Vaclav Smil and the Value

of Doubt
A ruthless dissector of unwarranted
assumptions takes on environmental
catastrophists and techno-optimists.
By David Owen • February 20, 2024

Photograph by David Lipnowski

Not long ago, I randomly opened Vaclav Smil’s recent

book “Size: How It Explains the World.” The first
paragraph I read, in a chapter about good and bad
design, concerned rubber flip-flops, which Smil
described as among the world’s most widely owned
individual possessions even though “they provide
neither good lateral support nor basic vertical stability.”
The following paragraph, about furniture, mentioned “the
steadily diminishing share of the rich world’s population
that grows food, catches fish, cuts wood, mines minerals
and builds structures.” The next touched on religious
pilgrimages, airports, and commuting to work. In 2018,
Elizabeth Wilson, who is the founding director of the
Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society at
Dartmouth, told Science, “You could take a paragraph
from one of his books and make a whole career out of it.”

Smil is an emeritus professor of environmental studies at

the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg. He is best
known for his writing about global issues, among them
energy, agriculture, population, economics, and climate.
He has served as a consultant with the World Bank, the
U.S. Agency for International Development, and other
institutions. His scholarly interests are eclectic, and he is
prolific. “Size,” which was published last May, is not his
most recent book; the second edition of “Materials and
Dematerialization,” which was first published a decade
ago as “Making the Modern World,” came out a month
later. Altogether, by his count, he has published forty-
eight, beginning with “China’s Energy: Achievements,
Problems, Prospects,” in 1976. He has four more under
way: one about globalization, one about food, a “Size”-
like study of speed, and a combined reissue, by Oxford
University Press, of two earlier books, which examine the
years between 1867 and 1914, the period that he
believes did more than any other to shape the modern
world. His books typically begin at a trot and maintain
the same daydream-defying pace until the final
paragraph. The fifth chapter of “Size” includes a detailed
critique, with formulas, of what he identifies as the
impossible proportions of various characters in
“Gulliver’s Travels”: “Properly scaled, an adult Lilliputian
would thus have a body mass more than 10 times larger
than Swift’s erroneous attribution, and instead of being
equivalent to a tiny shrew he would be more like an
eastern gray squirrel.” Smil has a sense of humor, but he
uses it sparingly; even passages that seem at first to be
personal or anecdotal sometimes turn out to be
footnoted.

Smil is a ruthless dissector of what he believes to be

unwarranted assumptions, and not just those of
eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish satirical novelists. The
first book of his that I read, twenty years ago, was
“Energy at the Crossroads,” published by the M.I.T.
Press, in which he wrote that the power under the direct
control of an affluent American household, including its
vehicles, “would have been available only to a Roman
latifundia owner of about 6,000 strong slaves, or to a
nineteenth-century landlord employing 3,000 workers
and 400 big draft horses.” He was making a
characteristically vivid point about the impact of modern
access to energy, most of it produced by burning fossil
fuels. No one can doubt that twenty-first-century
Americans’ lives are easier, healthier, longer, and more
mobile than the lives of our ancestors, but Smil’s
comparison makes it clear that most of us
underestimate, by orders of magnitude, the scale of the
energy transformations that have made our comforts
possible.

More recently, Smil has written about ongoing efforts to

address climate change, and about the feasibility of
achieving “net zero” by 2050. In “How the World Really
Works,” published in 2022, he writes that, in the first two
decades of the twenty-first century, “despite extensive
and expensive expansion of renewable energies, the
share of fossil fuels in the world’s primary energy supply
fell only marginally”—from eighty-six per cent to eighty-
two per cent—and that, during the same period, global
consumption of fossil fuels actually increased, by forty-
five per cent. Those numbers surprise people whose
sense of environmental progress is shaped by car
commercials and by news stories about breakthroughs
in solar panels, algae-based fuels, and organisms that
turn carbon dioxide into stone. They also annoy
environmentalists who view Smil’s observations as
backward-looking and counterproductive, and they
contribute to what one journalist described to me
recently as Smil’s reputation as “a sourpuss.”

Smil dislikes giving interviews. He believes that his

books contain everything that anyone needs to know
about him, and he told me that he had agreed to be
profiled in Science, in 2018, only as a favor to his
publisher—a gesture he later regretted. When I
approached him about this article, I did so with
trepidation. We exchanged e-mails almost daily for most
of a month, and we had a lengthy telephone
conversation. But when I suggested meeting in person,
he replied, “As for flying to Manitoba, nobody ever does
that (much like nobody ever flies to Topeka).” A quality
that runs through all his writing, and that I find both
appealing and challenging, is his stubborn skepticism.
Toward the end of “How the World Really Works,” he
quotes a line, usually attributed to Descartes, that could
serve as his own guiding principle: de omnibus
dubitandum. Doubt everything.

