"Energy Revolution? More like a Crawl" - Dr. Vaclav Smil
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as a grounded, data-driven counter to hype about quick energy revolutions.
What it is
Energy scholar Vaclav Smil argues that global energy transitions are slow and that renewable targets should not rest on wishful thinking. He appraises how energy dependencies are likely to change and asks for using much less.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2017 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec Scea91 · 2018-08 · on “Seaweed could be scrubbing more carbon from the atmosphere than expected (2017)”
Exactly, we haven't achieved that much actually. Most of the technology we use for harvesting energy is not much further from what people could imagine in 19th century. Turbine was invented in the 19th century. I really suggest watching this talk by Smil [this video] and if you are interested reading some books from him about energy and oil. Really insightful.
Recommends tedsanders · 2017-05 · on “The Future of Energy Isn't Fossil Fuels or Renewables, It's Nuclear Fusion”
That is a bizarre claim to make. Energy will not be far cheaper and more abundant in 10 years. Trillions of dollars are invested in infrastructure that has lifetimes of 50+ years. It is not economically or technologically feasible to undergo an energy revolution that quickly. Even if we gathered the political and financial will, our production facilities and supply chains could not feasibly handle the load of rebuilding the world's energy infrastructure in a single decade. [this video]
Recommends lcamach84 · 2020-09 · on “How can we, as web professionals, help to make the web more energy efficient?”
I encourage you to look at the work of Vaclav Smil [1] . There's no such thing as clean energy. [1] [this video]
Cites seltzered_ · 2022-12 · on “Deadly, dirty, indispensable: the nitrogen industry has changed the world”
I get where you're coming from, folks like Vaclav Smil have talked about how the haber bosch process is arguably what's kept 2/3 of human population alive ( [this video] ). The issues are also: - Thinking beyond the anthropocentric and realize we've created many ocean dead zones: e.g. [LINK] . Think about what this'll mean in terms of ocean temperature in life within our lifetimes. - Many farmsites simply use way too much nitrogen, possibly impacting human drinking water (one good person to follow in Iowa is Chris Jones ( [LINK] ) and Silvia Secchi ( [LINK] ) - Despite the above the predicament of deciding to use nitrogen inputs during adverse weather conditions (curious to hear about the alterna