SMIL Books

A survey of biology (from cell biology to biome-scale ecology) and geography as pertaining to the earth's biosphere - where life on earth came from (as far as it can be known), how it will end, where it has spread, how life affects the natural cycles of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur and other elements, what are the scaling laws for animals and plants, what is the total biomass of wild mammals, domesticated bovids and humans, and so on. So far as a nonbiologist can understand it, this is very interesting stuff.

The last chapter is about the human influence on the biosphere - human-introduced invasive species (99% of the biomass of the San Francisco Bay), air and water pollution, deforestation and global warming via anthropogenic emission of fossil carbon. I didn't know that the answer to a great many questions about global warming is, "We have no idea", since there are dozens of feedback cycles, both positive and negative, around the increased concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide and its consequences. Will plants photosynthesize more because of greater concentration of carbon dioxide? Some will, some won't. Will the warmer oceans cause the methane hydrates on the ocean floor to melt, releasing large quantities of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the athmosphere? Fortunately, we cannot destroy the biosphere; unfortunately, it is within our capabilities to alter it in such a way as to make the earth unlivable for billions of humans.

Smil's Energies is one of the best popular science books I have ever read.

This is less a review of the book then a plea for more people to read it. Like an idiot, I loaned my new copy of this book to a friend after just reading through it once. I'll be buying another, and keeping it.

Smil connects so many ideas together here that you might find yourself thinking that the dynamics of an interconnected biosphere are obvious. I suppose that's the highest praise I can offer. Complex interactions within geology, geography, chemistry and evolution are made clear in this book. The writing is bright, interesting and yet dense with information. This is large scale popular science writing at its best.

Vaclav Smil is a geographer, and tries to get some perspective on the life of our planet by taking the large view. This entails a sacrifice of depth to get the necessary breadth. But the task he has set himself is still to provide sufficient rigorous detail on the topics he includes (bichemistry, energetics, geology, geochemistry, etc.) to give the reader a basis for useful understanding of the complex thing that is the biosphere. It is necessary, as he asserts in his preface, to synthesize rather than specialize if we are to address the pressing questions about our living environment, which sprawls -- physically and intellectually -- over the whole world. And if you follow the references -- or just leaf through the bibliography -- you must come to realize the immense amount of learning and research that undergird this presentation.

The patron saint of this volume is the early 20th-century Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, who was the first to use the term "biosphere" (actually, "biosphera") in the grand and inclusive way that the rest of the world is now getting around to doing. He calculated (or estimated or guessed) the primary productivity of the green world, the standing biomass divided into its varous categories of land and water autotrophs and heterotrophs, the interrelationships between life, the sun's energy, the composition and behaviors of sea and air, and the grand geochemical cycles. And Vernadsky was hopeful: he expected a planet-wide consciousness to arise that would manage the biosphere intelligently.

Since then, hope has waned as our knowledge and power have grown. Humanity is stressing the systems of life as much, perhaps, as any catastophe in Earth's long history. Yet this book is a hopeful gesture: it is an attempt to get a grip on the issues in play so we can act with some effect to reverse or slow the degradation of the air, land, and waters, and to restore nature to a state of robust health -- or at least to give nature some breathing room. Smil has chosen to treat in detail the questions of the origins of life, its possible existence elsewhere, and its fundamental biochemistry. He talks about life in the mass -- as a storehouse for sunlight, and as a participant in the great cycles of material through the atmosphere, waters, within the mantle of the earth, and out again. He talks about the physical constraints on life's productivity, the dynamics and organization of the biosphere. And always he is concerned with magnitudes and their relationships: it is not enough to discuss the amount of plankton in the oceans as an isolated fact. Rather, its mass and its turnover, its powers of energy sequestration, should be compared to those of land plants, and productive and unproductive sea areas contrasted.

It is implicit in this approach that the numbers matter. We must know the size and extent of things that we wish to affect or to stop adversely affecting. After all, without some sense of the magnitude of the particular flows of material or requirements of particular facets of the living world, we can waste our efforts on what amount to side issues. However, I wish the presentation had been more user-friendly: many of the charts and graphs were lifted from technical publications, and the others had that feel. The ultimate goal of all this numerizing should be -- let's face it -- a sort of pictoral understanding. To that end, I would have liked some synthesizing graphics that showed (maybe with fat arrows and thin arrows, big, little and even teeny-tiny barrels (or trees or bugs...)) how facets of the system compared, and at a glance showed the relative "importance" of things.

