A Curmudgeon’s View of the Energy Challenge by Justin Gillis

A very interesting article over at the NYTimes

A Curmudgeon’s View of the Energy Challenge

Heres a preview:


One of the world’s great minds on issues of energy use, food production and the connection between them is a fellow named Vaclav Smil, of the University of Manitoba. Bill Gates reads him. He is No. 49 on Foreign Policy magazine’s list of the top 100 global thinkers. He is often a curmudgeon, but our editorial colleague Andrew Revkin recently pitted him against the environmental advocate Lester Brown on questions of future food supply, with Dr. Smil playing the optimist that time.
Anybody with a serious interest in the future of the planet could disappear for many days into Dr. Smil’s astonishing list of publications. A book he wrote called “Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and the Transformation of World Food Production” is enough to change one’s whole view of humanity. It turns out many of us would not even exist but for a chemical breakthrough dating to 1909, one whose consequences have put enormous strain on the ecology of the planet.