Customer Reviews

Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Contrary to what the title suggests, this is not about over-hyping any apocalyptic scenarios. To the contrary, Smil thinks through issues in an insightful and detached way. From the book, you develop critical thinking skills to vaccinate your mind against Media hype. You also develop a healthy skepticism towards any forecasts as they always miss the boat.

Smil classifies changes that could affect our civilization into two categories. First, the abrupt ones are unpredictable and potentially devastating. They include natural phenomena such as asteroids, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, floods, earthquakes, and influenza pandemics. They also include man-caused wars, genocides, and terrorism. The second type of changes occur over half a century or more. Those include the energy transition away from fossil fuel, and the slow changes in balance of geopolitical powers.

Smil states we are notoriously bad at forecasting risks or anything else. He mentions numerous Peak Oil forecasts that were invariably wrong. Smil mentions how in the 1970s, we were concerned a next ice age was upon us. Geopolitic, economic, and demographic forecasts have been wrong too. The rapid economic ascent of China and rapid retreat of Japan since 1990 were unforeseen by everyone. The sudden break up of the USSR was also unexpected.

Smil states we are even bad at explaining what already happened. As an example, Diamond in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed mentioned only deforestation as a cause of the devastation of the Easter Island community. But, he missed out on rats infestation, infectious diseases, and enslavement. We invariably miss out on tons of variables when explaining past events.

Smil geopolitical outlook is fascinating. The prospects for Europe and Japan are problematic because of declining populations due to aging societies. Also, Europe's identity will be challenged by the massive migration of Muslims who do not integrate themselves. This will stress Europe's already fragile fiscal condition. Japan's political system renders the country unable to adapt and resolve any upcoming national issue.

Russia, even more than Japan and Europe appears to face insurmountable demographic problems. It is the only modern society that is suffering an accelerated population decline due to both a drop in fertility rate and a rapidly decreasing lifespan. The latter is due to alcoholism among men. Russian officials have attempted to reduce the rate of alcoholism for decades in vain. This section contrasts with the embarrassingly bad After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism).

The Middle East prospect is dire due to poor governance, poor living standard, high illiteracy rates, outdated legal body, weak social infrastructure, repression of women, lack of any scientific achievement, and lack of water resources and arable land. Those societies also do not provide employment opportunities causing large young male population being diverted towards terrorist networks. For a good book on this topic, I recommend The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.

China is on the way up. It is the world's leading exporting manufacturer. By 2050, it should become the largest world economy. But, China faces challenges of its own. Its GDP per capita will remain a fraction of the US for several generations. Its one child policy has caused an uneven female/male ratio. This will cause a rapid aging of its population. This has implication for a country relying on an abundant and vibrant labor force. Its rapid economic growth is stressing the environment. China is losing scarce arable land to both industrialization and erosion impairing the country to feed itself. This will result in China relying more on food imports. But, given its huge population this is not a sustainable solution.

Within chapter 3, Smil outlook for the US is not encouraging. This is because it has gigantic Budget and Current Account Deficits. Those are the symptoms of the U.S. excessive spending, inadequate savings, and hollowing out of its manufacturing base. The U.S. is now even a net importer of hi tech equipment. Smil notices that the US economy's share of World GDP has already declined from 35% in 1945 to 20% currently. The US has lost its share of World GDP mainly to China.

However, within chapter 5. Smil's US outlook is more upbeat as he focuses on its strength and relative position. Smil notes that the US fiscal position is better than many European countries and Japan. Also, the US is still the champion of innovation and scientific discoveries. In 2004, 30% of the world's scientific papers were authored by the US vs only 6.5% for China. Adjusted for population size, the US is 20 times more productive than China. For another good book on this topic, I recommend The Post-American World.

Smil's section on climate change is very nuanced. He confirms that temperatures are rising and is probably due to anthropogenic CO2 emission. But, he states estimates of rise in CO2 concentration, temperature increase, and sea level rise are uncertain. But, prospective sea level rise should be moderate and due to warmer water expansion and very little from ice caps melting. Relying on several estimates from insurers and scientists, he states that the economic costs of adapting to climate changes are very manageable. This message contrasts with An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It apocalyptic tone.

Smil states that if we were a rational society we should be more concerned about changes in the water and nitrogen cycles than the rise in CO2 emission. He indicates that by 2050, nearly half of the world's population is projected to live in areas with scarce water resources. In 2003, half of the world's hospital beds were filled with patients with water-borne diseases (diarrhea, cholera, typhoid fever, etc...). Such waterborne diseases kill over 5 million people a year.

