Smil presents seventy-one short pieces, each examining a subject through quantities, covering people, countries, machines, fuels, transport, food, environment and general trends. Each runs two or three pages and states figures with sources.
The recurring purpose is to correct impressions formed without arithmetic. He shows the actual energy costs of food production including the fuel required per kilogram of chicken, beef and tomatoes; the actual efficiency of engines, turbines and lighting across history; the actual quantities involved in steel, cement, plastics and ammonia production, which he calls the four material pillars of civilisation and which have no low-carbon substitutes available at scale; the actual rates of adoption of past technologies against the claims made about current ones; the real trajectory of life expectancy and its causes; and the arithmetic of vaccination, diet and air travel risk.
His consistent argument is that discussion of energy, environment and technology proceeds without the numbers, and that the numbers change the conclusions. He is sceptical about rapid transitions on this basis, since he calculates the physical quantities that would have to be replaced. Smil is uninterested in narrative and the pieces do not build. He states quantities and lets the reader draw the conclusion, which some readers find bracing and others find flat.
The format works better as a reference than as sequential reading. The figures date, and several energy cost figures have shifted since publication. His scepticism about transition speed is contested by the pace of renewable deployment, though the material pillars argument about steel, cement, plastics and ammonia has not been answered.
Readers who want quantitative correction of impressions about energy, food, technology and environment, used as a reference rather than read through.
Distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba; writes quantitative histories of energy, food, materials and technical change.
Each book counts the physical inputs an economy consumes - joules, tonnes of steel, ammonia, cement - and establishes the historical rates at which past energy transitions actually moved. Those numbers let an investor size decarbonisation timelines and test claims about how fast an energy system can be rebuilt.
Chosen by shared topics, the entries that hold them, and the people who recommended both.