";s:4:"text";s:3974:"Publisher: The MIT Press. Energy and Civilization is a journey through the world history of energy from the discovery of fire to the latest energy transition. Many of these savings could be surprisingly easy to realize.” (.Smil’s book would indeed be a helpful post-crash guide – but it would be much better if we heed the lessons, and save the valuable aspects of civilization, before apocalypse overtakes us.Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.Climate change, citizenship, and the global caste system. But the effective use of fossil fuels had to be preceded by many centuries of development in metallurgy, chemistry, understanding of electromagnetism, and a wide array of associated technologies.While making clear how drastically human civilizations have changed in the last several generations, Smil also takes care to point out that even the most recent energy transitions didn’t take place all at once.While the railways were taking over long-distance shipments and travel, the horse-drawn transport of goods and people dominated in all rapidly growing cities of Europe and North America.” (.Likewise the switches from wood to coal or from coal to oil happened only with long overlaps:The two common impressions – that the twentieth century was dominated by oil, much as the nineteenth century was dominated by coal – are both wrong: wood was the most important fuel before 1900 and, taken as a whole, the twentieth century was still dominated by coal. ISBN: 0262035774. Did this sudden influx of energy wealth play a role in European supremacy over the past few centuries? Life on Earth depends on the photosynthetic conversion of solar energy into plant biomass. The result, over many millennia, was the development of new materials, tools and processes.Smil gives succinct explanations of why the smelting of brass and bronze was less energy-intensive than production of pure copper. 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 past two hundred years of fossil-fuel-powered civilization takes up the biggest chunk of the book. It is a literate and precise analysis of the evolution of human societies viewed through the lens of energy.Smil's masterful overview explains energy's centrality in creating and sustaining civilization. Humans have come to rely on many more energy flows—ranging from fossil fuels to photovoltaic generation of electricity—for their civilized existence. The conversion of energy on Earth ranges from terra-forming forces of plate tectonics to cumulative erosive effects of raindrops. Inevitable, because fossil fuel reserves are being depleted and will not regenerate in any relevant timeframe.