Smil mentions antibiotics resistance as a major environmental threat. Because of common overuse antibiotics resistance is now present in humans, domestic animals, and even wild animals that have never been exposed to those drugs. Some scientists think we may be near the point of returning to the pre-penicillin days, when we will have run out of antibiotics to defend against rapidly evolving bacteria. The same scientists deem such a situation catastrophic as it would result in additional millions of yearly deaths.

Smil conveys how we are paranoia about infrequent risks that we don't control such as terrorism vs being phlegmatic about extremely frequent and very high risk we do control such as car driving. He states "When strong emotions are involved, people tend to focus on the badness of the outcome rather than the probability [of the outcome]." This leads to bad social and individual reactions to risks. For another good book on this subject, I recommend Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You.

Vaclav Smil is a brilliant scientist who writes about important issues. His book "Enriching the Earth" is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how agriculture is able to support 5 to 6 billion humans who otherwise wouldn't be here without fossil-fuel based fertilizers.

So Smil must be aware of the famous 1972 Meadows et al "Limits to Growth" and the field of systems ecology - how energy flows through ecosystems (including human societies). Smil surely must know about disappearing and degraded aquifers, topsoil, forests, fisheries, etc. Clearly ecological limits, a growing human population, and declining energy resources is the largest catastrophe arriving within the next 50 years, and there was almost no attention and/or no scientific evidence offered to refute these imminent catastrophes.

This is an incredibly optimistic book that tries to have its cake and eat it too. On page 75 Smil acknowledges that if we can't get off of cheap oil the results could be "fairly catastrophic", but then he says that perhaps we'll make a transition to natural gas (another finite fossil fuel). Yet two pages later Smil contradicts himself when he explains why natural gas is limited in use for transportation on page 77: natural gas has an energy density 1,000-fold less than oil, and it's costly to transport and store.

I find it hard to believe that Smil doesn't realize that what we face is a liquid fuel crisis. Somehow he missed reading Robert Hirsch's "The Inevitable Peaking of World Oil Production" or Gever's "Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades" and many other books in his giant references list.

On page 90 Smil says that "the supply of fossil fuels is adequate for generations to come" but there's no citation to support that. Though if the population goes from 7 billion to 1 billion as oil, coal, and natural gas are used up, then there will be oil for generations to come from the collapsed demand, but surely 6 billion people dying counts as a catastrophe?

At least Smil has some skepticism about some kinds of alternative energy - he explains why auto fuel cells are not going to happen on pages 89-90, fusion has no chance within 50 years on page 89, fission is unlikely on page 89, that wind and solar are too unevenly distributed to be a solution on page 86, and that biomass is not a solution on pages 83 -87. But his "solutions" are ridiculous - he proposes nuclear on page 87 and hydrogen on page 89.

He rejects the collapse writings of Erlich, Diamond, Reese, Kuntsler, and Lovelock without offering any scientific citations throughout the book to convince me that these writers are wrong. The same for Ivanhoe, Cam[pbell, Laherrere and Deffeyes who he says have "disseminated an alarmist notion of imminent global oil exhaustion followed by economic implosion, massive unemployment, breadlines, homelessness, and the catastrophic end of industrial civilization". He adopts Wall Street Journal / economist fantasy arguments to refute them, saying "they disregard the role of prices, historical perspectives, and human inventiveness and adaptability...these predictions are just the latest installments in a long history of failed forecasts..."

As an example of a failed forecast, he lists Deffeyes's 2003 prediction of 2005. Recently, Science published an article "Peak Oil Production May Already Be Here" (25 March 2011 Vol 331), which states that peak oil probably occurred in 2005.

I was greatly looking forward to some science-based refutations because I'm pretty sad about where the world is headed, but this book didn't cheer me up, it made me annoyed with the selective evidence, avoidance of key subjects, and missing references that I would have liked to see refuted in a book with this title. For someone who has read such an astonishing number of articles and books (the references section is 35 pages long), the absence of systems ecologists and other scientists who've written peer-reviewed articles published in Science and Nature makes it clear that Smil must be avoiding reading anything which might contradict what he wants to believe.

Smil totally ignores Peter Ward, who has published books about how all but one of the past mass extinction events can be ascribed to global warming and how our current burning of fossil fuels could bring on a similar event in the future

The best part of his book is the Unfolding Trends chapter starting with the New World Order section. On page 164-166 he explains why "interdependence" is a better word than globalization. I think he's right -- we just saw that the 2011 tsunami and earthquake that hit Japan caused some single-source suppliers of auto parts to fail, which led to a slow-down in auto production. In the future as manufacturers in countries fail for various reasons (economic, resources declining, wars, social unrest, etc) even distant countries will be affected by these failures.