Smil was born in 1943 in what today is the Czech

Republic but at the time was the Protectorate of
Bohemia and Moravia, which the Nazis had established
after invading four years earlier. He deflected my
questions about his upbringing other than to say that his
childhood,“if a label has to be chosen,” was “normal and
happy.” Between 1960 and 1965, he was a student at
Charles University, in Prague. He described his student
years and the ones immediately following them as “a
long prelude to the Prague Spring of 1968.” The Prague
Spring was a period of liberalization that began with
Alexander Dubček’s election as the head of the
country’s Communist Party, on January 5th, and ended,
seven and a half months later, with a full-scale invasion
by Soviet bloc soldiers and tanks. Until the Soviets
intervened, Smil said, “even ordinary students could
access Western papers and journals in the university
library.” He studied a broad range of topics related to
energy, among them biology, geology, meteorology,
demography, economics, and statistics. The subject of
his undergraduate thesis was “the environmental
impacts of coal-fired electricity generation, particularly
the effects of air pollution.” His scholarly skepticism, he
said, came to him naturally, beginning when he was a
teen-ager, and was “mightily reinforced by getting
trained as an old-fashioned scientist (in what the
Germans call in one of their beloved compounds
Naturwissenschaften) beholden to demonstrable
realities, strengthened daily by living (until 1969) under
the Commies (with their endless lies about everything).”

Smil met his wife while both were students, she in

medical school. Like thousands of other Czechs, they
fled the country before travel restrictions made
emigration virtually impossible. They arrived in the
United States on August 31, 1969, and he spent two
years earning a doctorate, in the geography department
at Penn State. (The subject of his dissertation was global
energy development.) In 1972, the University of
Manitoba offered him a job, and he took it. He is fluent in
four languages and has studied half a dozen others. His
recent reading, he told me, has included Mandelstam
and Pasternak in Russian, and the New Testament in
Latin. His English is excellent but accented, and he
speaks it even faster than he writes—so fast that there
were parts of our telephone conversation that I didn’t
understand until I had listened to a recording with the
speed reduced by twenty-five per cent.

A dozen years ago, I interviewed a highly regarded

chemistry professor at a major American university. He
surprised me by saying that his job forced him to spend
so much time travelling that he had the same better-
than-first-class status on American Airlines that the
character played by George Clooney has in the 2009
movie “Up in the Air.” He needed to travel, he explained,
because in many ways the most important and time-
consuming part of his job was soliciting funding, all over
the world, for the research that his graduate students
performed in his lab. When I mentioned this to Smil, he
said that what I had described was the modern ideal of
the scientist, “just flying around, drumming up monies,”
and that he detested it. He has never relied on grad
students. “I used to run madly among libraries,” he said,
but he now makes heavy use of online resources, among
them the Web of Science, to which the university still
gives him access, and Gallica, a multicentury digital
archive created by the National Library of France. He
loves classical music, but is “absolutely tone-deaf” and
plays no instruments. He has a good memory for big
numbers and can do many calculations in his head. His
ideas come to him, he said, when he walks, reads, wakes
up in the morning, sits on airplanes, or cooks, including
favorite Japanese dishes. (He began visiting Japan in
1978, and co-wrote a book about the evolution of the
modern Japanese diet). “I just write my books, much as
a plumber fixes pipes and garbagemen haul away junk,”
he said. “I mean it, no introspection; it is just a kind of
work I like and can do.”

Smil has written a great deal about renewable-energy

technologies, and he has said that their implementation
cannot continue to grow quickly enough to fully negate
the global increase in over-all energy demand during the
next two or three decades. Unrealistic expectations for
such technologies, he has written, arise in part from
inappropriate extrapolation from the extraordinarily fast
and sustained evolution of solid-state electronics,
beginning, roughly seventy-five years ago, with the
invention of the transistor. In 1965, Gordon Moore—later
a co-founder of Intel—observed that the number of
components that could be etched on a single microchip
doubled roughly every two years. The number of such
components grew from a few thousand in the nineteen-
seventies to tens of billions today, a phenomenon that’s
often referred to as Moore’s Law. Even for microchips,
that rate may be slackening, but its application in most
other areas has always been problematic. In “Invention
and Innovation,” which M.I.T. published last year, Smil
writes, “We are told that rapid exponential growth, driven
by digitization and advances in AI, already prevails in
such fields as solar cells, batteries, electric cars, and
even urban farming.” Such growth, where it actually
does exist, can’t continue permanently, he argues. Belief
that it can, in his view, is consistent with what he
described to me as “America’s Barnumian approach to
science and innovation, where every dubious claim is
treated as ‘transformative change’ and where every
patently impossible promise”—nuclear fusion, high-
temperature superconductivity, the colonization of Mars
—“is worshipped as another effusion of history’s most
brilliant minds.”

In “Growth,” which M.I.T. published, in 2019, Smil takes

the same expansive approach to his subject that he
does in “Size”—the subtitle is “From Microorganisms to
Megacities”—but he does so in smaller type and at
almost double the page count. In a brief review in
Foreign Policy, Keith Johnson wrote that “the best way
to appreciate Vaclav Smil’s latest doorstopper is to take
a deep breath, walk across the room, and pick up the
book from wherever it landed after being tossed away
for the umpteenth time as impenetrable,
incomprehensible mush.” But Johnson did pick it up,
and, in the next paragraph of his review, he describes
“Growth” as “fascinating, compelling—and ultimately
convincing.”

In the book’s preface, Smil writes that most growth

processes—“of organisms, artifacts, or complex
systems”—can be plotted on a so-called S-shaped, or
sigmoid, growth curve, meaning that the rate of change
increases slowly at first, then increases rapidly, then
levels off. An error that humans make with similarly
predictable regularity is to assume that the nearly