I know that mere magnitude is not always a safe guide to how important something is in the workings of the world. A rather small quantity of CFC's in the stratosphere has had immense effect, for counterexample. Small amounts of bottleneck chemicals like phosphorous control the richness of life in otherwise productive areas. And how unimportant is a rare -- and biospherically useless -- species?

Anyway, I cheer this parade of fact backed by much research and aided immensely by our current generation of planet-spanning monitoring devices. This is hard science, and it gives us baselines and error ranges, without which all discussion finally devolves into opinion and political posturing. Yet, when the last graph is in place, we go right on despoiling the world. The problem is not so much a technical difficulty as it is a matter of societal will. Smil admits as much in his last chapter. All that has gone before is not even really prelude. Without the active cooperation of the political entities that partition this vast human herd the environment cannot be saved. This is the hard part. It is rather a letdown, getting to this point in the book, to realize that science is powerless in the face of a desire to ignore it.

This is a very readable book about the history and nature of the Earth's biosphere, and ideas about its future.

Smil begins with some fascinating material on the the nature and origin of early life on Earth. That includes a discussion of stromatolites (early life), and some interesting comments about guesses of the odds of life appearing in a stellar system in the Galaxy. While estimates that hold the chances to be small are taken seriously, Fred Hoyle's argument that the chance is outrageously small is shown to be silly.

The author then describes the nature and diversity of life in general, and its resiliance to a variety of natural catastrophes, including bolide impacts and supernovae.

Smil tells us about how the biosphere is energized, by solar radiation and the Earth's internal heat. And we then see the flows of water and materials, including carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and other mineral cycles. The next two chapters deal with the extent of the biosphere and the biosphere's mass and productivity. There are organisms that range up to 50 km above the surface of our planet, or to the bottom of the oceans, nearly 11 km down. To tens of meters below the land surface. And at temperatures ranging from 110 degrees Celsius to minus 50. pH ranges can be from 1 to 11. Meanwhile, the biomass may be anywhere from 2200 to 4000 Gigatons of Carbon.

There is a chapter on the dynamics and organization of the biosphere, including the quarter-power scaling of animal and plant metabolism "that applies across an entire range of body sizes and metabolic pathways."

After that, Smil discusses the transformation of the biosphere due to human actions, such as the release of sulfur, nitrogen, and carbon into the atmosphere. The book concludes with some ideas about the future of the biosphere. He speculates that the Earth's population will stabilize at well below 10 billion people and that there needs to be a transition "from fossil fuels to solar radiation as the dominant source of human energy needs." Meanwhile, there are problems to face: we humans are awfully prone to violence, there may be a new ice age, we could be hit by a big bolide, and so forth. Still, the author is mentions that the biosphere might prove surprisingly resiliant to what is being done to it at present.

There are a few useful appendices, covering milestones in the evolution of the Earth and its biosphere, sizes and masses of organisms, chemical reactions in the carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur cycles, and ocean and land estimates of the biosphere's phytomass, heterotrophic biomass, and net primary productivity, There's also a list of useful websites.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic.

I sampled this book on a whim on my Kindle and then bought the whole thing, even though it was a steep $20 plus. Smil does an excellent job describing how critical technologies such as electrical transmission, motors, and lighting actually evolved, far beyond the Edison-invented-the-lightbulb stories we have all heard. I am just a couple of chapters in, but I am confident in saying if you are leaning towards buying this book, you probably should. He goes into more detail than you may want concerning such things as the efficiency of various electrical technologies, yet somehow he makes the story of leaps and steady improvements rather mesmerizing.

Quite striking is his major thesis that the technological revolution before WWI was sui generis, a singularity in its own right. He explains how the technologies developed then are still very much with us and unlikely to be superceded anytime soon. This is a good antidote to the presentism of the Age of Information and AI enthusiasts. Unless you are already an engineer, you are likely to learn a lot about basic technologies we take for granted. IP lawyers may also find the various patent struggles of interest.

I was in Powell's technical book store not looking for anything in particular, when I found exactly what I was looking for! I've always been interested in the history of technology, but often the books/articles seem to miss the big picture. Smil gets the big picture, and presents it in an accessible fashion. He puts an interesting perspective on many of the inventions that you are familiar with, and some that you are not-- providing a thorough discussion on energy related topics, as well as covering steel making and the Haber-Bosch process. His writing has an interesting personal perspective, and he provides detailed documentation and interesting illustrations. What a wonderful book. A must read for anyone interested in technology, and the history behind many of the things we now take for granted.

