Quotes from Vaclav Smil

industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy; now he eats potatoes partly made of oil.

The fourth category of invention consists of new methods of production, operation, and management, ranging from marginal but economically rewarding improvements to fundamentally new and highly automated ways of mass-scale manufacturing, information gathering, and data processing.

As might be expected with modern media reporting, every news report of some notable research advance has been commonly seen as moving us "closer" to the holy grail of nitrogen fixation in cereals—but "closer" remains elusive. "Substantial progress" reported in one year has no consequences five years later.

Uncritical media reports about breakthroughs and epochal beginnings, often under naively or ridiculously phrased headlines, have become the norm that generates false conclusions and raises unwarranted expectations.

I contrast the now common belief in an ever-faster pace of innovation with the many unmistakable signs of technical stagnation and slowing advances: there are limits to everything, and invention and innovation cannot be exceptions.

In 2018, nuclear power provided the highest share of electricity in France (about 72 percent), 50 percent in Hungary, Swiss reactors contributed 38 percent, and in South Korea it was 24 percent, while the share in the US was just below 20 percent.

This book has only modest goals: to remind us that success is only one of the outcomes of our ceaseless quest for invention; that failure can follow initial acceptance; that the bold dreams of market dominance may remain unrealized; and that even after generations of (sometimes intensifying) efforts, we may not be any closer to the commercial applications first envisaged decades ago. And what is true about the past is, despite recent claims to the contrary, likely to be repeated in the future.

As commonly used, the meanings of the terms invention and innovation have a large overlap, but innovation is perhaps best understood as the process of introducing, adopting, and mastering new materials, products, processes, and ideas. Accordingly, there could be plenty of invention without commensurate innovation

In contrast to Soviet innovation failures, the post-1990 economic development of China is the best recent, and historically unequaled, example of mass-scale innovation based on rapid appropriation of a wide array of foreign inventions.

The Chinese Communist Party learned the lesson from the USSR's disintegration well: no loosening of control similar to Gorbachev's attempt to reform an unreformable political regime but, in its scale, a truly unprecedented innovation-led economic expansion that resulted in rapid quality-of-life gains and left the party even more firmly in control.

it is undeniable that the decadal aggregates of applications granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), including grants to foreign residents, increased from just 911 during the first decade of the nineteenth century to nearly 250,000 during the 1890s, and then went from about 340,000 during the first decade of the twentieth century to about 1,653,000 during the 1990s, a nearly 2,000-fold increase in two hundred years.

We have already reduced the number of malnourished people to less than a tenth of the global population

The math is unavoidable: it is an inevitable property of long-lasting exponential growth that it ends up in a singularity, a point in time when a function reaches an infinite value, making anything instantly possible.

The Arthur D. Little management consultancy estimates that—based on a vehicle life of 20 years—the manufacture of an EV creates three times as much toxicity as that of a conventional vehicle. This is mostly due to the greater use of heavy metals.

By 1970 the global applications of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers were more than eight times the 1950 level. By the century's end they had risen above 80 million tons a year, and recently they have been close to 120 million tons of nitrogen a year.

Energy conversions are the very basis of life and evolution. Modern history can be seen as an unusually rapid sequence of transitions to new energy sources, and the modern world is the cumulative result of their conversions.

Their benefits are indisputable: I have calculated that no less than 40 percent of the global population receive their dietary protein (directly from crops and indirectly from animal foodstuffs) from harvests that got nitrogen from the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia; in China, the share is about 50 percent.

Hydrolectricity is the largest modern non-fossil source of primary energy; the combination of relatively low cost, high suitability to cover peak demand, and the multi-purpose nature of most large reservoirs (they serve as sources of irrigation and drinking water, a protection against downstream flooding, recreation sites, and, increasingly, places for aquacultural production) should make it one of the most desirable choices in a world moving away from fossil fuels.

the International Commission on Large Dams put the global potential of economically feasible projects at just over 8 PWh, roughly twice the current rate of annual generation.

CFCs and DDT carry different, much more sobering but also expected lessons: human interventions in Earth's environment often carry delayed, complex risks, so far removed from the initial concern and so far beyond the readily conceivable complications that only time and the accumulation of events will make us aware of those unexpected but highly consequential impacts.

In 1901 the Maybach-designed Mercedes 35 was the first essentially modern motor vehicle: still without any roof but including four cylinders, two carburetors, mechanical inlet valves, an aluminum engine block, a gear stick in a gate, a honeycomb radiator, and rubber tires.

During the second decade of the twenty-first century, worldwide applications of nitrogenous fertilizers averaged about 110 million tons a year, and losing half this mass is releasing more than 50 million tons of the element (in reactive compounds, mostly as nitrates and ammonia) into the environment.

Octane (C8H18) is one of the alkanes (hydrocarbons with the general formula CnH2n + 2) that form anywhere between 10 to 40 percent of light crude oils, and one of its isomers (compounds with the same number of carbon and hydrogen atoms but with a different molecular structure)

During the first two decades of the twentieth century there was considerable interest in ethanol (ethyl alcohol, C2H6O or CH3CH2OH), both as a car fuel and as a gasoline additive.