70th book of 2019 - Big History Done Right.
Tap tap…. tap tap tap. You hear that sound? That’s me furiously typing downstairs, trying to absorb the implications of this book and fit them into my worldview.
This book is a PM’s dream. Take every civilization, over all of history, and boil them all down to one metric: energy consumption. This allows comparisons between the grain required to raise the pyramids to the fuel required to put me on the plane I’m sitting in right now. I understand why Bill Gates loves Smil, and somewhat tangentially feel like I understand Gates a little more by triangulating his preferences.
Anyways, back to the book: Smil takes the big ideas like Yuval Harari crossed with substantial original research like Thomas Picketty. I most appreciate the ways in which he is able to show objective differences in how society used to operate on thoroughly renewable energy, how we are currently powered by non-renewable sources, and the concrete implications that might have for the future, far beyond the horizon most predictions can maintain credulity. The thing I enjoyed most about this book is that energy shows a second objective lens (beyond narrative history) to validate how different modernity is from classic civilization, as well as showing how unsustainable our current society is.
Along the way he drops fascinating tidbits about things like water wheels, windmills, Haber–Bosch, theoretical limits of urban agglomerations under different technological paradigms and more.