I found this book (2 ed. Scientific American 2001) to be easily readable, and while the general thrust of the work may be about the greenhouse effect that is not the main topic. Rather, the book focuses on exploring the flows of major substances in the environment e.g; carbon, nitrogen, water and phosphorous. I've loaned this book and and it was greatly appreciated there too. Alas, it seems it can be difficult to go back and reference material; the index is a bit skimpy and the text arrangement works well for reading but may only allow you to find the general section of what you are looking for.

This book gives the reader the background to consider the "Greenhouse Effect" and all its ramifications in a serious way. Very good reading and very thought provoking.

This is a colorful and attractive book that tells you everything you may ever need to know about creating multimedia presentations using SMIL 2.0, the second release of the World-Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language Recommendation. SMIL is an XML language for creating multimedia presentations, integrating media, temporal control and interactivity. A SMIL presentation can contain a combination of any types of media. SMIL itself is media "agnostic", and includes most media types by referencing their URL's rather than embedding them in the SMIL file itself.

The authors, Bulterman and Rutlege, are respected multimedia researchers and were key contributors to both the SMIL 1.0 and SMIL 2.0 Recommendations. They were personally involved in drafting and testing a significant portion of the standard, and the company that Bulterman used to lead, Oratrix, developed one of the first full implementations of the SMIL 2.0 language, Grins. So these guys know what they are talking about.

While the W3C SMIL 2.0 Recommendation (http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/REC-SMIL2-20050107/) is primarily written for SMIL implementors and XML language designers incorporating SMIL features into their XML-based language, the book is written for multimedia content authors. The book begins with an overview of SMIL 2.0, with six example presentations that show how SMIL can be used, some history, and a guide to the organization of the SMIL 2.0 standard. The next chapter gives a brief but useful introduction to SMIL 2.0 code including the major components of the language: structure, media, layout, timing, linking, and control.

Further chapters go into each of these areas in much greater depth, explaining all of the options and features in each component (terms module in SMIL 2.0) of the language. And there are many! To support fully featured, interactive, and attractive multimedia features that allow infinite flexibility in the look and feel of a multimedia presentation, SMIL 2.0 has a ton of features and options. In addition to the components already listed, there is animation (my favorite), transition effects, media clipping, advanced layout, extended control, and metadata. Bulterman and Rutlege do a good job of presenting a lot of material in an organized and attractive manner, with lots of examples.

By and large, the features in SMIL 2.0 are straightforward and intuitive to use, However, as is true in any standard developed to meet the needs of many separate groups (SMIL 2.0, for example), SMIL 2.0 is a large language with some potential pitfalls, and there are some also "doozers" and "gotchas". By necessity, the SMIL timing model is complex. While usually intuitive, in some particular cases the timing elements and attributes can interact in initially surprising ways. For another example, there are two kinds of SMIL XML for representing transitions, and all transitions may not be available in all platforms. The authors calmly guide the reader through all this. Backward compatability between versions of SMIL, including the oddly named 'skip-content' attribute is another complex subject clearly presented.

This book is both more comprehensive and much more attractively presented than any other book on SMIL that I have seen. The "insiders" view of SMIL that authors have is used to round out the explanations and rationale for things to good effect. Overall this is a great book for any multimedia content developer who is using or considering using SMIL 2.0. It will also be useful to SMIL implementation developers as another source of information when reading and implementing the recommendation documents. Lastly it should be of interest to students studying multimedia as an in-depth guide to a specific comprehensive multimedia presentation architecture.

Aaron M. Cohen
Chairman of the W3C Synchronized Multimedia Working Group (produced the SMIL 2.0 Recommendation)

This is a remarkable book, and by far the most authoritative guide available for the SMIL languages. It serves a broad audience, and combines a readable style with complete expertise in the subject matter.

For authors, the book provides an easy-to-understand explanation of the language principles and syntax. Many useful examples illustrate the features, and provide useful authoring templates. Bulterman and Rutledge's experience with multimedia authors and authoring comes through in the many tips and hints for addressing real-world issues and avoiding potential pitfalls. All examples are provided online as well, along with demos and other resources.

For the serious student or implementer, the book provides detailed explanations of the underlying models for layout, timing and animation. These sections benefit from the combined experience of the book's authors as leading members of the W3C standards group that developed the SMIL languages. Their understanding of the details is clearly beyond that of most other authors on this subject.

