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  • Energy and Civilization

  • A History
  • Written by: Vaclav Smil
  • Narrated by: David Colacci
  • Length: 20 hrs and 9 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (62 ratings)

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Energy and Civilization

Written by: Vaclav Smil
Narrated by: David Colacci
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Publisher's Summary

Energy is the only universal currency; it is necessary for getting anything done. The conversion of energy on Earth ranges from terra-forming forces of plate tectonics to cumulative erosive effects of raindrops. Life on Earth depends on the photosynthetic conversion of solar energy into plant biomass. Humans have come to rely on many more energy flows-ranging from fossil fuels to photovoltaic generation of electricity - for their civilized existence.

In this monumental history, Vaclav Smil provides a comprehensive account of how energy has shaped society, from pre-agricultural foraging societies through today's fossil fuel-driven civilization. Humans are the only species that can systematically harness energies outside their bodies, using the power of their intellect and an enormous variety of artifacts - from the simplest tools to internal combustion engines and nuclear reactors. The epochal transition to fossil fuels affected everything: agriculture, industry, transportation, weapons, communication, economics, urbanization, quality of life, politics, and the environment. Smil describes humanity's energy eras in panoramic and interdisciplinary fashion, offering listeners a magisterial overview.

©2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)2018 Gildan Media

What listeners say about Energy and Civilization

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Well worth reading and arguing over

First and foremost, Energy and Civilization is a book about facts. It chronicles and calculates the various forms of energy used throughout human history and provides much useful information in understanding where we started as a species and how we got to where we are today. That is the book’s great strength and why I would recommend it to others.

Where I disagree with the author is on his basic worldview of what is desirable and undesirable and what humanity should do going forward as regards energy, particularly power generation and supplying energy for the great masses who live in urban environments. I also found one of this book’s shortcomings to be how certain information is presented. For example, he references solar, wind, and fossil fuel Government subsidies and lists total subsidy amounts of each for various periods. Fair enough. But to truly understand these subsidies and their usefulness, we must know the subsidized amount per unit of energy produced, which happens to be much higher for wind and solar than for fossil fuels, even after 50 years of Government subsidies. Also, the low energy density, intermittent nature, and high cost of wind and solar are mentioned only briefly, while still insisting they are the “renewables” of the future. Smil also does not dwell long on the massive energy and material inputs needed to generate these costly and unreliable forms of energy and their limited potential to mainly electrical energy (only 20% of total energy use, whereas fossil fuels and nuclear can be used to all energy uses AND fossil fuels produce many derivative products including synthetic fertilizers, which sustain the lives of at least 3 billion people despite representing only 1% of fossil fuels used today).

Whether you agree or disagree with the author, you can’t get away from the great strength of this book, which is its large assortment of useful facts. I recommend reading this author along with Robert Bryce and Alex Epstein to hear the various competing arguments drawn from many of the same basic facts. 4/5

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How much power does a horse produce?

Compare to a man? Compare to a 1000 men? Or a loader? How much energy do they consume and how big of a field do I need to seed to feed them. How much energy would that take. How much CO2 they produce? Everything energy since the beginning to today, a wealth of knowledge in today's number one topic. Be informed.

1 person found this helpful

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A Must Read

A deep & detailed analysis; as a global citizen, investor/speculator, this book is a must.

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

excellent delivery of a complex subject

Well written and well organized. Provides a realistic prospective of the actual flows of energy from our early beginnings to today. The closing is especially insightful. Well done.

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  • C. Hoogeboom
  • 2018-05-19

Not a good format for this book

This is pretty much a text book, chock full of numerical data. It's impossible to keep track of any of the data, so it all becomes meaningless. It may be a good book, but it's a terrible audio book.

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  • serine
  • 2018-11-15

Smil is the master!

