Energy Quotes

“A useful analogy is to see traditional societies as relying on instantaneous (or minimally delayed) and constantly replenished solar income, while modern civilization is withdrawing accumulated solar capital at rates that will exhaust it in a tiny fraction of the time that was needed to create it.”
― Vaclav Smil, Energy: A Beginner's Guide

“Unfortunately, motor vehicles are also responsible for 1.25 million accidental deaths every year (and more than ten times as many serious injuries),”
― Vaclav Smil, Energy: A Beginner's Guide

“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: “Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?” Despite”
― Vaclav Smil, Energy: A Beginner's Guide

“Despite these advances, internal combustion engines remain rather inefficient prime movers and the overall process of converting the chemical energy of gasoline to the kinetic energy of a moving passenger car is extraordinarily wasteful.”
― Vaclav Smil, Energy: A Beginner's Guide

“Energy will do anything that can be done in the world. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)”
― Vaclav Smil, Energy: A Beginner's Guide

“Despite its supposed universality, the second law appears to be constantly violated by living organisms, whose conception and growth (as individuals) and whose evolution (as species and ecosystems) produces distinctly more ordered, more complex forms of life. But there is really no conflict: the second law applies only to closed systems under thermodynamic equilibrium. The Earth’s biosphere is an open system, which incessantly imports solar energy and uses its photosynthetic conversion to new plant mass as the foundation for greater order and organization (a reduction of entropy).”
― Vaclav Smil, Energy: A Beginner's Guide

“For nearly a century, pig iron’s high carbon content was lowered, and steel made by blasting the molten metal with cold air in open hearth furnaces; only after World War II were these replaced by basic oxygen and electric arc furnaces.”
― Vaclav Smil, Energy: A Beginner's Guide

“era than a comparison of the excellent woodcuts included in Agostino Ramelli’s (1527–1608) sixteenth-century classic Le Diverse et Artificiose Machine (first published in 1588) and the elegant engravings that appeared in the world’s first richly illustrated encyclopedia, published under the editorship of Denis Diderot (1713–1784) in France (the last of 28 volumes of L’Encyclopedie was completed in 1771). Ramelli’s illustrations of commonly used machines (waterwheels, pumps, windmills), tools (gearing, chains, cams), and his own new designs show devices that are ingenious but made overwhelmingly from wood, and are obviously heavy and clearly not very efficient. In contrast, L’Encyclopedie is full of illustrations”
― Vaclav Smil, Energy: A Beginner's Guide

“In 1748, David Hume (1711–1776) complained, in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, that “There are no ideas, which occur in metaphysics, more obscure and uncertain, than those of power, force, energy or necessary connexion, of which it is every moment necessary for us to treat in all our disquisitions.”
― Vaclav Smil, Energy: A Beginner's Guide

“No forecasts then – only brief reviews of some key factors that will determine the world’s future quest for a reliable and affordable energy supply, and the major resource and technical options we can use during the next half-century.”
― Vaclav Smil, Energy: A Beginner's Guide

“Finding out how much food actually is consumed is a challenging task, and neither dietary recalls nor household expenditure surveys yield accurate results.”
― Vaclav Smil, Energy: A Beginner's Guide