The book design itself is interesting and fun. Graphics in the margins mark the chapters, with key chapters featuring flipbook-like graphic "animations". It has a comfortable layout and organization and an excellent index. If I have a complaint, it is that I do not find the graphics summarizing syntax features to be very intuitive. Fortunately, the text and examples provide sufficient syntax reference.

Authors of web multimedia as well as academics and professionals integrating or implementing SMIL language features will find this an invaluable addition to their reference bookshelf - I strongly recommend it.

This is an important book for anyone wishing to gain a better understanding of energy in all its forms and in all environments. Perhaps I can best express my thoughts at this early stage of reading the book by quoting from an email I sent the author, Vaclav Smil, earlier today.

"Today I received your latest book, Energy in Nature and Society, in paperback. After initially looking through it, I've now read the preface and the first eight pages and, after reading only that little, just placed an order for a hardcover copy - even though I can barely afford such extravagance. In this volume you have published a remarkable piece of work, and I hope it will be widely read by those who truly wish to gain a better understanding of energy in its totality."

This truly is a book for those who wish to gain a deeper understanding of energy and is the best writing to date on the subject.

This is an easy to follow guide for the beginner. You don't have to know calculus to follow the math. I daresay it could be a useful review for the more sophisticated reader.

This book is a comprehensive introduction to energetics. The book takes the view that energy balance calculations are useful predictors of biological population dynamics. There is first a review of the current terrestrial energy provided by the sun and the earth (the earth's core is very hot). This may seem like a simple topic, but there are an enormous number of ways energy reveals itself for measurement, so a third of the book is devoted to this subject.

The middle third considers the energy balance implications of various plant and animal populations. The final third considers the human energy balance.

I would have liked to have seen consideration of power-law distributions of energy consumption by population group, but this omission doesn't subtract from the value of the book.

First of all, this is not a book that most people would take to the beach to read, but rather a fairly scientific book on the use of nitrogen in agriculture, as befits a publication of MIT Press.

Smil initially set out to write a biography of Fritz Haber, but found that Haber's contribution to agriculture was so much more complicated than he could fit into a biography. Instead, he wrote a history of nitrogen supplements in agriculture. The amount of nitrogen is by far the main determinant of crop yield; within common sense limits, a crop's yield is more or less linearly dependent on how much nitrogen a farmer spreads on his fields. In the 1910s, Fritz Haber and Bosch, devised a way to extract nitrogen from the air; until then farmers had been dependent on compost and the shipments of guano (bird dung) from South America to get more nitrogen onto their fields. The results include a huge increase in crop yields, a huge decrease in the percentage of the population that must toil the fields, a huge increase in literacy and much more.

Smil's book is quite interesting to anyone interested by science; if you have a teen that you are trying to interest in science, this is a book you could send his way. If you're averse to the occasional number, equation, graph, or scientific nomenclature, you're best off avoiding this book. These caveats stipulated, I highly recommend this book.

The Haber process is arguably the most significant development of the 20th century, yet it remains virtually unknown to the general public. There are a few chapters on the history and chemistry of this vital process, and they are reasonably well written. But the vast majority of the book is an endless litany of statistics, completely devoid of narrative structure. For example:

"In the United Kingdom more than half of all nitrogen fertilizer has been applied to grasslands. A Royal Society study found that in the late 1970s average applications on pastures surpassed the inputs to arable land (172 vs. 135 kg N/ha), and that synthetic compounds accounted for 57-63% of all inputs. The overall use of fertilizer nitrogen in the United Kingdom rose by almost 50% between the late 1970s and the mid 1980s, but it declined afterwards, and its average during the late 1990s has been only about 20% higher than a generation earlier, which means that the synthetic fertilizers supply between 65 and 70% of all nitrogen inputs. But high-yielding winter wheat -- the 1998 mean was 7.97 t/ha -- still receives more than 180 kg N/ha, double the amount applied in 1970 when the yield was around 4 t/ha, and the secular correlation between the rising applications of inorganic nitrogen and rising harvests is obvious (fig. 7.8)."

Now imagine 300 more pages of text just like that, and you get the idea. There is no *story* here, just data. It's a shame, because there is definitely a story to be told.

The material on the Haber process itself is better, but not great. In particular, the author can't seem to choose the level of the audience: descriptions of chemistry alternate between being too simplistic and assuming too much. Details essential to understanding often seemed to be missing, while details of no apparent relevance are in abundance. I don't really care whether the process takes place under 137 vs. 152 atmospheres; but I do care *why* the pressure is so critical, which is never explained.

