Dismissing his writing as "totally pointless" seems rather hasty.
What evidence would you have to support that assessment? Other than wishful thinking and appeal to consequences.
We got here largely by moving off a sustainable track. Humanity used to live lagely sustainably.
Unfortunately for those who'd like to return to that state, we've also increased total numbers, and per-capita wealth, far beyond the levels the sustainable track sufficed for. Reversion would proabably be traumatic.
That said: most of the transformation is less than a century old, and substantial portions of the world (China, India, Africa) have joined the industrialised world largely in the past 50--75 years. So time-wise we're not so far from it. In terms of carrying capacity and the requirements for maintaining present state without catastrophic collapse, the distance seems much greater. To that extent I somewhat disagree with Smil's relative confidence, though I'll note he's far more informed than I am on the overall state of the situation.
While I am optimistic about getting us off fossil fuels, if it turns out they are actually necessary for even one thing, then that thing, whatever it is, logically cannot be in the long-term future of humanity.
Though on something being obligately dependent on some input or process: if that is one of a very small number of uses and both supply and consequence effects can be managed (e.g., we won't run out of supply in any conceivably meaningful timeframe and we can manage consequences), that usage might persist.
Limiting petroleum usage to material feedstocks could be tolerable if:
- That occurs at rates such that exhaustion isn't a meaningful risk.
- Any environmental impacts, including but not limited to CO2 emissions, are compensated for.
Those are themselves both steep requirements, but not utterly inconceivable.
The pre-industrial utilisation of natural oil and tar seeps for uses such as lamp oil, sealing ships hulls, and the like, seem to me to have been at least reasonable. It wasn't until we started shipping the material in bulk within and between countries that major problems started emerging.
That said: ice-core studies have detected atmospheric CO2 shifts and heavy metal contamination (mostly mercury and lead) dating to paeleolithic times (presumably from deforestation) and Roman mining activities during the Republic and Empire periods. Activities we think of as de minimus may in fact not be.
Expertise is not authority. It does rely on trust. And it isn't a blanket certification --- just because someone is an expert does not mean that they are never wrong (and I've indicated elsewhere in this thread some areas in which I disagree). However it does suggest that a casual dismissal based on lack of qualification, as was the case in this specific thread, wants for evidence itself.
That is, the value of expertise (root word, experience) is a deep familiarity, knowledge, understanding, and trustworthiness in a specific field. One trusts an expert computer programmer, an expert doctor, an expert engineer, an expert pilot, an expert lawyer.
Or, in this, case, an expert environmental scientist.
I'd mentioned his credentials not as a blanket dismissal of some specific argument against the piece, or an element of it, but that the piece as a whole is "pointless". Smil's experience, knowledge, understanding, and track record strongly suggest otherwise.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Appeal_to_authority
If you follow lordkrandel's other comments to this thread, you may find their own experiential basis, beginning from a clear reading of the article and articulation of their own argument, is lacking.
How did he get this reputation for being smart when he's had so many dumb takes on energy?
Has he accepted that EVs are viable yet? (edit: having now read the article, no he's still arguing that EVs are bad) Does he really not know that fossil fuels are not required for any of these things. Did he just intentionally lie about it? For what purpose?
edit: He contradicts himself at the end of the article, so he knows the headline is false. Is this basically an ad for fossil fuels?
And just in case someone points out that the headline may have been written by an editor:
> Fossil fuels remain indispensable for producing all of these materials.
But if you keep reading past the advertising copy about how great fossil fuels are.
> Synthesis of ammonia and smelting of steel could both be based on hydrogen rather than on natural gas and coke. We know how to do that
Well, that's not what your headline says.
He does of course continue to try to sandbag this
> —but it will take some time before we could produce hundreds of million tons of green hydrogen derived from the electrolysis of water by using wind or solar electricity (virtually all of today’s hydrogen is derived from natural gas and coal). The best forecast is that green hydrogen would supply 2% of the world’s energy consumption by 2030, far below the hundreds of million tons that will eventually be needed to decarbonize ammonia and steel production
I can't tell if he's just writing poorly or being intentionally deceptive but the green hydrogen for ammonia and steel wouldn't be part of the global energy consumption, we'd use renewables to provide the electric power for the creation of it and use the green hydrogen as a chemical feedstock.
