifestyles are ruinous. “Most of the energy in North America is just consuming – Wal-Mart, shopping centres, government offices – or personal consumption: houses, cars, flying to Hawaii, gambling in Las Vegas,” he said during a recent appearance at Canada’s Perimeter Institute. “We could live affluent lifestyles with half as much energy. Are people so unhappy in Kyoto or Lyons? Is it such a terrible punishment to live in Bordeaux?” He himself drives a modest car and lives in a super-energy-efficient house. “If the world wants to replicate the two biggest wasters in the world, the U.S. and Canada, there is no hope for anybody.” What is the likelihood that people will cut back voluntarily? “Very slim.”
Prof. Smil, born and educated in the former Czechoslovakia, has the kind of hard-headed skepticism you often find in Eastern Europeans. He and his wife, Eva, landed in the United States in 1969. But Canada was more congenial, so they settled here in 1971. As someone who was rigorously schooled in all the sciences, he regrets people’s widespread ignorance of science, technology and basic economics. As he told energy writer Robert Bryce, “Without any physical, chemical, and biological fundamentals, and with equally poor understanding of basic economic forces, it is no wonder that people will believe anything.”
Prof. Smil’s 24th book, Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next 50 Years, has just been published in Canada. It offers a numbers-heavy but compact guide to all the main things we should be worrying about (or not), from natural disasters to population trends. Although he deliberately stays away from predictions, he concludes from the evidence that climate change is nowhere near the top of the list. What is? A genuine flu pandemic, which, he says, is a 100 per cent certainty. What we can’t predict is how bad it will be. Prof. Smil is no alarmist, but he warns that even a least-worst-case epidemic “would pose challenges unseen in most countries for generations.”
Bill Gates has read it, and says it’s great.
That may be one reason why hardly anyone in Canada has heard of Vaclav Smil. But Bill Gates has. He believes Prof. Smil is one of the smartest guys around today. He plugs several of Prof. Smil’s recent books on his website, and says that he has “opened my eyes to new ways to think about solving our energy and environmental issues.”
The sometimes irascible Prof. Smil hangs his hat at the University of Manitoba (which may be another reason everyone east of Winnipeg ignores him). He is a distinguished professor in the faculty of environment,
For example, take the notion (heavily promoted by Al Gore) that we could wean ourselves off fossil fuels in a few years if only we really wanted to. This is about as realistic as the notion that we could fly to the moon on gossamer wings if we really wanted to. Some day it may be possible – but not any time soon. “We are structurally cooked,” he recently explained. “Every new technology takes 40 to 50 years before it captures the bulk of the market. As of today, there are no clean-energy technologies that can replace fossil fuels on a large scale.”
Prof. Smil is an expert on the history of technological innovation. He points out that the U.S. energy industry – which includes production, processing, transportation and distribution, coal and uranium mines, oil and gas fields, pipelines, refineries, fossil-fuel fired, nuclear, and hydroelectric power plants, tanker terminals, uranium enrichment facilities, and transmission and distribution lines – constitutes the world’s most massive, most indispensable, most expensive and most inertial infrastructure. Its principal features change on a time scale measured in decades, not years. That’s why “we’re going to be a fossil-fuel society for decades to come.”
A lot of us don’t want to hear that. Yet the facts don’t care whether we like them. Prof. Smil methodically sets out to show that the facts do not support either the romantics, who think we’ll be saved by wind turbines, or the techno-optimists, who think that electric cars are right around the corner. Along the way he demolishes peak oil theory, biomass for fuel, carbon sequestration, and various other energy myths. He believes that weaning ourselves away from fossil fuels would be a good thing. But we need to understand that the transition from fossil fuels will be complex, protracted and nonlinear, and will require enormous investments. “Wishful thinking,” he writes, “is no substitute for recognizing the extraordinary difficulty of the task.”
Meantime, he argues, there’s plenty we should do to reduce demand. North Americans are the energy hogs of the world. Our industries are super-efficient, but our lifestyles are ruinous. “Most of the energy in North America is just consuming – Wal-Mart, shopping centres, government offices – or personal consumption: houses, cars, flying to Hawaii, gambling in Las Vegas,” he said during a recent appearance at Canada’s Perimeter Institute. “We could live affluent lifestyles with half as much energy. Are people so unhappy in Kyoto or Lyons? Is it such a terrible punishment to live in Bordeaux?” He himself drives a modest car and lives in a super-energy-efficient house. “If the world wants to replicate the two biggest wasters in the world, the U.S. and Canada, there is no hope for anybody.” What is the likelihood that people will cut back voluntarily? “Very slim.”
