VACLAV SMIL

Mass adoption of renewable energies would thus necessitate a fundamental reshaping of modern energy infrastructures.

Behind every morsel of bread, fruits, or meat is a large amount of transformed fossil fuels.

Some countries that grow lots of pork, like Denmark and the Netherlands, are either eliminating antibiotics or reducing them. We have to do that. Otherwise we'll create such antibiotic resistance, it will be just terrible.

Collaboration and augmentation are the foundational principles of innovation.

I'm the product of the classical, old-fashioned European education that is broad-based. You want to get your degree in the world, you have to study all sorts of things.

Canadians are hardly assertive or demanding. We don't expect U.S. presidents to bow down to our prime ministers when they visit us in Ottawa, nor are we looking for the occasional kickback on an F-16 deal.

I studied what the Germans call the Naturwissenschaften, the natural sciences. Everything from biology to geology. How the clouds are formed, how the animals live, and what makes the rocks. So I know about nature. Period.

Evolution has made us omnivores, and substantial quantities of meat can be produced by feeding plant matter whose production does not directly compete with growing food crops: crop residues, food processing waste, low-quality grain, and controlled grazing by ruminants.

I'm old fashioned. I'm not one of these young guys who think they are so smart that they can prescribe what humanity ought to do. Humanity never learns any lessons. Prescriptions don't matter. We already know exactly what to do. We just don't do it.

I wouldn't put a big trust in what people in Silicon Valley say. They may be good at manipulating ones and zeroes and writing software, but beyond that, their contribution to human progress has been pretty dismal. I'm not impressed.

U.S. industries from steel-making to plastics synthesis are among the world's most energy-efficient; American agriculture is highly productive, as are America's railroads. But for decades, Americans themselves have been living beyond their means, wasting energy in their houses and cars and amassing energy-intensive throwaway products on credit.

This is the question I'm asking: Do Americans live twice as long because they consume twice as much energy as Europeans? Are you people twice as smart as the average Frenchman? Do you enjoy life twice as much as the average Danish guy? What have we gotten for consuming twice as much energy as Europe? What have we gotten in return?

We're a society that demands electricity 24/7. This is very difficult with sun and wind.

A brilliant mind having a eureka moment could not create an Intel microprocessor containing a billion transistors any more than one person could dream up a Boeing 787 from scratch.

Meat consumption is a part of our evolutionary heritage; meat production has been a major component of modern food systems. Carnivory should remain, within limits, an important component of a civilization that finally must learn how to maintain the integrity of its only biosphere.

Energy use is merely a means to many rewarding ends: economic security, education, health.

Meat eaters don't like me because I call for moderation, and vegetarians don't like me because I say there's nothing wrong with eating meat. It's part of our evolutionary heritage! Meat has helped to make us what we are. Meat helps to make our big brains.

When you talk in terms of electricity, renewable is very important. Hydro in Manitoba. Hydro in Sweden. Wind in Denmark. Of course, those are very important.

Killing animals and eating meat have been significant components of human evolution that had a synergistic relationship with other key attributes that have made us human, with larger brains, smaller guts, bipedalism, and language.

In every society, manufacturing builds the lower middle class. If you give up manufacturing, you end up with haves and have-nots, and you get social polarization. The whole lower middle class sinks.

I am probably one of the last people on the planet without a cell phone.

The history of energy use is a sequence of transitions to sources that are cheaper, cleaner, and more flexible.

We insist on celebrating lone heroic path-finders, but even the most admired and the most successful inventors are part of a more remarkable supply chain of innovators who are largely ignored for the simpler mythology of one man or one eureka moment.

America tends to assume Silicon Valley-style innovators can drive quick and transformative changes, but even Silicon Valley's would-be masters of the universe have discovered that energy transitions are subject to time spans and technical constraints that defy their reach.

Harvesting the biosphere is still the most fundamental human activity. Without that, everybody's dead, really. We could do quite well without microchips, or the business site of 'Atlantic Monthly,' the gated communities, Guccis, and high-growth GDP. But we cannot do without harvesting the crops and cutting down the wood.