Now that I am done reading this book, I plan to start at chapter one again. My head was filled with so much information, I am positive my brain has not yet ingested nearly the number of treasures packed in this book. Smil does not gloss over facts or tell a story in the way many historians do. In this book, you will not find the kind of sweeping histories told in the captivating way Yuval Noah Harari brings to life in his book sapiens. Smil is not that kind of story teller. Telling the story Smil has told in his book, many historians might say something like:

How did humans build civilization? By using every ounce of energy they could get their hands on. Throughout history humans have used the energy stored in horses, in slaves, and in the machines they built. They stole energy from the sun (a lot of it), gaining them a share higher than seen in any other species. Humans harvested energy from the wind and water. They mined it from holes in the ground and sent it along railroads. From the dawn of civilization, humans coupled the energy from the sun, wind, and water with the energy (ATP) from the cells that reside in all living organisms (like slave and animal muscle) to build each aspect of civilization. Using this energy, in its various and wonderful forms, humans built villages, cities, and huge warring empires. They built food systems that fed and sustained incredible amounts of humans. Using energy, they built transportation systems to create a trade system that took on a life of its own and has transformed early humans into the modern humans of today. With that energy, they brought about the industrial revolution that gave humans more resources than they had ever imagined possible.

In order to set the stage for such a revolution, humans needed to stockpile a lot of energy along the way. Before the use of slaves and before the use of animals and machines to do work, humans spent all of their time harvesting just enough energy from nature to survive. That is to say, they were foraging for food, spending their energy roaming around, eating food to gain more energy to keep roaming around for food, and so on, using all the energy gained to keep the cycle in perpetual motion. No energy was left over for innovation. No energy was left over to build the great empires and cities that would be long in the future. Everything changed once humans switched from hunter gatherer strategies to trapping all that food in a smaller space, crops on farms, they produced more energy than they needed for mere survival. It was with the advent of agriculture that our civilization, for good or for bad, really emerged.

With this rapid advancement came about moral quandaries. There simply was no way to build early civilizations without slavery. From the earliest writings, we know that the very first laws ever constructed had to do with keeping the poor doing the work of the rich (who made the laws). It was just the way of life. When humans figured out that they could harvest the energy of non-human muscle, like the muscle power in horses, they used horses, meaning fewer humans had to donate their muscle energy. Slavery decreased (this was a fascinating aspect of this book and is something I want to spend more time thinking about-- how morality arose not from consciousness but from our energy needs!!!). When machines were finally build, horse muscles (horsepower) was replaced by machine power (still called horsepower). This reduced our need to use humans and animal muscle. Interestingly, humans began to focus more on human and animal rights only once they no longer needed their muscle power to bring about the advancement of their societies.

That is how a storytelling author might have written Smil's book.

Where Smil diverges from the story telling Harari's of the world is that he will not construct a story that flows, is easy to follow, where the facts are kept to a minimum. No, you will be overloaded with facts. Smil will not merely convey that there was a transfer of horsepower from horse muscle to machine energy output. He will tell you exactly how many Watts were harvested from horses, from slaves, from machines. Smil will do this on every page, and it will undoubtedly make this book much harder to read than other books. You will not be able to just sail along sinking into the type of daydream induced when reading deeply satisfying histories as told by authors like Harari. Your brain will have to constantly work to keep track of what these figures really mean for how energy transformed human existence from the prehistoric practices of hunting down one's food and roaming the earth to feed the human body to the advances we have witnessed so far, such as agriculture, the industrial revolution, the computer revolution, and conquering space, to the projected advances for the future of our species. You will have to ingest the extremely detailed facts and then remind yourself, constantly, where you are in the sweeping narrative. However, if you can do that, you experience reward beyond anything a more superficial book could produce. Smil's facts are relentless, but my god do they really drive home his points! I knew I would be interested in how much energy humans harvested from the power of water and the water-wheel driven mills that built our early modern cities or how much power it really took to build the pyramids (a much different answer than you will find from past experts), but never thought I would be interested in exactly how much energy humans could harvest from dung or whale oil. Turns out, I am very interested.

Smil examined the costs of the energy we harvest. For example, what happens when humans harvest so much energy from fossil fuels for so many years? We drive climate change/global warming on a very large scale. These are things we need to take into consideration as we decide exactly how we humans will go about harvesting energy in the future.

While reading this, I could not help but think of one scientist from the past who would have loved, so much, to have been alive to read this book. In 1944, Schrödinger asked, "What Is Life?". He answered that question by suggesting that life occurred when something went on resisting entropy longer than expected. That is, an organism is exceptional at creating a pocket of space in which energy is ingested and cycled. Schrödinger would have loved to have had access to Smil's data. Smil could have informed Schrödinger exactly how living organisms went about ingesting the energy from the sun or from the hot core of earth and how exactly those organisms went about cycling that energy. The entire reason I want to reread this book is to think deeply about how every single organism, from the first cells without mitochondria to the more advanced cells that captured it, from the first plants to boney fish, from tiktaalik to tree shrews to us and to Earth itself -- how each organism ingested, harvested, and repacked energy so that it could keep going on longer than expected. I don't just want to know that it did. I want to know exactly *how* it did.