I really wanted to like this book more than I did. There *is* plenty of good material here, but you have to sort through a lot of empty statistics to get it, and the omission of key pieces of scientific explanation makes for a painfully frustrating read.

This is a great book for any one interested in the way the Haber-Bosch process of making Nitrogen fertilizer changed the world. Enriching the Earth provides in depth information on the history that led up to the discovery of the process of using N2 and H2 to make NH3. It also contains up to date information on the effects that all of this new nitrogen has on the earth.

The book can get a little technical at times, with chemical formulas and schematics of the instruments. While I found this information useful, some people might find it overwhelming. If you skip over the techincal parts, the book is very well written for the average person.

These little known scientists really changed the world as we know it. When you think about it, what has Einstein done for you lately? These guys put food on the table.

Smil's book is a "must read" for anyone interested in the world food problem. His most valuable contribution is his insistence, backed up with an unparalleled marshalling of facts, that the biggest hope in the short run lies in greater efficiency. By looking at the whole food cycle, from field to final end, he can show (correctly) that waste all along the line is costing us more than enough food to feed all the hungry AND many of the unborn. Water and fertilizer are lost in the field, grain goes to rats and weevils during storage, and so on down to the appalling plate waste in the US. Smil does not side with the catastrophists who project imminent famine (they have been wrong too often) nor with the cornucopians who see nothing but plenty ahead (he dismisses them with the tart comment that, ultimately, the earth would have to be all grain if food and population kept growing). He is, however, on the optimistic side, seeing existing and fairly easily-developed technology as quite adequate to feed the expected world population. There are some problems. First, he accepts the hopeful premise that world population will level off around 10 billion. In spite of the mantra-like repetition of this figure by aid agencies, it is probably too optimistic. China is barely managing to sustain its one-child policy, and population growth is still rapid in the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, and Latin America; many countries show no sign of slowing. Second, he adopts the most optimistic possible figures or scenarios on soil erosion and some other variables. Desertification, for instance, he ascribes largely to natural climatic swings. This is not credible; there are far too many photographs, from around the world, of desertification that stops short at barbed-wire fences (which prevent overgrazing). On the other hand, he does not say much about minor and obscure crops, and still less about obscure cropping regimes and methods. Use of such technologies (found mostly among traditional peoples around the world) could vastly increase the productivity of world agriculture. One notes, going beyond this book, that some countries today are as badly off as the most pessimistic of catastrophists feared: Sudan, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Mali, and many more. These are countries with weak and usually tyrannical governments, often torn by conflict. Conversely, some countries have done as well as the most cheery optimists could have hoped; these are mostly European countries with strong, democratic governments with high levels of accountability. In between, countries fall neatly into line along a continuum. China, Smil's and my main area of expertise, is in the stretch. Smil, arguing against Lester Brown, sees much hope for China. However, China's government is currently toward the weak and tyrannical end, making Lester Brown's gloomy predictions look more reasonable. China has a long history of saving itself at the last minute, and Smil may be right in the end. But China also has a long, long history of famine caused by inept governance. Anyway, the point is made, and I wish Smil had made it: Good government, not technology and not food waste, is the key. This being said, Smil's book is about the best out there at the present, and brings together a huge array of important facts, many of them otherwise almost impossible to find in the specialized literature. Anyone interested in world futures had better read it.

The debate over feeding a growing world population seems like an ink blot test - you "see" your paradigm (prejudices, world view) and feel strongly, usually without a lot of data.

This seems true of environmentalists as well as free market enthusiasts.

Vaclav Smil recaps the debate, including Paul Ehrlich's famous vasectomy and - so far always wildly inaccurate - prophesies of massive starvation, and the equally enthusiastic faith of free marketers that technology and free markets will _always_ and _forever_ keep right on booming.

Then he adds a reality check, going over the data and the science in loving detail.

Smil has spent many years in the field - and in paddies ;-) - all over the world, so his summary for general readers recaps his own cutting-edge scholarly books as well as scholarship generally. Freeman Dyson was deeply impressed by Smil's general work on bioenergetics, the physics of ecology - Smil is the rare bird who can do first-rate research _and_ explain it without talking-down, grinding an ax or equations (he does have a flow diagram for biospheric nitrogen that is truly elegant, as well as charts and graphs that _work_ without bogging you down).

While he concludes it is just possible to feed the projected world population over the next century, the fascination is in the details he presents elegantly.