I thought I had a pretty complete list of catastrophes, but I hadn't heard of the once every 100,000 years volcano-triggered landslides that can create waves over 325 feet high that move up to 215 miles per hour. If there were a massive collapse of the western flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on La Palma in the Canary Islands, it would devastate the east coast of North America with a series of 33 to 82 foot high waves (worst case).

Important books missing from Smil's reference list:

Collapse of civilizations, systems ecology
------------------------------------------

Walter Youngquist Geodestinies: The Inevitable Control of Earth Resources over Nations & Individuals
Garrett Hardin Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos
David Pimentel Food, Energy, and Society
John Perlin A Forest Journey: The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization
Clive Ponting A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations

The Collapse of Civilization is not what we should be worrying about. We're on the way to driving ourselves and most other species on the planet extinct.
------------------------------------------------------

Johan Rockström Planetary Boundaries. Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity
Peter Ward The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?
Peter Ward Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future
Peter Ward, et. al. Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, And Earth's Ancient Atmosphere
Michael J. Mills et. al. Massive global ozone loss predicted following regional nuclear conflict
John Atcheson Methane Burps: Ticking Time Bomb Dec 16, 2004 Baltimore Sun


Can we avoid WW III as energy declines and times get harder?
------------------------------------------------------------

Lutz Kleveman The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia
Michael Klare Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict
Chalmers Johnson The Sorrows Of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic
Robert Baer Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude
Ahmed Rashid Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia
Peter Turchin War and Peace and War. The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations.
David Berreby Us and Them. Understanding Your Tribal Mind.
Howard Bucknell III Energy and the National Defense.

Why there are no replacements for fossil fuels
----------------------------------------------

Martin Hoffert, et al Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet 1 Nov 2002 Science
Joseph J. Romm Hype About Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate
U.Bossel & B.Eliasson Energy and the Hydrogen Economy
Alice Friedemann The Hydrogen Economy: Energy and Economic Black Hole
Howard Hayden The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won't Run the World
Ted Trainer Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society
Jacqueline Langwith, ed. 2008. "Opposing Viewpoints: Renewable Energy, vol. 2."
Sheila Newman, ed. 2008. "The Final Energy Crisis". Pluto Press.
Alice Friedemann Peak Soil: Why Cellulosic and other Biofuels are Not Sustainable and a Threat to America's National Security
D. Pimentel, T. Patzek Ethanol Production Using Corn, Switchgrass, and Wood; Biodiesel Production Using Soybean and Sunflower
H Hirsch, O Becker, M Schneider, A Froggatt Nuclear Reactor Hazards: Ongoing Dangers of Operating Nuclear Technology in the 21st Century
Richard Wolfson Nuclear Choices: A Citizen's Guide to Nuclear Technology

Infrastructure: alternative energy sources must maintain the infrastructure we built when oil had an Energy Returned on Energy Invested of 40-100
--------------------------------------------

Charles Hall et al. Hydrocarbons and the Evolution of Human Culture 20 Nov 2003 Nature 426, pp. 318-22
Brian Hayes Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape
Kate Ascher The Works: Anatomy of a City
ASCE American Society of Civil Engineers Report Card for America's Infrastructure. Environmental Protection Agency. The Clean Water and Drinking Water Infrastructure Gap Analysis. 2002. Office of Water
Rose George The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters

Politics: Why it's so hard to find a way out of our situation: the Human Political Animal
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Joel Bakan The Corporation The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
Stanton Glantz Tobacco War: Inside the California Battles
Marion Nestle Food Politics How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health
Jack Doyle Taken for a Ride: Detroit's Big Three and the Politics of Pollution
James C. Scott Seeing Like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.


Human Ecology
-------------

Steven A. LeBlanc Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage
William Catton Overshoot
Mathis Wackernagel Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth
Tim Flannery The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australian Lands and People
Judith Shapiro Mao's War against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China
Michael Williams Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis
Tim Flannery The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples

Topsoil
-------

David Montgomery Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations
David W. Wolfe Tales from the Underground: A Natural History of Subterranean
R. Ratta, R. Lal Soil Quality and Soil Erosion
N. Brady, R. Weil The Nature and Properties of Soils

Water
-----

John Opie Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land
Sandra Postel Pillar of Sand, Can the Irrigation Miracle Last?


