The realism that is missing on the energy transition

The cult of symbolic dates for decarbonization will not help fight the climate crisis: the transition must go through a realistic and flexible calculation, not through panic over the end of the world. The new book by Vaclav Smil

Over forty publications make Vaclav Smil an authority in the field of the study of energy transitions. In his last work, How the world really works (Einaudi, Turin 2022), the author takes aim at the dominant paradigm of decarbonization and the climate crisis. Not to deny its scientific and methodological premises – global warming and its carbonic and anthropic origins – but to impute to it a lack of realism, effectiveness and effective feasibility. Smil’s polemical object is, on the basis of a very rich set of data, figures, technical arguments, the realistic possibility of the global decarbonisation of the main economies of the world within the foreseen dates: 2030 and 2050. The fear of climate change has generated, in the last thirty years, a paradox: “a wave of catastrophism”, of “disturbing prophecies” and anxiety for the fate of the planet, all accompanied however by “absolutely unrealistic promises” and by a substantial “nullism”: Global carbon emissions are systematically increasing.