Vaclav Smil

Vaclav Smil (born December 9, 1943) is a Czech-Canadian scientist and policy analyst.

He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

His interdisciplinary research interests encompass energy, environmental, food, population, economic, historical and public policy studies.

He has also applied these approaches to energy, food and environmental affairs of China.

Smil was born during World War II in Plzeň, at that time in the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (present-day Czech Republic).

His father was a police officer and his mother a bookkeeper.

Growing up in a remote mountain town in the Plzeň Region, Smil cut wood daily to keep the home heated.

This provided an early lesson in energy efficiency and density.

Smil completed his undergraduate studies and began his graduate work (culminating in the RNDr., an intermediate graduate degree similar to the Anglo-American Master of Philosophy credential, in 1965) at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Charles University in Prague, where he took 35 classes a week, 10 months a year, for five years.

"They taught me nature, from geology to clouds," Smil said.

After graduation he refused to join the Communist party, undermining his job prospects, though he found employment at a regional planning office.

He married Eva, who was studying to be a physician.

In 1969, following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and Eva's graduation, the Smils emigrated to the United States, leaving the country months before a Soviet travel ban shut the borders.

"That was not a minor sacrifice, you know?"

Smil says.

He reads 60 to 110 non-technical books a year and keeps a list of all books he has read since 1969.

He "does not intend to have a cell phone ever."

Smil is known for being "intensely private", shunning the press while letting his books speak for themselves.

Smil then received his Ph.D. in geography from the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences of Pennsylvania State University in 1971.

In 1972, Smil took his first job offer at the University of Manitoba where he remained for decades, until his retirement.

He taught introductory environmental science courses among other subjects dealing with energy, atmospheric change, China, population and economic development.

Smil is skeptical that there will be a rapid transition to clean energy, believing it will take much longer than many predict.

Smil said "I have never been wrong on these major energy and environmental issues because I have nothing to sell," unlike many energy companies and politicians.

At the University of Manitoba, he only ever showed up at one faculty meeting (since the 1980s).

The school accepted his reclusiveness so long as he kept teaching and publishing highly rated books.

Although renewable energy technologies have improved over time, the global share of energy produced from fossil fuels since 2000 has increased.

Smil emphasizes that replacing the use of fossil carbon in the production of primary iron, cement, ammonia, and plastics is a significant and ongoing challenge in the industrial sector.

Together, these industries account for 15% of the world's total fossil fuel consumption.

Smil stresses the need for energy prices to reflect their true costs, including greenhouse gas emissions, and promotes a decrease in the demand for fossil fuels through energy-saving measures.

Smil believes economic growth has to end, that all growth is logistic rather than exponential, and that humans could consume much lower levels of materials and energy.

Included among Smil's admirers is Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who has read all of Smil's 36 books.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Science Academy) and the recipient of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology in 2000.

In 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of FP Top 100 Global Thinkers.

In 2013, he was appointed by the Governor General to the Order of Canada.

In the fall of 2013, he was the EADS Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin.

"I wait for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie," Gates wrote in 2017.

"He's a slayer of bullshit," says David Keith, an energy and climate scientist at Harvard University.

His wife Eva is a physician and his son David is an organic synthetic chemist.

He lives in a house with unusually thick insulation, grows some of his own food, and eats meat roughly once a week.

Smil noted in 2018 that coal, oil, and natural gas continue to make up 90% of the primary energy sources used in the world.