For instance - the loving movement for more work horses on farms. I love morgans, but some even love mules ;-)

All agricultural uses consume about 1% of North American liquid fuels, but feeding the horses needed to replace internal combustion would require 250% of current land devoted to agriculture. Smil is too delicate to ask what we'd do with all that horse manure - in the 1850s, New York City had a small industry devoted to sweeping it up and shipping it to Connecticut's "gold coast" to grow onions.

Nitrogen fertilizers are perhaps the critical input, and perhaps one third of us today could not be fed without artificial nitrates (Smil has a book _Transforming the World_ just on this topic).

He is equally powerful, point by point, on just how China went from starving en masse with Mao to current surpluses, what we know and do not know about soil erosion, and each of the limiting factors in crop varieties (cultivars, if you like good words). He does not seem to over-emphasize, but if genetic re-engineering of crops ever gets beyond resistance to pests, the underlying efficiencies of photosynthesis plus organic fixation of nitrogen _conceivably_ might allow some wildly more efficient "Frankenfoods", a sort of "monster mash" using C4 photosynthesis as the basis.

If Smil takes sides in the clash of worldviews, he successfully presents it in terms of in-put efficiencies. E.g., will we really starve because we will run out of farmland, because artificial fertilizers will run short or kill-off the micro-life that make soils live.

I found one sentence bemoaning the "collapse" of petroleum prices, which cut short "drilling for oil" by improving energy efficiency. This is where engineering efficiency loses touch with most of us. Gasoline cheaper than bottled water is good for most of us, bad for OPEC, and state interventions to artificially impose the cost signals from $40/barrel petroleum would be hugely costly even before you count pure waste.

Consider Al Gore's "carbon tax" which immediately gave coal an exemption - because coal is so clean, or maybe to pay-off the UMW and Senator Byrd. Britain passed a carbon tax, but somehow imposed a double helping on state-owned _nuclear_ power plants that generate zero "green house" gases, again because coal production has political clout that completely offsets any environmental arguments.

But Smil's strength is _precisely_ his ability to focus on the data, on the science. Economics and politics, let alone worldviews that mimic theology, show up only as consequences of the biophysics.

Regardless of your position on global warming, this is a very scholarly and informative must-read book.

ENERGY AT THE CROSSROADS
Vaclav Smil
MIT Press 2003

A Book Review by Steve Baer (email-zomework@zomeworks.com)
December 2003


So many good things about Vaclav Smil's Energy at the Crossroads make it difficult to explain the shortcomings.

Smil's arguments are straightforward and his statistics, with one giant exception, are extensive.
He doesn't bring the false drama to his chapters on oil that so many authors are unable to resist. Smil knows a great deal about our use of fossil fuels. Who should know more than he after over thirty years of study, yet he says he doesn't know how much more oil there is, or how long it will last. Smil is skeptical of such pronouncements. His long chapter on "against forecasting" is alone worth the price of the book. Our relationship with energy is simply too complex for us to see into the future. Some may not wish to read books like this. After all, isn't it easy to say, "I don't know and don't think anyone else does either"?

I am so glad for the few sentences Smil writes about himself, about his youth in Czechoslovakia. He tells of splitting the mountains of firewood during the summer which he lights (with difficulty) before dawn in the winter; about the oil furnace and now the 90% efficient natural gas stove that supplies any heat the sun doesn't for his passive solar home in Manitoba.

Energy at the Crossroads lifts up and away from its numbers and graphs. The joy of the hot-rodder or jet pilot appears many times as Smil recounts how we have arrived at our turbo jets, our 500 kW households (including vehicles), our enormous oil tankers, so effective that shipping costs hardly change with distance. These certainly are accomplishments to revel in, and Smil does. He includes some marvelous paragraphs on steel, energy's companion, guardian and nursemaid for today's technology. With Smil, when you reach the edge of a chapter's topic, the adjoining territory, which he hasn't time to explore thoroughly, is likely completely familiar to him. For Smil has studied more than the carbon in coal, oil, wood and gas. He has also investigated Nitrogen and Phosphorous, which he mentions in passing.

While Smil rejoices in the powers we have, he never appears determined to go ever forward. He is too open minded and sophisticated to crave ever larger, ever more powerful anything. In several places he asks what was so bad about life in France or Japan during the 60's when these accomplished societies used modest amounts of energy. Why do we need more? Smil would be just as happy if we were to go sideways.

