We Are Structurally Cooked

Foreign Policy magazine annually publishes its list of the 100 most influential thinkers around the globe.  The 2010 list has Vaclav Smil at #49.  Smil, a Czech-born environmental scientist at the University of Manitoba, is on the list "for keeping the West honest about its plight."

Smil has led a 30-year career of interdisciplinary contrarianism, writing hundreds of scientific articles and dozens of books attacking sacred cows of western environmental and geopolitical thought.  In 2010, he published four books and took on carbon sequestration and peak oil.  I am currently reading Prime Movers of Globalization: The History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines and Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years.  His book titles range from The Bad Earth, to Feeding the World, to Energy at the Crossroads.

His recent article in the May-June 2011 issue of American Scientist (Global Energy: The Latest Infatuations) is a must read for engineers.  Smil writes the following:

"I see more fundamental, and hence much more worrisome, problems.  Global energy perspective makes two things clear: Most of humanity needs to consume a great deal more energy in order to experience reasonably healthy lives and to enjoy at least a modicum of prosperity; in contrast, affluent nations in general, and the United States and Canada in particular, should reduce excessive energy use.  While the first conclusion seems obvious, many find the second one wrong or outright objectionable."

In 2009, Smil wrote that, in order to retain its global role and its economic stature, the United States should:

". . . provide a globally appealing example of a policy that would simultaneously promote its capacity to innovate, strengthen its economy by putting it on sounder fiscal foundations, and help to improve Earth's environment.  Its excessively high per-capita energy use had done the very opposite, and it has been a bad bargain because is consumption overindulgence has created an enormous economic drain on the country's increasingly limited financial resources without making the nation more safe and without delivering  a quality of life superior to that of other affluent nations."

Video of Smil discussing the future of the planet:

Smil gvve a great answer when ask if the West could tear itself away from oil in a couple of years given the political will - - "We are structurally cooked."