(public).sospep.subjects ~ view article ~ interview-vaclav-smil

<h1 style="text-align: center;">INTERVIEW-Vaclav Smil</h1>
<h2>[WHAT]</h2>
<ol>
<li>] by Clive Thompson @ wired -&nbsp;&nbsp;] Smil talks about the how behind his prolific authorship,&nbsp;innovation in America, the environment, our energy sources, the problems with renewables, the economy</li>
</ol>
<h2>[WHY]</h2>
<ol>
<li>]&nbsp;</li>
</ol>
<h2>[WHERE]</h2>
<ol>
<li><strong>] READ THE FULL ARTICLE</strong></li>
<ol>
<li>]&nbsp;<a href="http://www.wired.com/2013/11/vaclav-smil-wired/" target="_blank">http://www.wired.com/2013/11/vaclav-smil-wired/</a></li>
</ol></ol>
<h2>[WHEN]</h2>
<ol>
<li>] 2016-05-04</li>
<li>] 2013-11-25</li>
</ol>
<h2>[EXAMPLE]</h2>
<p>&ldquo;There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil,&rdquo; <strong>Bill Gates wrote this summer.</strong> That&rsquo;s quite an endorsement&mdash;and it gave a jolt of fame to Smil, a professor emeritus of environment and geography at the University of Manitoba.</p>
<p>His nearly three dozen books have analyzed the world&rsquo;s biggest challenges&mdash;the future of energy, food production, and manufacturing&mdash;with nuance and detail. They&rsquo;re among the most data-heavy books you&rsquo;ll find, with a remarkable way of framing basic facts. (Sample nugget: Humans will consume 17 percent of what the biosphere produces this year.)</p>
<p>His conclusions are often bleak. He argues, for instance, that the demise of US manufacturing dooms the country not just intellectually but creatively, because innovation is tied to the process of making things. (And, unfortunately, he has the figures to back that up.) WIRED got Smil&rsquo;s take on the problems facing America and the world.</p>
<p>Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing&mdash;from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What&rsquo;s very important is in-house research. Innovation usually arises from somebody taking a product already in production and making it better: better glass, better aluminum, a better chip. Innovation always starts with a product.</p>
<p>the crown jewel of Boeing now, the 787 Dreamliner. The plane had so many problems&mdash;it was like three years late. And why? Because large parts of it were subcontracted around the world. The 787 is not a plane made in the USA; it&rsquo;s a plane assembled in the USA. They subcontracted composite materials to Italians and batteries to the Japanese, and the batteries started to burn in-flight. The quality control is not there.</p>
<p><strong>Can IT jobs replace the lost manufacturing jobs?</strong>&nbsp;No, of course not. These are totally fungible jobs. You could hire people in Russia or Malaysia&mdash;and that&rsquo;s what companies are doing.</p>
<p><strong>You claim Apple could assemble the iPhone in the US and still make a huge profit.</strong>&nbsp;It&rsquo;s no secret! Apple has tremendous profit margins. They could easily do everything at home. The iPhone isn&rsquo;t manufactured in China&mdash;it&rsquo;s assembled in China from parts made in the US, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, and so on. The cost there isn&rsquo;t labor. But laborers must be sufficiently dedicated and skilled to sit on their ass for eight hours and solder little pieces together so they fit perfectly.</p>
<p>But Apple is supposed to be a giant innovator. Apple! Boy, what a story. No taxes paid, everything made abroad&mdash;yet everyone worships them. This new iPhone, there&rsquo;s nothing new in it. Just a golden color. What the hell, right? When people start playing with color, you know they&rsquo;re played out.</p>
<p><strong>Let&rsquo;s talk about energy. You say alternative energy can&rsquo;t scale. Is there no role for renewables?</strong></p>
