【盖茨书评】能源如何使生命成为可能
瓦茨拉夫•斯米尔（Vaclav Smil）是个捷克裔加拿大人，是曼尼托巴大学（University of Manitoba）的名誉教授。我是斯米尔的粉丝，他写的37本书我几乎都看过了。我期待斯米尔的新书，就像有些人期待下一部《星球大战》电影一样。有几年我不需要等太久，仅在2013年一年，斯米尔就出版了四本书！
我之所以喜欢读斯米尔的书，是因为他的叙述既深入又广博。许多出身于学术界的作家喜欢在书中深入钻研一个他们已经研究多年的话题，但他们通常不会同时融合来自不同学科的见解。而许多来自新闻业的著名作家却正好相反，他们很擅长宏观描述，却没有充分的知识储备来描述细节。斯米尔却能轻松兼顾这两者。
在他的最新著作《能源与文明：一部历史》（Energy and Civilization: A History，中文名暂译）中，他深入而广博地解释了在过去的一万年中，人类将能量转化为热能、光能和动能方面的创新能力是如何推动人类文化和经济进步的。是的，我们的历史固然与国王皇后及权谋之术紧密相连，但斯米尔告诉我们：历史更与能源的创新息息相关。
斯米尔在书中的论点可以概括如下：当一群人学会了狩猎和采集食物，又学会了耕种庄稼，使得生产出的食物量超出自身生存所需时，他们就有时间和精力把自己的智慧用在其它地方。他们运用智力，思考如何能更有效地将能量转化为食物，譬如使用畜力、工具、轮作、肥料、灌溉和种子新品种。农作物产量的增长直接导致了人口密度的提高，反过来又导致了更复杂的社会和更专业化的分工，以及人类在各个领域取得的一系列非凡进步。
过去的 300年里，人类社会出现了各种历史上最为伟大的进步，而几乎所有这些进步都可以直接追溯到新能源的开发。斯米尔极其详尽地讲述了这些进步。例如，他认为人类社会的最大转变始于18世纪中期，在欧洲的铁工厂老板开始用低灰分的低硫煤制成的冶金焦炭作为熔炉燃料之后。比起以木炭（木头）作为燃料的熔炉，以焦炭为燃料的熔炉体积可以大很多，使得全球生产量从1750年的80万吨提升到1900年的3000万吨。在1800年代末，一系列冶金行业的创新促进了现代钢铁工业的发展，为之后的工业发展提供了最重要的原材料。
斯米尔通过一些独特的运算和精彩的解释性插图，描述了19世纪及20世纪其它与能源相关的创新，这些创新不仅推动了经济的快速增长和生活质量的改善，而且导致了严重的环境问题。虽然其中很多创新发明你可能都耳熟能详，但你肯定能从中学习到有关蒸汽机、汽油内燃机、发电、变压器（“它使廉价、集中发电成为可能，[还]可能成为一个比赛的赢家，如果这个比赛要评选出对现代社会不可或缺又十分普遍，但人们却经常忘记其存在的装置。”）和可再生资源的一些新知识。
与他以往的著作一样，斯米尔在叙述时既不会过分夸大，又不会刻意简单化。他很清楚，能量不是看待人类进步的唯一途径，道德等因素也起着至关重要的作用。“能源不是唯一的决定因素……尤其是对一般意义上的生活及人类行为来说……（它）是塑造社会最重要的因素之一，但（它）无法决定一个社会的成功或失败。”
我承认，《能源与文明》不是一本浅显易懂的书。事实上，当我几年前读到第一本斯米尔写的书时，我甚至有点受打击的感觉。我问自己：“我真的有可能看懂这些东西吗？”但《能源与文明》整本书遵循着简单的时间顺序推进，结构编排得很好。
如果要让你对这本书有个大致的了解，最好的方式是分享书中斯米尔的一些精彩发现。正如你所知，书中的内容涉及了许多不同的学术领域。这些内容不是你在维基百科网站上随便搜搜就能找到的内容。它们经常会涉及只有斯米尔会做的独特运算。
对觅食的群体来说，收集植物根部是一个超级有效的策略。“觅食的过程每消耗一个食物单位，他们就会获取多达30至40个单位的食物能源。与此相反，许多狩猎行动都会有一个净能量损失（net energy loss）或空等量（bare equivalence），对于在热带雨林中的小型树栖或地栖性哺乳动物来说尤其如此。”
在短短一个世纪里，竟然能出现这么多的能源创新，这真令人叫绝。“1900年，一个在北美大平原的农夫手中拿着六匹大马的缰绳在耕种他的麦田，他控制着……功率不超过5千瓦的动物能量。一个世纪后，他的孙辈们就可以舒服地高坐在拖拉机里，吹着空调，毫不费力地控制着功率超过250千瓦的柴油发动机。”
我们浪费了大量的食物。“富裕国家当下的粮食供应量比实际需要高出75%，造成了巨大的食物浪费（相当于零售食品总量的30-40%）。”
在这本书的每一个章节中，斯米尔都清楚地表明：能源消费和经济增长密不可分。用他的话来说：“财富的增长需要大量增加能源的消耗量。”我完全同意他的观点。在过去一个世纪里，能源消耗增长最多的是化石燃料，这是一种价格昂贵的燃料，也会加剧气候变化问题。这也是为什么我花了大量的时间和资源加快相关的研究和开发，努力使清洁能源比化石燃料更便宜，却又同样可靠。
我与斯米尔的主要分歧，在于我们可以多快地完成到清洁能源的过渡。他认为摩尔定律和软件的迅速发展误导了人们，使大家认为所有的创新和发明都可以在短时间内发生。这一点我也同意，然而对于清洁能源发展的前景，我比他更为乐观。