Despite the strengths the overall mood of the book is wrong. The problem must be the forces at work on Smil; the pressures he and the rest of us contend with.

First, consider his publisher the MIT Press. Smil mentions how pleased he is that the MIT Press published his last five books. The MIT Press may sell many copies of its books, but they put little effort into editing. The present volume introduces terms such as TOE after we have gotten used to GJ and EJ and never explains what the letters mean (ton of oil equivalent). Why didn't MIT help its author? In Smil's earlier book, Energies, power and energy are confused. The same confusion is in D.E. Nye's book on electrifying America. No freshman could pass physics I making these mistakes. Smil deserves better. Sales, cover design, jacket blurbs, and promotion must outweigh clarity and accuracy with the MIT Press.

An even greater disappointment than ship shod editing is the statistics and treatment of renewable energy. Smil knows all about the power of people at work; how many Watts they are worth, how someone lifting sacks compares to a conveyer belt. He has discussed this in other books. Why does he leave out the muscle power of six billion people from his energy accounting? Why does he forget his own solar heated house?

Something has cast a spell over Smil's energy accounting. Smil's statistics are a hormone to accelerate growth of electricity, coal, oil and large industries. There should be a warning, like those on medicine bottles, of the side effects of taking these studies seriously - the impairment of architecture, agriculture, city planning, and birth defects in forming societies. According to Smil there is no travel by foot or bicycle. No work is done by the strengths of our bodies; no light or warmth passes through windows; clothes don't dry on clotheslines. We don't use brooms, mops, shovels or picks, only power tools. The only renewable energies are wind generators and photovoltaic panels, both of which remain heavily subsidized and are manufactured chiefly by huge international corporations. What introduced this mood into the book? It doesn't fit with the details.

Let us remember what is would cost each and every one of us six billion if we had to pay at today's prices for the sunlight that hits our earth. It would be about $50,000 per day for each of us and another $4,000 a night for a full moon. Though we will never pay this, it doesn't make it any less valuable or any less important to remind ourselves of, as we sell ourselves things dug or pumped out of the earth.

Certainly a solidly researched book. Mr. Smil leans over, it seems, to be "objective," but the arguments are weighted; we are warned against the gloom and doom version of the Hubbertites, and it would seem, indeed, that it is sheer folly to predict the imminence of the oil "peak." Much of the argument against the "peakists" (Campbell, Leherrere, etc.) seems to be based on a close reading of Odell--hardly an entirely reliable source. So it seems we will be able to depend on cheap oil for a long time... But then comes the chart on p. 211, which shows 3 (count em) peaks, the first of which is virtually identical to that of Campbell and Co., and the least optimistic of which puts the peak around 2035--essentially the official US version (peak in 36 years). The median is around 2025.

Sorry, Mr. Smil, but 20 years is not, from a historical perspective, a huge difference. The peak is coming soon, we will have to face it, and you do very little to consider the really horrifying implications. Mass starvation, anyone? How will all the fertilizer needed to produce the crops to feed the planet be produced without cheap oil? The author rather hopefully suggests that a new energy source might even replace oil, just as oil once replaced coal. Such as??? To back up his argument on this, (again, p. 211) he quotes no less than Lovins, whom he excoriates elsewhere.

But, have no fear, technology will rescue us, at least in the case of oil--and those rapidly depleting wells? Well, in the past they haven't petered out as quickly as foretold, so that means next time they won't either... Innovations will help us get 65% of the oil, instead of the former 40%... Wind power? Forget it... not a really significant factor, even after 2025, when (according to Mr. Smil himself) oil will be in decline. Why not? The technology won't be developed! It can be for oil, but not for wind! Don't ask why!

A very slanted book, then, still betting everything on oil, despite the fact that it itself demonstrates the imminent end of the fossil fuel regime.

For a more convincing read, see Richard Heinberg's *The Party's Over*.

Read this for a Global Energy course, and I might I write that this is one book that I would not recommend to any one that is not working or investing in the industry. This read was very 'heavy' for the passive reader, and covered a large amount of numbers and forecasts that the author himself disputes.

