Indeholder "Introduction", "People : The Inhabitants of Our World", " What happens when we have fewer children?", " The best indicator of quality of life? : Try infant mortality", " The best return on investment : vaccination", " Why it's difficult to predict how bad a pandemic will be while it is happening", " Growing taller", " Is life expectancy finally topping out?", " How sweating improved hunting", " How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?", " Why unemployment figures do not tell the whole story", " What makes people happy?", " The rise of megacities", "Countries : Nations in the Age of Globalization", " The First World War's extended tragedies", " Is the US really exceptional?", " Why Europe should be more pleased with itself", " Brexit : realities that matter most will not change", " Concerns about Japan's future", " How far can China go?", " India vs. China", " Why manufacturing remains important", " Russia and the USA : how things never change", " Receding empires : nothing new under the sun", "Machines, Designs, Devices : Inventions That Made Our Modern World", " How the 1880s created our modern world", " How electric motors power modern civilization", " Transformers - the unsung silent, passive devices", " Why you shouldn't write diesel off just yet", " Capturing motion - from horses to electrons", " From the phonograph to streaming", " Inventing integrated circuits", " Moore's Curse : why technical progress takes longer than you think", " The rise of data : too much too fast", " Being realistic about innovation", "Fuels and Electricity : Energizing Our Societies", " Why gas turbines are the best choice", " Nuclear electricity - an unfulfilled promise", " Why you need fossil fuels to get electricity from wind", " How big can a wind turbine be?", " The slow rise of photovoltaics", " Why sunlight is still best", " Why we need bigger batteries", " Why electric container ships are a hard sail", " The real cost of electricity", " The inevitably slow pace of energy transitions", "Transport : How We Get Around", " Shrinking the journey across the Atlantic", " Engines are older than bicycles!", " The surprising story of inflatable tires", " When did the age of the car begin?", " Modern cars have a terrible weight-to-payload ratio", " Why electric cars aren't as great as we think (yet)", " When did the jet age begin?", " Why kerosene is king", " How safe is flying?", " Which is more energy efficient - planes, trains, or automobiles?", "Food : Energizing Ourselves", " The world without synthetic ammonia", " Multiplying wheat yields", " The inexcusable magnitude of global food waste", " The slow addio to the Mediterranean diet", " Bluefin tuna : on the way to etinction", " Why chicken rules", " (Not) drinking wine", " Rational meat-eating", " The Japanese diet", " Dairy products - the counter-trends", "Environment : damaging and protecting our world", " Animals vs. artifacts - which are more diverse?", " Planet of the cows", " The deaths of elephants", " Why calls for the Anthropocene era may be premature", " Concrete facts", " What's worse for the environment - your car or your phone?", " Who has better insulation?", " Triple-glazed windows : a see-through energy solution", " Improving the efficiency of household heating", " Running into carbon", "Epilogue", "Further Reading", "Acknowledgments", "Index".

Et emne ad gangen bliver taget op og regnet lidt på. Fx regner han på vindmøller og gætter på at det er svært at få lavet 100 MW vindmøller, der kan konkurrere kommercielt. Men hvorfor grænsen lige går der? ( )

Countless insights. I believe it was Lord Kelvin who said you can only discuss things you can measure. While that may be debated this book provides a smorgasbord of measurements and much food for thought. It also serves as a continuing warning about climate change. Still out is a very upbeat presentation indicating many opportunities for action. ( )

Although billed as an "essential" guide to the constraints hemming in policy decisions in terms of production and energy use, this collection of essays by the noted polymath Vaclav Smil mostly exist to have provided him with amusement; having been given a platform by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. As for the overarching theme, you can say that it's about achieving efficiencies in modern industrial society, the constraints to doing so, and how how restraint in consumption is highly underrated. One thing that I can say is that even just dipping at random into this collection will probably make you feel smarter. ( )

Non mi ha convinto. ( )

The Guardian apparently calls him "the nerd's nerd" and he certainly covers a lot of ground and puts some really interesting statistics forward. For example he has computed the feeding efficiencies for different types of meat species: 3-4 units of feed per edible unit for broiler chickens, 9-10 for pork and 20-30 for beef.Interestingly this also demonstrates that Vaclav has his blind spots. Broilers are raised in intensive sheds and fed grain (which is grown elsewhere), Beef in the USA may also be produced on feedlots but can also be produced on the open range where the animals feed on low value grass or herbage which could not otherwise be utilised. So his equations are fine....as far as they go but they are not the full story.
Similarly, he goes to great lengths to demonstrate that large wind generators absorb a lot of resources to construct. His implied conclusion is that they are not economic because of this....but he also has the throw-away line that these costs would be recovered in on year of operations. So, presumably, the next 19-20 years of generation would be virtually free (apart from maintenance costs and disposal coasts).
I really enjoyed his articles. Each a short pithy essay making his points really strongly. For example: diesel engines are here to stay. There are no readily available mass-mover (container ships, bulk haul ships, trucks and freight trains) alternatives. However, I really detect a blind spot when it comes to the role of services in the economy. Vaclav seems to hold fast to the notion that the only good economic activity is manufacturing. This flies in the face of the reality that all of the advanced economies are increasingly reliant on services as the economic generator and most GDP in the developed countries is generated by the service sectors. (It's over 80% in USA and Australia for example). Manufacturing is a very small direct contributor But Vaclav writes like an engineer who places manufacturing on a pedestal and suggests that no other sector can generate so many well paying jobs. Sorry Vaclav. You are wrong. The service sectors generate by far the most jobs in advanced economies and tell the community that the lawyers, bankers, doctors, dentists, IT programmers, etc. have poorly paid jobs and you invite incredulity. Again Vaclav seems terribly out of touch, and has a real blind spot with the services sector.
He does however make the point that the USA is not the world leader on a number of important indices such as life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity, happiness. (And, I might add, income equality). The USA is certainly up there with the leaders but lots of other countries are outperforming it.
He has an interesting article about kerosene (which is the primary constituent of jet fuel). He makes the point that it has a very high energy density of 42.8 mégajoules per kilogram. This is slightly less than gasoline but it can stay liquid down to -47 degrees C, and it beats gasoline on cost evaporative losses and fire risk. He can't see an alternative to Kerosene for aviation but does make the point that today's airliners are burning about 50% less fuel per passenger km than they did in 1960.
All in all, I found the book fascinating and his erudition impressive. I would have been even more impressed if I was not aware of those blind spots mentioned above. Happy to give it 4.5 stars. ( )