这种乐观可能来自于我在突破能源基金（Breakthrough Energy Ventures，该基金为清洁能源的创新投资超过10亿美元）的工作，来自于我从美国能源部先进能源研究计划署（ARPA-E）的专家们那里学到的知识，或是来自于我在世界顶级能源创新者的实验室里所看到的研究项目。了解到他们做出的努力，我不禁对这个领域的未来充满信心，包括碳中性液体燃料，以及各种改变能源生产、储存和传输的重大进展都已经离我们不远了。
斯米尔告诉我，他下一本书的主题是“成长”——从庄稼和婴儿到帝国和经济体。事实上，任何他觉得有趣、想要深入剖析的主题我都愿意阅读。但“成长”听上去像是一个很适合他的话题，我已经在期待阅读这本书了。
How energy makes life possible
As regular TGN readers know, I’m a fan of Vaclav Smil, a Czech-Canadian professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba. I’ve read nearly all of his 37 books. I wait for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie. Some years I don’t have to wait long. In 2013 alone, Smil published four!
I read Smil because he’s uniquely good at going both deep and broad. Many writers who come out of academia specialize in delving deep into a topic they’ve studied for years, but they typically don’t bring together insights from across many different disciplines. Many impressive writers who come from journalism are the opposite. They’re great at painting the big picture, but they’re not as well equipped to depict the fine details. Smil can do both with equal facility.
In his latest book, Energy and Civilization: A History, he goes deep and broad to explain how innovations in humans’ ability to turn energy into heat, light, and motion have been a driving force behind our cultural and economic progress over the past 10,000 years. Yes, our history has a lot to do with kings and queens and games of thrones. Smil shows that it has even more to do with energy innovation.
Here’s Smil’s thesis in a nutshell: Once groups of humans graduated from hunting and gathering and learned how to cultivate crops in ways that would produce more food than they needed for their own survival, they had the time and energy to use their brains in new ways. They applied that brainpower to getting even more efficient at converting energy into food—using animal power, tools, crop rotation, fertilizers, irrigation, and new seed varieties. The gains in crop production led directly to higher population densities. This, in turn, led to more complex societies and greater specialization of work, and an incredible array of advances in every area of human endeavor.