We might also use some of it to generate electricity, but those are two separate things that he's probably intentionally trying to muddy.
The corresponding chapter title from Smil's book is "Understanding Our Material World: The Four Pillars of Modern Civilization".
Smil highlights their significance, irreplaceability, and that "the mass-scale production of all of them depends heavily on the combustion of fossil fuels, and that some of these fuels also supply feedstocks..."
The title as submitted seems to me to be fair: "The modern world can't exist without fossil fuels". Not that civilisation cannot, or that there isn't a possibility for replacing either the materials to a substantial degree, or the role of fossil fuels in their production, but that the result of doing so would leave us with something much at odds with the present parameters of the indistrialised, technological, high-energy, fossil-fuel dependent world we take as a given.
And to that extent, Smil's argument seems quite sound. You'll find similar viewpoints expressed both by strong critics of the fossil-fuel world, say, Richard Heinberg, or by apologists for the fossil fuel industry, such as Daniel Yergin. To the extent that they all agree that where we are now is a direct consequence of human utilisation of fossil fuels, I find no basis for disagreement.
The question is what the future implications and prospects are. Fossil-fuel defenders see an unlimited future for that resource. Critics think we need to eliminate all possible use immediately. Smil, as he himself notes, tends to cut a middle path in his arguments, though that's really not the most valuable aspect he brings to the discussion. It's an absolutely unsparing assessment and quantification of fossil fuels' role and where that leaves us in considering future options.
It's a philosophy which earns him strange bedfellows and frequent criticism from across the growth-sustainability spectrum.
And I think you'll find that the more you rely on Smil's actual text, rather than third-party headline summaries, the more his argument and facts cohere.
Using mass produced PV power, which is the cheapest energy ever produced in history, and uses Quantum Physics effects to turn sunlight into electricity is in your opinion not 'industrialised, technological, high-energy'? How can you type that with a straight face in 2022?
Oh, what's this one you slipped in at the end as if it belonged amongst those other words, "fossil-fuel dependant". Yeah, it's not that, because, it turns out, CO2 pollution is bad, even worse than all the other pollution they've caused.
> And until all energies used to extract and process these materials come from renewable conversions, modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on the fossil fuels used in the production of these indispensable materials. No artificial intelligence designs, no apps, no claims of coming “dematerialization” will change that.
What was he trying to convey with this paragraph that closes the article?
I mean he's literally saying that until we get to net zero, then we will still be burning fossils fuels. Okay that's true I guess. But he sounds weirdly happy about it, like he's proved someone wrong about something. Maybe some person he's argued with that held the incredibly esoteric opinion that not renewable power, efficiency, insulation, and pricing in externalites was going to replace fossil fuels but 'artificial intelligence and apps'???
I mean that's an absurdly strawman position to attack, and I'm still not sure that Smil is even right about that. Technology is kind of a big deal in a lot of fields. AI gets used to enhance oil recovery for example. Is his closing argument literally "Old man yells at the cloud."?
What was he trying to convey with this paragraph that closes the article?
My read is that Smil is addressing a lot of hand-wavy assertions, again from across the BAU to halt-fossil-fuels-now spectrum, that there are easy ways out. A hard analysis based on quantities, properties, and available viable options says that no, there aren't easy ways out. AI alone won't save us, aps won't save us, unsubstantiated claims of dematerialisation won't save us. You could look to sources such as David MacKay, Sustainable Energy --- Without the Hot Air, who made a similarly hardboiled analysis for the UK. Given rates of energy consumption, touted measures like "unplug your electronics" are not enough. This isn't a problem that's solved by a bunch of small measures, but by a bunch of big measures.
And the specific big measure here is get fossil fuels out of materials production. Most espeically of ammonia, plastics, steel, and concrete, though that itself is still just a start.
You've expressed yourself largely, if not entirely coherently, in what you're against.
What do you happen to be for? What goals and methods are you advocating, addressing what problems, specifically?
You admitted above to not even reading the article. If you're going to discuss it at length, I'd hope you might fix that. And read closely, because his arguments really are nuanced.