Quotes from Vaclav Smil

The second law of thermodynamics, the universal tendency toward heat death and disorder, became perhaps the grandest of all cosmic generalizations – yet also one of which most non-scientists remain ignorant.

By 2020 there were some 1.8 billion air-conditioning units in operation, with more than half of them in just two countries, China and the US. But this is only a fraction of the potential total because among the nearly three billion people living in the world's warmest climates, fewer than 10 percent have air conditioning, compared to 90 percent in the US or Japan.

Finally, the third law of thermodynamics, initially formulated in 1906 as Walther Nernst's (1864–1941) heat theorem, states that all processes come to a stop (and entropy shows no change) only when the temperature nears absolute zero (–273°C).

Romania was the greatest exception with GDP up strongly by about 55% but with the country's material consumption expanding 2.5 times during the decade, a clear case of rising inefficiency of material use and increasing dependence of economic growth on higher material inputs.

Energy is not a single, easily definable entity, but rather an abstract collective concept, adopted by nineteenth-century physicists to cover a variety of natural and anthropogenic (generated by humans) phenomena. Its most commonly encountered forms are heat (thermal energy), motion (kinetic or mechanical energy), light (electromagnetic energy) and the chemical energy of fuels and foodstuffs.

De omnibus dubitandum (Doubt everything)

The greater the reduction of these fossil fuel–based services, the greater the need for the labor force to leave the cities to produce food in the old ways.

Some measurable effects appeared soon: as the lead phase-out proceeded, the median lead concentration in American children decreased by nearly 80 percent between 1976 and 1994, and by 2015 it was only about 5 percent of the mid-1970s level.

What has displaced TEL? Methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) became a leading additive by the late 1990s, but in 2000 the EPA announced its phase-out because of its adverse environmental effects (its solubility in water led to contamination of aquifers).

This left refiners with two major choices: either reformulate gasolines with increased shares of hydrocarbons that prevent knocking (known as the BTEX complex) or turn to ethanol. Initially, the BTEX complex became the leading substitute: this mixture of hydrocarbons—benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene, and xylene—present in liquid fuels is separated by refining and added to gasoline (which contains a limited volume of these aromatics) to boost its antiknocking capacity.

The efficiency of energy conversion is simply the ratio of desirable output to initial input.

The first reports of adverse effects came during the late 1950s as both agricultural applications and large-scale DDT spraying to control mosquitoes, tent caterpillars, and gypsy moths became common.

In the same year when Ratcliffe and Barker published their findings, Rachel Carson—a marine biologist formerly employed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service who left her job in 1952 after her previous publication, The Sea Around US, became a bestseller that gave her financial independence—began to investigate the anti-DDT activities among some communities, mostly in the US Northeast, affected by DDT spraying

This trifecta turned the book into the best-known nonfiction work of the 1960s. Silent Spring presented the use of DDT as one of the most consequential human interferences in the natural order of things, and the book was intended to make the widest possible public impact.

An average inhabitant of the Earth nowadays has at their disposal nearly 700 times more useful energy than their ancestors had at the beginning of the 19th century.

The scientific definition of power is simply the rate of energy use: power equals energy per time, or ML2/T3

An abundance of useful energy underlies and explains all the gains—from better eating to mass-scale travel; from mechanization of production and transport to instant personal electronic communication—that have become norms rather than exceptions in all affluent countries.

she made DDT the centerpiece of the book's lengthy indictment: throughout the book Carson refers to it nearly two hundred times.

Obviously, this atomization of knowledge has not made any public decision-making easier.

we are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years.

Ngram Viewer charts provide excellent illustrations of long-term

four pillars of modern civilization: ammonia, steel, concrete, and plastics.

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.

energy densities (energy stored per unit of mass or volume, critical for energy storage and portability)