Population
----------

Roy Beck & Leon Kolankiewicz The Environmental Movement's Retreat From Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization (1970-1998). As the environmental movement approaches its fifth decade, the most striking change is the abandonment of U.S. population stabilization as an actively pursued goal.
Garrett Hardin The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia The Immigration Dilemma: Avoiding the Tragedy of the Commons,
Bill McKibben A Special Moment in History May 1998 Atlantic Monthly
All links at: www dot mnforsustain dot org
Thomas Homer-Dixon Environment, Scarcity, and Violence


Climate Change
--------------

Spencer R. Weart The Discovery of Global Warming
John D. Cox Climate Crash: Abrupt Climate Change And What It Means For Our Future
Brian Fagan The Little Ice Age: How climate made history 1300 - 1850
Brian Fagan The Long Summer. How Climate Changed Civilization
The National Academy Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises

Declining Societies
-------------------

Dmitry Orlov Russia: Reinventing Collapse. The Soviet Example and American Prospects
Peter Godwin Zimbabwe: When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

Exponential Growth
------------------

Robert Constanza, et al Sustainability or Collapse? An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth
Donella Meadows Nothing is So Powerful As an Exponential Whose Time Has Come
Albert Bartlett Arithmetic, Population, and Energy


Violence
--------

Azar Gat War in Human Civilization.
Lawrence Keeley War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage
James Waller Becoming Evil. How ordinary people commit genocide and mass killing
Philip Gourevitch We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
Jack Weatherford Genghis Kahn and the Making of the Modern World
Daniel Goldhagen Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans & the Holocaust
Wrangham & Peterson Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence
Michael Ghiglieri The Dark Side of Man: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence

Industrial Agriculture
----------------------

Eric Schlosser Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Michael Maren The Road to Hell The ravaging effects of foreign aid and international charity
Steven Stoll The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California
Richard Street Beasts of the Field. A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913.
Richard Walker The Conquest of Bread. 150 years of Agribusiness in California.
Julie Guthman Agrarian dreams. The paradox of organic farming in California
Kimbrell (editor) Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture
Jim Hightower Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times: A report of the Agribusiness Accountability Project on the Failure of America's Land Grant College Complex
Richard C. Fluck Agricultural Energetics
Carolyn Johnsen Raising a Stink: The Struggle over Factory Hog Farms in Nebraska

There is something arrogant about an author who in the same book covers economics, history, and physical science. He questions the peak oil calculations, instructs us on which will be the leading civilization of the future, and criticizes the global warming scenario among a multitude of other expectations for the future. Here are some examples of his trends for the next fifty years.

He questions the estimate that peak oil production will be reached between 2012 and 2020 because (1) estimation models are simplistic, (2) many past estimates have failed, and (3) published reserve estimates are not complete or to be trusted. He carefully considers the probability of Europe, Japan, Islam, Russia, and China or the United States as the leading civilization of the future. Europe is too heterogenous, Japan too old, Islam too backward, Russia too primitive, China still has a long way to go, and we all know the retreating fortunes of the United States.

His discussion of global warming stresses the limitations of our knowledge. Especially the computer models we use to project future warming rely on "highly uncertain assumptions" (p.178). He stresses that IPCC forecasts consider a 21st century global temperature increase of less than 1.5 C unlikely, but also an increase of more than 5 C as equally unlikely. Thus the most probable global warming in the 21st century will be in the range 2.5 to 3 C (p. 180). Most societies will have to adapt to this gradual temperature increase, but will be able to do so.

The book is thoroughly footnoted, and the author provides 37 pages of references. Vaclav Smil is a careful thinker, who despite the broad spread of his discussion has mastered the subject matter and carefully considers his words. He is the first to admit his prognostications can not be on the button, that all he wants to point out is "a wide-ranging, historically based interdisciplinary appraisal of sudden discontinuities and unfolding trends,"(p. xi). An insightful read.

Predicting the future is still impossible, but science has gotten much better at forecasting it, at least to the extent that it is informed by statistics and probabilities. Vaclav Smil speaks the truth as he sees it, according to mathematical information and indications. For instance, he refutes the "peak oil" scenario, but asserts that society's transition to an economy that is less reliant on fossil fuel is long overdue, environmentally and politically. Smil predicted the financial meltdown and the flu pandemic, so clearly he's on to something. He delves into a variety of issues in this analysis of trends and calamities, from the economic decline of the U.S. to conflicts in Muslim countries, the aging of many national populations and the depletion of essential ecosystems. getAbstract recommends this fascinating account of the future as seen through the cold eye of a statistician.

