Book Review: Energy and Civilization A History by Vaclav Smil

Borrowed this book from my cousin. It read more like an almanac containing tons and tons of energy related data sliced and diced in different ways than an interesting book that tells a story. Smil is an academic with a head that is overflowing with numbers. I think it would be interesting if I can do a mind meld to visit the insides of his brain to see how much and what kind of data are stored, how his thinking process works, and how he perceives the world through those numbers. 

In some way this book is equivalent to books like Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, as it provides a panoramic view, tracing the evolution of human civilization through one lens that spans several thousand years. But the GG&S book had an underlying thesis that comes out as a coherent story backed by the data & evidence presented. This book on the other hand doesn't reflect any new thesis or creative thinking but simply documents the impact of energy on civilization like a flat research report presenting every available number. That leaves the reader a bit unsatisfied in the end. In this aspect, this book is more like the Sapiens - A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari that also simply stated history and just left it at that.  

Book starts with the close relationship between energy and the society's development. This is followed by more or less a chronological narration of the role of energy in prehistory, traditional farming, preindustrial prime movers and farming, fossil fuels, electricity, renewables, and so on. Book concludes with a chapter titled energy in world history, which doesn't bother to tie it all together but just states how many aspects of world history is affected by energy while many other aspects are not impacted by energy. You feel like you finished reading a text book. No major insights or hitherto unknown view points. But the author has indeed put in enormous amount of thought into drilling down the available data. For example, when he is simply talking about human beings walking/running on the land, he analyzes the data this way: Running requires power outputs mostly between 700 and 1,400 MW equivalent to 10-20 times the basal metabolic rate. The energy cost of running for humans is relatively high, but people have a unique capability of virtually uncoupling this cost from speed. Body weight support and forward propulsion account for about 80% of the total cost of running; leg swinging claims about 7%; and maintaining lateral balance about 2%-but arm swinging cuts the overall cost by about 3%. Smil quotes his own research and a whole bunch of papers and articles to support his claims.

I am not a huge sports fan. I do understand the good values sports inculcates in people (e.g. how to take wins and losses equally well, work as a team). What turns me off is the amount of fraud & cheating that is prevalent pretty much in all the spectator sports. As a result, none of the records or numbers look true or meaningful to me. Perhaps Smil shares my sentiments and so I was amused to see these lines in the book: Does not the label of wasteful energy diversions apply much more readily to the extravagant, and mostly uninspiring, structures we build to watch modern gladiators kicking, throwing, or hitting assorted balls?  Elegant dissing of most spectator sports in the world. :-)

There is enough material o compensate such levity. There is a box titled "An Inquiry into the conditions of the women who carry coals under ground in scotland, known by the name of BEARERS" that describes the physical labor young children (starting from as young a age as 7) performed with their mothers for years carrying coal on their heads that is certainly emotionally disturbing by our standards today. 

The mother descends the pit with her older daughters, when each, having a basket of suitable form, lays it down, and into it the large coals are rolled; and such is the weight carried, that it frequently takes two men to lift the burden upon their backs The mother sets out first, carrying a lighted candle in her teeth; the girls follow. with weary steps and slow, ascend the stairs, halting occasionally to draw breath.It is not uncommon thing to see them, when ascending the pit, weeping most bitterly, from the excessive severity of labor. The execution of work performed in this way is beyond conception. The weight of coals thus brought to the pit top by a woman in a day, amounts to 4080 pounds and there have been frequent instances of two tons being carried. 

Subsequent paragraphs goes on to compute the energy numbers for this work performed as a lady weighing 60Kg, lifting 1.5t of coal from a depth of 35m will need about 1 MJ and so on. 

Some of the details in the book are elegant & impressive. For example, we know Rudolf Diesel invented the diesel engine. But the book talks about how he didn't invent an engine just to make himself rich but saw it as a tool to build a more egalitarian society. In the late 1800's, prime movers like water wheels or steam engines were large and were very difficult to move around. So, those prime movers will be the center pieces of the rest the structures like a factory. Diesel set out to invent a sewing machine size cheap engine that could be bought by individuals to setup their own shops. He wanted worker cooperatives built around this invention that will make it very easy to setup manufacturing systems anywhere needed for little money. He envisioned this worker run factories in the countryside leading to an age of honesty, justice, peace, compassion and love. A book he wrote to promote this eco system apparently sold only 300 copies. Still he thought and claimed that he had solved a huge social problem. Society didn't organize itself around worker cooperatives and the diesel engine were used more in heavy machinery and locomotives. Still it was nice to know that the thought process was bigger than the invention itself. 

There is no complicated math anywhere in the book. But Smil does analyze the available data in many different ways, for example, in terms of "energy output to mass" ratio when evaluating prime movers, instead of looking at simple energy output numbers alone. This teases out the efficiency of engines from their weight point of view. He also takes pains to contrast the 1900 great plains former who would struggle to muster about 5kW of power by pulling together six horses to his great granddaughter who could sit inside the air conditioned cubicle on a large diesel powered combine that puts 250kW at her finger tips. He makes similar comparison between a train engineer in 1900 who'd have utmost about 1 MW of power when the steam engine is running at maximum capacity pulling the train at about 100 km/h speed to a Boeing 747 pilot in 2000 that has about 120 MW of power from four gas turbine engines at his disposal flying 11 km above earth at a speed of 900 km/h. While being quite impressed by the amount of data he could wrangle throughout the book, I did notice how in one page he is talking about a precise number (756 kwh) that morphs into something a bit vague in another page (more than 700 kwh) indicating that he is mortal and is probably referring to datasheets and databases to get his numbers and doesn't remember everything in his mind. Phew.. Though I am not trying to compete with anyone, I don't need to feel too bad about my memory's limitations. :-)

You can give it a read if you like comprehensive description of history from one specific viewing lens (energy), though there is no overarching thesis or new idea being promoted.