Energy and Civilization: a History

"He is extremely scholarly; there isn’t a page you don’t learn something from. In particular, he knows a great deal – probably more than anybody else in the world — about the way that energy was used in past centuries. And he is extremely influential outside academic life. He sets the framework for people’s discussions of our energy future. They may not realise it but when people talk about energy and how we move from one source of energy to another, in the background are things that Smil has written. Everybody talking about energy, in a sense, lies within his orbit because we all accept much of what he says. “As time went on, I came to realise that most people did not want a world in which energy was scarce or its use guilt-generating. ” The only point of disagreement is going to be as to whether this transition away from fossil fuels to low-carbon forms of energy can happen faster than he thinks they can. And I personally think there’s good reason to believe that history is not necessarily going to be repeated in this case."