This is a highly informative and stimulating book for those who care about where we humans and our biosphere are heading. Vaclav Smil claims to have a superior approach to illuminating the next fifty years that offers "the best way" for us to imagine and plan for new circumstances. No comprehensive solutions are offered, only a small number of scattered suggestions. For example, Smil writes that water and nitrogen management are just as important as global warming, but offers no solutions on how these might be addressed. Smil does advise a very commendable "no-regrets" approach: that the benefits of counter-measures often warrant their execution, regardless of whether the perceived risk being addressed turns out to be well-founded (his example: global warming). The book is at its best when describing individual potential catastrophes, giving numbers and comparisons, pointing out important facts and fallacies and calling for rational, systematic risk reduction. The approach is a mix of quantitative statistics and estimations as well as qualitative analysis of trends. The latter is at times highly subjective and, at least in one case, incorrect. The book contradicts itself in a substantial way regarding whether we should accelerate the transition to renewable energy. The contradictions and numerous typographical errors show that the author should invest more time to improve the text quality of his publications.

From the Introduction: "Above all this is not a book of forecasts... Nor is this a volume of scenarios.... A close, critical, interdisciplinary look ... can be beneficial in reminding us... to pay adequate attention to the consequences of unpredictable... catastrophic events and to the clearly discernible outcomes of worrisome long-term trends. .... Better understanding and heightened awareness should help us lessen the impact of unpredictable events [...and...] improve our efforts at moderating or reversing deleterious trends... My intent is to illuminate, not to prescribe; ... to convince readers of the fundamental openness of contingent futures... such a realistic, searching, amalgamative, mosaic-building approach is superior to grand prescriptions, and it offers the best way to power our imagination, to mobilize our creativity, and to deploy our considerable capacity for adapting to new, unforeseen and unforeseeable circumstances. ... My intent is to explore those key variables whose impact is likely to be large enough to shape the course of world history during the first half of the twenty-first century."

The author rejects long-range forecasts as useless because they rarely stand the test of time. He rejects scenario analyses as fairy tales because "they will inevitably miss other components whose dynamic interactions will create profoundly altered wholes". The author prefers to "explore key variables", estimate the significance and probabilities of events and make qualitative evaluations of trends. Roughly speaking, Smil's approach is to give us our current coordinates and the slope of the curve, adding references to history and some analysis of what this could mean in 2050. His approach is probably better than the approaches that he criticises, but only in as much as it sets more modest goals and lower expectations. His estimations could also fail the test of time. His "exploration of key variables" may also be "missing components" and certainly say little of the "dynamic interaction" of factors. His qualitative trend evaluations are subjective and may well be wrong. Such is futurology.

Smil runs us through historical facts and numbers across a very broad range of topics that he knows well, thereby giving perspective and valuable correctives to common misconceptions. Some examples: The earth ingests 5 tons of meteoroids per day. Almost all near earth objects with diameter > 1 km have been identified; the chances of a surprise are extremely low. The largest super-eruption known occurred 28 million years ago in Colorado, causing 4500 km3 of ejecta. Volcano-triggered landslides can cause a tidal wave in excess of 100m moving up to 350 km/h. The total death toll of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic (50 million) was three times more than all deaths of World War I and almost equal to the number of deaths caused by Stalinist USSR and Maoist China. Even more lethal pandemics are possible today, despite modern know-how. Spending on nuclear fusion research (as opposed to fission) has been swallowing a quarter of a billion dollars per year for the past fifty years, has been a constant and dismal failure, and yet continues to be funded. Biomass energy schemes (e.g., ethanol) are bad for the environment and simply require too much land to be justified, even when one disregards the questionable morality of devoting food resources to satisfying the grossly inefficient use of fuel. The Gulf Stream is apparently not weakening and is in any case not responsible for Europe's mild winters. Most of the continent's winter heating is due to seasonal release of heat from the ocean. After 9/11 many people preferred to drive cars rather than to fly, which is in fact much more dangerous. Similarly, huge post-9/11 investment in research on bioterror, which is possible but relatively unlikely, has "short-changed" the work on common pathogens that annually claim millions of lives worldwide. This is because people are more afraid of risks that they cannot control, even if they are substantially less likely than everyday risks (smoking, obesity, car accidents, medical errors).

