Hacker News Books

Smil's Energy and Civilization is indeed excellent.

I highly recommend Energy and Civilization[1], the most engrossing dry recitation of facts I've ever read.

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/energy-and-civilization

Catton, Overshoot: https://www.worldcat.org/title/overshoot/oclc/16587666&refer...

Meadows et al, Limits to Growth: https://www.worldcat.org/title/limits-to-growth/oclc/8165904...

Online: http://www.donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Limits-to...

30 year update: https://www.worldcat.org/title/limits-to-growth-the-30-year-...

Joel E. Cohen, Carrying Capacity:

Article: https://www.worldcat.org/title/population-economics-environm...

Book: How many people can the earth support? https://www.worldcat.org/title/how-many-people-can-the-earth...

Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity: https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-s...

Ophul's bibliographies are excellent, one online: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6fgq8g/william...

Smil, Energy and Civilization: https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-his...

Weissenbacher, Sources of Power (2 vols): https://www.worldcat.org/title/sources-of-power-how-energy-f...

In Energy and Civilization, Vaclav Smil points out that in terms of embedded energy, an automobile, with over 1,000x the mass of a smartphone, has only 100x the embedded energy.

Given replacement cycles, humanity now invests more energy in creating smartphones (life expectancy: ~2 years) than automobiles (~10 years). By year-of-use embedded energy, autos use only 30% of the resources of smartphones.

(p. 344, box)

This contains a link to the actual discussion [1] which I highly recommend watching. Bill demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of energy systems, guided by one of his favorite authors (Vaclav Smil) who recently wrote the incredible and humbling book, Energy and Civilization [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1EB1zsxW0k

[2] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Energy-and-Civilization

Definitely not the shortest read, my suggestion. Though it turns up on LibGen.

James Burke's Connections traces much of this historry, as does Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization.

The Singer ref should reward multiple interests, and can be dipped into at leisure.

I very strongly recommend reading the underlying article itself. I've submitted that numerous times to HN, unfortunately PDFs seem not to have much uptake, in part because many readers arrive via mobile devices.

https://www-legacy.dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_C...

I'd stumbled across this through my own research, trying to find literature with a detailed description of fossil-fuel formation. I've since found it referenced by numerous other works --- yes, one of my forms of entertainment is looking for familiar citations amongst footnotes. Smil's Energy and Civilization being one work citing Dukes.

It's not just the material conversion that's staggering, there's the time of accumulation. For petroleum, humans burn in one year a quantity which took five million years to accumulate.

There is a very prevalent group of people on HN who don't deny that global warming is happening, but strongly deny that it is a serious problem.

This group deeply believes that technology will solve their problems, no matter how large. All that is required is believing in this strongly enough. There is a nearly rabid belief that everything will be fine because "technology" will find a way.

What these people fail to recognize is that technology is a function of energy. This comes across pretty clearly in Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization. Technology has felt magical in the last 250 years because we have had a tremendous amount of energy.

There is a very common myth, one I used to believe myself, that magically in the age of reason man woke up and started creating amazing things. I think everyone in tech has been at least someone seduced by this vision. The cover of SICP has a wizard on it!

What more accurately happened is that we started extracting fossil fuels, and that let to us being able to to magical things, including finding more fossil fuels faster. Even the earliest hunter gathers were able to harness fire and benefit from it. The first agrarian societies learned how to use the sun to build truly solar powered economies. We live in the age of fossil fuels, and as much as we wish it to be true, we are not able to build renewables on a scale and timeline to even begin to replace the magic of fossil fuels. In fact we continue to globally use more of every fossil fuel every year. Renewables are only able to supplement our insatiable hunger for energy.

So technology can't magically save us from our energy problems because energy is the magic that makes technology happen. But for many here such statements border on heresy.

Excellent book. And recommended for the fine denizens of Altair IV (both of us) as well.

I'd also very strongly recommend Vaclav Smil's Energy and World History (1994) or the updated Energy and Civilization (2017). These describe history through the lens of energy sources, and the role of energy in that history.

Manfred Weisenbacher takes on much the same story in Sources of Power, which is a more comprehensive, if uneven, book. Excellently researched (and drawing heavily on Smil as well as many, many other sources), but could use some trimming and occasionally verges strongly to the polemical.

> US consumption CO2 numbers account for US purchase of solar panels.

That's what I said, but they don't account for the manufacture of raw materials produced and sold in China to aid in the manufacture of these panels, nor of the associated infrastructure causes. They therefore underestimate the export co2.

> Is of what was in terms of energy. Will it be that way in the future? Only if we let corruption and entrenched fossil fuel interests prevent cheaper options from being deployed.

