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Natural gas is the world s cleanest fossil fuel; it generates less air pollution and releases less CO2 [...]

In 2004, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) established the OPEC Award for Research to honour [...]

In this book, Vaclav Smil argues that power density is a key determinant of the nature and dynamics [...]

In January 2015 I began to write monthly essays for the IEEE Spectrum, on of the world’s leading [...]

For the last few years, we have written an annual piece on energy. In doing so, we have [...]

The car I drive to work is made of around 2,600 pounds of steel, 800 pounds of plastic, [...]

Vaclav Smil keeps turning out amazing books. Making the Modern World, I just finished, and it’s pretty fantastic. [...]

“There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil,” Bill Gates wrote this [...]

  How much further should the affluent world push its material consumption? Does relative dematerialization lead to absolute [...]

While the world has become more energy efficient, it still uses a lot of energy to grow (twice [...]

“There’s no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil. With his vast knowledge of [...]

“In Harvesting the Biosphere, Smil gives as clear and as numeric a picture as is possible of how [...]