Vaclav Smil

Smil writes about the physical basis of civilisation, energy, materials, food, and the numbers underneath all of it, at a rate of roughly a book a year for forty years, and he dislikes being called a futurist. His central point is that four materials, cement, steel, plastics and ammonia, hold the modern world up, that all four are made with fossil energy, and that no announced timetable for replacing them survives contact with the arithmetic. Bill Gates has said he reads everything Smil publishes. He taught at Manitoba for decades, and writes with no interest whatever in reassuring anybody.