The past 300 years have seen the most miraculous advances in the human condition—and just about all of those advances can be traced directly to the exploitation of new forms of energy. Smil takes you through these advances in painstaking detail. For example, he shows that the biggest transition in the human condition started in the mid-18th century, after ironmasters in Europe began firing their furnaces with metallurgical coke, made from low-ash, low-sulfur coal. Coke-fueled furnaces could be much larger than charcoal (wood) furnaces and drove an increase in global production from 800,000 tons in 1750 to 30 million tons in 1900. A series of additional metallurgical innovations in the late 1800s led to the modern steel industry, which has provided the most important material for industrial development ever since.
With the help of original calculations and some good explanatory illustrations, Smil describes the other energy-related innovations that drove rapid economic growth and quality-of-life improvements—as well as profound environmental degradation—in the 19th and 20th centuries. While many of the innovations will be familiar to you, you will undoubtedly learn new things about the steam engine, internal combustion engines running on gasoline, the generation of electricity, the transformer (“it made inexpensive, centralized electricity generation possible [and] would probably win a contest for a device that is as common and indispensible for the modern world as it is absent from the public consciousness”), and renewables.
As usual with Smil, he doesn’t overstate or oversimplify his case. He’s well aware that energy is not the only way to view the advance of humanity – things like morality play crucial roles too. “Energy is not the only determinant of … life in general and human actions in particular…. [It is] among the most important factors shaping a society, but [it does] not determine the particulars of its successes or failures.”
I’ll admit that Energy and Civilization is not easy reading. In fact, when I read my first Smil books years ago, I felt a little beat up and asked myself, “Am I ever going to be able to understand all of this?” But Energy and Civilization follows an easy chronological progression and is well edited.
The best way to give you a sense of the book is to share some of the remarkable facts Smil digs up. As you’ll see, they range over many different academic fields. They are not the kind of things you could simply pull off Wikipedia. They often involve original calculations that only Smil would do.
Gathering roots was a super efficient strategy for foraging groups. “As many as 30-40 units of food energy were acquired for every unit expended. In contrast, many hunting forays, above all those for smaller arboreal or ground mammals in tropical rain forests, had a net energy loss or bare equivalence.”
It’s fascinating to reflect on how much energy innovation occurred during the course of a single century. “When in 1900 a Great Plains farmer held the reins of six large horses while plowing his wheat field, he controlled … no more than 5 kW of animate power. A century later his great-grandson, sitting high above the ground in the air-conditioned comfort of his tractor cabin, controlled effortlessly more than 250 kW of diesel engine power.”
We waste a tremendous amount of food. “The food supply in affluent countries is now 75% higher than actual need, resulting in enormous food waste (30-40% of all food at the retail level).”
Throughout every section of the book, Smil makes a clear case that energy consumption and economic growth are inextricably linked. In his words, “to become rich requires a substantial increase in energy use.” I fully agree with him. And in the past century or so, the biggest increase in energy use has come from fossil fuels—which are expensive and drive climate change. That’s why I’m spending a lot of my time and resources trying to accelerate research and development to make clean energy less expensive than fossil fuels, and just as reliable.
The main disagreement I have with Smil is about how quickly we can make the transition to clean energy. He is absolutely right that Moore’s Law and the speedy advances in software have misled people into thinking all innovation and adoption happens that quickly. Yet I am more optimistic than he is about the prospects of speeding up the process when it comes to clean energy.
Perhaps it’s the insights I have gained from my work with Breakthrough Energy Ventures (a fund that’s investing more than $1 billion in clean-energy innovation), what I’ve learned from experts connected with ARPA-E, or the research I see going on in the labs of the world’s top energy innovators. When I learn about their efforts, I can’t help but feel optimistic about what’s on the horizon—from carbon-neutral liquid fuels to game-changing improvements in energy generation, storage, and transmission.
Smil told me that his next book is going to be about growth—everything from crops and babies to empires and economies. The truth is, I’d read just about any topic he found interesting and wanted to dissect. But growth sounds like a perfect topic for him. I’m looking forward to it already.
推荐阅读：【盖茨书单】我在2017年读过的5本好书