Prof. Smil, born and educated in the former Czechoslovakia, has the kind of hard-headed skepticism you often find in Eastern Europeans. He and his wife, Eva, landed in the United States in 1969. But Canada was more congenial, so they settled here in 1971. As someone who was rigorously schooled in all the sciences, he regrets people’s widespread ignorance of science, technology and basic economics. As he told energy writer Robert Bryce, “Without any physical, chemical, and biological fundamentals, and with equally poor understanding of basic economic forces, it is no wonder that people will believe anything.”
Prof. Smil’s 24th book, Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next 50 Years, has just been published in Canada. It offers a numbers-heavy but compact guide to all the main things we should be worrying about (or not), from natural disasters to population trends. Although he deliberately stays away from predictions, he concludes from the evidence that climate change is nowhere near the top of the list. What is? A genuine flu pandemic, which, he says, is a 100 per cent certainty. What we can’t predict is how bad it will be. Prof. Smil is no alarmist, but he warns that even a least-worst-case epidemic “would pose challenges unseen in most countries for generations.”
Bill Gates has read it, and says it’s great.
FP Junk Science Week: The Rubber Duckies
June 18, 2010 – 8:56 pm
FP Comment’s 12th annual Junk Science Week comes to a triumphant close with today’s 2nd annual Rubber Duck Awards to recognize the scientists, NGOs, activists, politicians, journalists, media outlets, cranks and quacks who each year advance the principles of junk science. Junk Science occurs when scientific facts are distorted, when risk is exaggerated or discounted, when science is adapted and warped by politics and ideology to serve another agenda. The Rubber Duckies are named in honour of Rick Smith, president of Environmental Defence Canada and co-author of a remarkable piece of junk science literature, the 2009 Slow Death by Rubber Duck. In the book, Mr. Smith perpetrated a science scam over the Bisphenol A and established himself as Canada’s leading scaremonger and distorter of science. Let this year’s awards begin!Read more
The FP Rubber Duckies: Killjoy at the barbecue
June 18, 2010 – 8:54 pm
The Junk Science Week Rubber Duckie Killjoy award goes to a radio commentary broadcast on Toronto’s 680News by restauranteur extraordinaire Rose Reisman. Based on the dubious science from the long-standing food war against fun foods such as beef — and especially barbecued steaks — Ms. Reisman issue a warning. Just as the summer grilling season is about to hit its peak, she proposed adopting cooking techniques that, if adopted, could somewhat compromise the season:Read more
The FP Rubber Duckies: For services to the climate coverup
June 18, 2010 – 8:52 pm
The Rubber Duck award in the climate category goes to Lord Oxburgh, who gave “peer review” a whole new meaning in rushing out the first whitewash of the Climategate scandal. He headed an inquiry into the scientific integrity of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, from which the emails emerged, and concluded in record time that there was nothing to see here. Move along please.
Lord Oxburgh’s skimpy survey — which was carried out by a group distinctly free of skeptics — found in the CRU little more than a “small group of dedicated if slightly disorganized researchers.” His Lordship found the CRU’s “loss” of data infinitely excusable, as also was its lack of statistical sophistication, even though its field was “fundamentally statistical.”
Read more
Posted in: Environment, Full Comment Tags: climate change, Peter Foster, Junk Science Week, The Rubber Duckies, Lord Oxburgh
The FP Rubber Duckies: Rejecting the good news
June 18, 2010 – 8:49 pm
The Rubber Duckie for bias and missing the point of one’s own research goes to the massive Interphone cellphone study. Released earlier this year, it dismissed its own work because it failed to prove what researchers were looking for, namely, evidence of adverse effects of cellphones. Also rejected was evidence in their research that showed cellphones may reduce brain-tumour risk. As Lawrence Solomon reports below, the Interphone researchers may well have missed the real story in their work because they didn’t want to see it. Cellphones can cause cancer and other medical problems, one whack of studies says. Cellphones are safe, says another batch.
Which is it? Both sets of studies can’t be right.
The definitive study that many expected would settle the controversy, a multi-year, 13-country effort organized by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, came out last month. To its researchers’ surprise, the data indicated that cellphones can be both safe and dangerous, and that cellphone use can even reduce the risk of cancer. It all depends on how much cellphones are used.
The researchers’ reaction to the results they obtained? Don’t believe the data, they effectively warn. We must have botched this up somehow, especially since most of the data shows cellphones actually reduce cancers.
Read more
Posted in: Environment, Full Comment Tags: Lawrence Solomon, hormesis, Junk Science Week, cancer, The Rubber Duckies, cellphones, Interphone, radiation hormesis, brain cancer, mobile phones
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