Thank you Smil for this challenging, insightful, and exquisite book.
#tagsgiving #sweepstakes #CivilizationBuilding

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  • Mark Rockwell
  • 2018-09-16

Astonishing depth

Admittedly audio is probably not the best format for this book. There’s just so much information presented at such a granular level that it can be hard to follow along. That said, it was still an excellent listen and the broad themes come across as well in this format as any other.

The book gets bogged down in the middle but the second half picks back up.

Overall I highly recommend reading or listening to this book. It’s full of both information and insight.

12 people found this helpful

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  • MK
  • 2019-01-30

Excelent content, but Audible is a bad format

If you like history and are curious about energy and technology development throughout the years this is excellent book for you. Extremely handy source for all energy related numbers, dates, names covering pretty much from first use of fire to smartphones.
But purchase a hard-copy instead. There are way too many dates and numbers, which are better assimilated through reading.

8 people found this helpful

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  • ME :)
  • 2021-09-17

Shallow and full of obvious bigotry

A topic with some potential, but the limitations of the writer unfortunately made this book fall short.

The social/mental framework of the author is clear anti-Cristian and anti-European. This is unfortunate as the author is clearly intelligent and has done his research. However, the conclusions and thought process is clearly stunted and skewed due to his inherent bigotry. .. it’s a shame… but common these days with academics from the Anglo world these days.

I think this book is best listened to at 2.0x speed and used as a source of leads for sources for further research.

4 people found this helpful

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  • Monty
  • 2020-12-08

a difficult book to hear

my greatest complaint about this audiobook is the fact that the author includes the year of birth and death of every single person mentioned in the book. this is something your brain skips over when you visualize text on a page, but in an audiobook where the narrator is compelled to read everything, the recitation of the "year through year" of every named birth and death is absolutely obnoxious. I have to stop listening to it as it is driving me crazy. There are enough dates listed in the book besides these because it's a history book. this is something the audiobook producer should take into account with narration.

2 people found this helpful

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  • CFr
  • 2021-10-19

Didn't have to be so boring

Subject could be interesting, but this book made it sooo boring. The author tortures the reader with with birth and death date of every person mentioned (no one cares!!!) and painfully drags out every bit of the information. I'm surprised I got through it.

1 person found this helpful

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  • eclectic reader
  • 2021-10-17

An encyclopedic review of energy and civilization

Smil provides almost too much data about energy use in civilization and poorer capital throughout history. He sees energy as an important element in historical advance but nearly incidental to ethics and art. He refers to automobiles as an addiction and notes no addiction is without costs. He speculates on how out of the world can wean itself from hydrocarbon energy. While full of many answers it raises even more questions.

1 person found this helpful

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  • Hübelix
  • 2021-07-27

an essential read to all climachangers

this book gives u a nice perspective on where we come from and how fragile our system rest on the availability of some view scars ressources. a must read to all which believ climatechange is the only problem...

1 person found this helpful

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  • Bobby
  • 2021-06-19

Reads almost like a textbook

If you are already a fan of Smil, then you know what you are getting into. The depth to which he explains calculations and research can put me to sleep at times, but at the end of the day it is an incredibly well researched and put together story. I don't remember the nitty gritty details he layer out, but the big picture of the story Smil told about Humanity's relationship with energy going all the way back to the beginning of mankind... it will stick with me forever.

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  • Pierre Gauthier
  • 2019-12-08

Original but Somewhat Tedious!

In this substantial work, the author describes the evolution of mankind from prehistory to the present with a constant reference to how it is affected by energy.

His approach is very much quantitative, and he estimates for instance how much energy was required to hunt an antelope with respect to the calories it could provide. The methodology used is not detailed (thank goodness!) but such calculations must have been painstaking and certainly based on a flurry of assumptions that make them difficult to take at face value.

Yet, despite a certain tediousness, the approach is original and doubtlessly intellectually stimulating.