Smil makes a valuable contribution by describing potential problems, and offers some very good ideas and advice in his conclusion, but one is left feeling that he takes the easy way out by - for the most part - refraining from hinting at what he imagines we could do about them. For example, he rightly extols the benefits of intensive fertilisation while also indicating its corresponding destructive effects on the biosphere. Yet he remains painfully silent about the implicit dilemma this presents for the massively growing human population and massively deteriorating state of the biosphere. Many billions of humans will likely be damned with intensive fertilisation or without it.

The most startling contradiction starts on page 90: "There is no urgency for an accelerated shift to a nonfossil fuel world: the supply of fossil fuel is adequate for generations to come; new energies are not qualitatively superior; and their production will not be substantially cheaper. The pleas for an accelerated transition to nonfossil fuels result almost entirely from concerns about global climate change, but we still cannot quantify its magnitude and impact with high confidence." First, it is simply foolish to believe that any risk that has a plausible and significant chance of being ruinously catastrophic on a global scale, but that cannot be "quantified with high confidence", merits no urgent counter-measures. Most importantly, Smil does an about-face in his concluding chapter. Page 241: "By far the best example of a rich opportunity to deploy a no-regrets strategy is minimizing the future magnitude of global warming.... Most important, lower emissions of CO2 would require reduced consumption of fossil fuels, a goal we should be pursuing much more aggressively all along because of its multiple benefits." Does anyone really believe that there is "no urgency" for "a goal that we should be pursuing much more aggressively" because of the "future magnitude" of risk? This is pure fence straddling. It boggles the mind to think that such a successful author preaches two such different messages. What does Vaclav Smil really believe?

Some other criticisms:

Smil's own subjectivity jars with his call against subjectivity and for rationality. Here are some examples. Smil takes a stand against "overenthusiastic, uncritical promoters of new energy techniques" and goes to lengths to teach them "fundamental realities" but could have balanced his lessons with the fundamental reality that we depend on - and give mountains of cash to - unstable, autocratic, and potentially hostile countries. On page 87 Smil brings up what he calls the "myth" of the decline in costs of renewable energy that was expected with increased volumes and yet fails to disprove this expectation. Simply stating that "...photovoltaic silicon prices have more than doubled..." without a time frame, or stating that the costs of raw materials for building wind turbines "have risen" does not prove anything. In fact, photovoltaic costs have decreased globally by more than 50% over the last five years and continue to drop dramatically. The cost of raw materials for wind turbines has little effect on their growing production; it's not as if a windmill is made out of rare-earth materials. (Smil includes the price of ethanol fermentation from corn as relevant, although he himself recognises that ethanol is completely discredited.)

Further examples of the author's subjectivity: Smil commands an army of detailed orders of magnitude to show weaknesses of renewable energy, but when making his claims that stable repositories are available for the sequestration of spent atomic energy for "thousands of years", suddenly his analysis becomes arm waving. Why does he not show the stupendous costs and the order of magnitude of the required duration of sequestering atomic waste (e.g., based on when the decay of the waste would make leaching into the ground water acceptable)? The risk of atomic energy remains completely uninsured because it would destroy any company foolish enough to insure it. This goes unmentioned.

Further examples: Yes the Chinese "constitution" is awful, especially compared to the American Constitution, but does Smil really believe that China has no other basis to build its soft power? Yes Saudi Arabia was slower to react to 9/11 than to the 2004 Riyadh bombings: it would be bizarre for any country to be more sensitive to terrorism overseas than to the immediate aftermath of an inland terrorism attack.

Smil has associated himself with the "American Enterprise Institution", which includes Richard (Dick) Cheney on its board and Newt Gingrich, John Bolton, and Paul Wolfowitz amongst its many associates. Smil's bias shines through continually in the text, for example when he states that for some four generations the United States has been the world's "unselfish saviour". This is nonsense; yes, America has worthy ideals and can and has behaved unselfishly with extreme generosity, but like other countries, America's prime drivers are security and economics - altruism comes later. Smil implicitly equates foreign criticism of particular American activities with anti-Americanism. This is disparaging for international readers who have very deep respect for the US and who are grateful for America's positive influences on world security, but who are intelligent and therefore critical thinkers.

Some topics addressed by the book have had important developments since it was published. Smil's optimistic view of national debt issues has so far been misplaced. The trustworthiness of Tamiflu has been substantially eroded, because of its questionable effectiveness and its dangerous side-effects. Shale gas has become both an energy blessing and an environmental curse, as it has greatly diminished enthusiasm for investing in renewable energy technology. As Smil's book makes clear, futurology is difficult but eminently worthwhile.