From his lifetime as an energy expert and prolific author, Smil writes insightfully about the major energy trends of the past century, and then he attempts to look into the future. He clearly presents, aided by dozens of well designed graphs, an enormous amount of information on global patterns for all energy sources and applications in an exceptionally well organized format. Clearly, Smil was an energy expert of the highest caliber of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, we are now four and a half years into the twenty first century, and it seems to have left Smil behind in a few places. Most of his data are actually pre-1999; and although a few references are dated 2002, almost none of the actual data are post-2000, even though the print date on the book is Nov. 2003. For example, the fact that he thinks there were tens of thousands of fuel cell vehicles on the road in 2003 gives away the fact that the book was largely written in 2001 using references mostly from the late nineties, some of questionable value. (Some "experts" at DOE as late as 1999 were predicting 10,000 FCVs on the road in 2003. Today, however, there are fewer than 400.) Yet, this does not significantly lessen the enormously valuable contribution of Smil's work.

Chapter 2 looks carefully at, in all major countries, a number of important linkages to energy, including such parameters as GDP, infant mortality, life expectancy, food availability, the "human development index", the "political freedom index", air quality, water quality, GHG emissions, war, and terrorism. In Chapter 3, he discusses literally hundreds of failed energy-related projections over the past 40 years; and he congratulates himself on predicting, in 1983, the total energy consumption in 2000 with uncanny accuracy, while the predictions of many others were off by more than a factor of two in either direction. (His forecasts of the various energy segments (coal, oil, gas, renewables) were all individually off by huge amounts. Maybe he got lucky on the total.) Clearly, his appreciation for the interplay of trends in efficiency, markets, resources, and competition was and is of considerable value. (It was also fun to see him point out the silliness of various projections by Amory Lovins, one of the most na?ve physicists among the vocal hydrogen-economy advocates.)

One agenda of this book is to refute the Peak Oil theory of Colin Campbell, as he so well presented in "The Coming Oil Crisis". Smil bases his refutation rather heavily on the fact that most pessimistic oil peak predictions prior to the mid 90's have by now been proven untrue. He points out that some predictions from the early seventies have by now missed the mark by more than 20 years. (He doesn't seem to appreciate that an additional 30 years of data collection and analysis might allow some refinement in the methods.) Rather than attempt a careful, independent, country-by-country analysis of the oil and gas reserves, as carried out by Campbell, he prefers to rely more on extrapolations of production trends of the last twenty years and faith in the power of market incentives to keep the oil and gas flowing liberally for 40 to 100 more years.

Smil is right to emphasize that energy intensity has decreased in the past 30 years and it will likely decrease much more in the next 30 years in some countries (especially, the U.S, Australia, and Canada). There are very positive and powerful life-style implications in this trend, which Paul Roberts, Richard Heinberg, and even David Goodstein and Colin Campbell do not fully appreciate. Smil is certainly right to point out that the immediate potential for enormous improvements in efficiency, especially in private transportation in the U.S., will help to relieve pressure on oil production. But had he taking the time to update his data on increasing oil usage in China and India since 2000, he would have surely realized that a continuation of the small rate of reduction of energy intensity in the U.S. would not begin to offset the voracious oil and LNG markets in the developing world.

Smil's treatment of non-fossil energy sources in Chapter 5 is, for the most part, well-researched, thorough, and sound. His treatments of hydro and wind energy in particular are outstanding, and his appreciation for world-wide biomass utilization pre-1999 is second to none. Unfortunately, his data on advanced biofuels are often 4 to 6 years out of date - cellulosic ethanol, biodiesel from rapeseed and mustard seed, algal biodiesel, and even biomethanol. (This last one is a surprise, as he clearly has some, albeit limited, appreciation for the huge potential of converting stranded natural gas to methanol for oxygenation and extension of gasoline.) Smil leaves the impression that energy balance of biofuels will not likely exceed 1.3, whereas in fact corn ethanol (with co-products) now is up to 1.77, cellulosic ethanol may exceed 2.5, and biodiesel from mustard and biomethanol from switchgrass will both likely soon exceed 4.

His last chapter on Possible Futures is also full of a lot of useful information on trends in various conversion efficiencies and technology developments, but it too is not without its problems. When an engineer or scientist makes errors of two orders of magnitude in important facts critical to projections (as Smil did in the cost of fuel cells), it calls into question the validity of his judgment and foresight regarding future transportation fuels. For a more up-to-date and useful perspective on transportation fuels, see my brief "Fuels for Tomorrow's Vehicles" or "The Hype About Hydrogen" by Joe Romm.

All in all, Smil's latest book is one that should be read by and on the shelf of all energy analysts - along with Campbell's, Romm's, and an up-to-date reference on advanced biofuels. The typical, interested citizen would be better directed to Joe Romm's exceptionally sound and highly readable book. - F. David Doty, PhD, engineering physicist.