[MCN] An important new tome worth noting on Friday, Sept 27 and subsequently?

[Lance Olsen]

Vaclav Smil: ‘Growth must end. Our economist friends don’t seem to realise that’ <https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiEAnTdJxtFILGA47aZj7_uCEqFggEKg4IACoGCAowl6p7MN-zCTDMwRU?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen>
The scientist and author on his latest book – an epic, multidisciplinary analysis of growth – and why humanity's endless expansion must stop. 
The Guardian <https://news.google.com/publications/CAAqBggKMJeqezDfswk?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen>
Yesterday

 Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil is published by MIT Press

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/21/vaclav-smil-interview-growth-must-end-economists <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/21/vaclav-smil-interview-growth-must-end-economists>

2 excerpts:

“We could halve our energy and material consumption and this would put us back around the level of the 1960s. We could cut down without losing anything important. Life wasn’t horrible in 1960s or 70s Europe. People from Copenhagen would no longer be able to fly to Singapore for a three-day visit, but so what? Not much is going to happen to their lives. People don’t realise how much slack in the system we have.”


“Now there is this louder voice calling for more consumption and a bigger bathroom and an SUV, but it’s increasingly apparent that cannot go on.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/21/vaclav-smil-interview-growth-must-end-economists <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/21/vaclav-smil-interview-growth-must-end-economists>

=——————————————————Steve Running’s review of an earlier book by Vaclav Smil --------------------------------------------=

“Full of recent references and statistics, Harvesting the Biosphere adds to the growing chorus of warnings about the current trajectory of human activity on a finite planet, of which climate change is only one dimension. 

“One can quibble with some assumptions or tweak Smil’s calculations, but the bottom line will not change, only the time it may take humanity to reach a crisis point.”

Stephen Running. “Approaching the Limits” Science 15 March 2013.

Book review. Harvesting the Biosphere: What we have taken from Nature. by Vaclav Smil .  MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2012. 315 pp. $29, £19.95. ISBN 9780262018562.





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