Energy is effectively the same as economic activity. You are correct that if we could magically replace all of the fossil fuel usage with renewables we would be at zero emissions. But again, all sources of energy production have been rising.

> Dollars are not CO2 emissions. CO2 is emissions. Our economic systems are constructed by law and convention, and technology is completely changeable.

Again you are correct that dollars are not CO2 emissions, but dollars are a good proxy for energy (read Smil's Energy and Civilization if you need a reference for that), and currently the vast majority of our energy needs are met with CO2 emitting fuel sources.

> The only solution is compete transition of the economy in all sectors. Massive change. I say get on board or get out of the way.

Do you really not see the contradiction regarding the problem at hand and your solution? A complete transition of the economy is a incredibly destructive, insanely energy intensive process. Unless energy was already mostly renewable such a solution will only lead to the problem being worse.

I guess I'll get out of the way since this conversation has only further convinced me of how bleak our situation is.

I cannot recommend highly enough Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History (1994), or the revised edition released just this year, Energy and Civilization. It follows pretty much precisely this metric, which is also, incidentally, far easier to calculate than you'd expect. In fact, you can pretty much plot out human development levels, from hunter-gatherer, to agricultural, to empire, to early industrial, to modern industrial, based on per capita energy consumption and availability, ranging from a low of about 10 GJ/capita to a peak of over 350 GJ/capita in the US (in very rough numbers, I don't have sources in front of me at the moment).

See generally: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/03/12/world-energy-consumpti...

There's some very interesting work going on in this area, in particular Steve Keen's recent integration of energy into production functions:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BAjN6bG7XzM

Despite being very much an apologist for and champion of the oil industry, Daniel Yergin's The Prize is outstanding.

Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization and books on energy transitions gives a mostly energy-physics and technological bacground on the coal-oil transition (and ag-coal previously). Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power adds in some of the political dimension.

Though he's scarcely a Limits to Growth devotee, it was Daniel Yergin's The Prize (book and BBC/PBS series) which hammered home the absolutely staggering impact of petroleum on human growth and technological progress.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/prize-the-epic-quest-for-oil-...

Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization tells the history, and impact, of energy on humanprogress evenmore specifically, and over a far longer period, through five eras: hunter-gatherer, ag, coal, oil, and whatever it is that comes next.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-his...

EROEI is a large part of that, though it doesn't tell the whole story. EROEI of coal is often higher than petroleum, but petroleum's handling characteristics -- fluid rather than solid -- and inherent portability, over both long distances and short, make it vastly more useful and flexible, most especially in motive applications, and transport in particular.

Some of petroleum's role in mining can be replaced by electricity (see vast open-pit electrically-powered bucket excavators), so long as there's a primary energy source for that. Others not so much: global bulk liquid and ore transport is highly tied to oil-fueled marine deisel engines.

I strongly recommend Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History and Energy and Civilization (along with many other books on resources). The "Burning Buried Sunshine" paper (Springer link above)describes human energy use relative to net primary production. As of the late 1990s humans wwere accounting for (using directly or indirectly) 20% of all net primary production, with other energy use roughly doubling that.

Whether or not remaining biological systems could survive on just 60% of plant life is a possibility, though the impacts would likely be large. Further growth in human energy consumption would obviously be limited.

I'd come across that independently, Smil also cites it.

There are several elements of Roman wealth which aren't captured by GDP (or alternatively, of the overreporting of modern wealth by GDP).

One element is infrastructure depreciation. As you note, the materials and construction of Rome tended to last. Stone and Roman concrete both in particular don't degrade with time (though they may suffer earthquake damage). Things built tended to remain built over timescales we are not familiar with, at the very least, centuries rather than decades. Depreciation expense was far less.

Another factor was a much smaller natural capital expense. Not an entirely absent one, and there were problems with deforestation, salinisation, and cropland depletion throughout the Roman empire, as well as hazards introduced by commerce of plague and disease. But the major capital depletion of the modern world, the draw-down of fossil-fuel reserves at rates millions of times greater than their formation, was not present, nor various consequences of such actions, including of course, greenhouse-gas induced global warming and ocean chemistry changes.

(Among the issues Rome did have to deal with was heavy metal pollution, particularly lead and mercury, and particulates emissions. It wasn't all roses. But by relative magnitudes this was a very small fraction of present capital expenditures.)

Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization is an epic exploration of the role of energy in history, including the Roman Empire.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/authors/vaclav-smil

David Christan, Big History:

https://www.bighistoryproject.com/about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History

https://www.worldcat.org/title/big-history/oclc/940282526

Vaclav Smil's Energy and World History accomplishes a similar end:

https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/...

His later Energy and Civilization largely updates this, though shifting the historical focus somewhat.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-his...