<p>I like renewables, but they move slowly. There&rsquo;s an inherent inertia, a slowness in energy transitions. It would be easier if we were still consuming 66,615 kilowatt-hours per capita, as in 1950. But in 1950 few people had air-conditioning. <strong>We&rsquo;re a society that demands electricity 24/7. This is very difficult with sun and wind.</strong>&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>nuclear?</strong> The Chinese are building it, the Indians are building it, the Russians have some intention to build. But as you know, the US is not.&nbsp;s it a nice thought that the future of nuclear energy is now in the hands of North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Iran? It&rsquo;s a depressing thought, isn&rsquo;t it?&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>So what&rsquo;s left? Making products more energy-efficient?&nbsp;</strong>Innovation is making products more energy-efficient &mdash; <strong>but then we consume so many more products that there&rsquo;s been no absolute dematerialization of anything.</strong> We still consume more steel, more aluminum, more glass, and so on. As long as we&rsquo;re on this endless material cycle, this merry-go-round, well, technical innovation cannot keep pace.</p>
<p>Yikes. So <strong>all we&rsquo;ve got left is reducing consumption.</strong> But who&rsquo;s going to do that? My wife and I did. We downscaled our house.&nbsp;What is the simplest way to make your house super-efficient?<strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Insulation! &nbsp;</strong>Right. I have 50 percent more insulation in my walls. It adds very little to the cost. And you insulate your basement from the outside&mdash;I have about 20 inches of Styrofoam on the outside of that concrete wall. We were the first people building on our cul-de-sac, so I saw all the other houses after us&mdash;much bigger, 3,500 square feet. None of them were built properly. <strong>I pay in a year for electricity what they pay in January.</strong> You can have a super-efficient house; <strong>you can have a super-efficient car, a little Honda Civic, 40 miles per gallon</strong></p>
<p>Your <strong>other big subject is food.</strong> You&rsquo;re a pretty grim thinker, but this is your most optimistic area. <strong>You actually think we can feed a planet of 10 billion people&mdash;if we eat less meat and waste less food.&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p><strong>We pour all this energy into growing corn and soybeans, and then we put all that into rearing animals</strong> while feeding them antibiotics. <strong>And then we throw away 40 percent of the food we produce.</strong></p>
<p><strong>The problem is with eating 200 pounds of meat per capita per year.</strong>&nbsp;You know, you take some chicken breast, cut it up into little cubes, and make a Chinese stew&mdash;three people can eat one chicken breast. When you cut meat into little pieces, as they do in India, China, and Malaysia, all you need to eat is maybe like 40 pounds a year.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>So the answers are not technological but political: better economic policies, better education, better trade policies.</strong></p>
<p>Right. Today, as you know, everything is &ldquo;innovation.&rdquo; We have problems, and people are looking for fairy-tale solutions&mdash;innovation like manna from heaven falling on the Israelites and saving them from the desert. It&rsquo;s like, &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s not reform the education system, the tax system. Let&rsquo;s not improve our dysfunctional government. Just wait for this innovation manna from a little group of people in Silicon Valley, preferably of Indian origin.&rdquo;</p>
<p><strong>Bill Gates reads you a lot. Who are you writing for?</strong> I have no idea. I just write.</p>
<p><strong><br /></strong></p>
<h2>[HOW-TO]</h2>
<ol>
<li>]</li>
</ol>
<h2>[REFERENCE]</h2>
<ol>
<li>] SRC = ?</li>
<li>] <a href="/view/person?id=372" target="_blank">Smil,Vaclav</a>&nbsp;</li>
<li>] <a href="/view/task?id=6129" target="_blank">CREATE-article#</a> (BK) - Our Energy Future - how you can solve the global climate crisis&nbsp;</li>
</ol>
<h2>[RELATED]</h2>
<div><ol>
<li>]&nbsp;</li>
</ol></div>
<h1 style="text-align: center;">&nbsp;</h1>

~ view article ~ Chapter] index-ideas FROM [ Book] ideas-subjects IN [ libraries] ideas