Doris Goodwin’s ‘Team of Rivals’ was the first presidential biography I ever read.  Biography was not among my favorite genres, but I did have a desire to learn more about Abraham Lincoln.  He is widely considered the greatest American president. In fact, to many even that title seems an understatement.  Tolstoy once wrote that Lincoln ‘was bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together…and as a great character he will live as long as the world lives’.    Like most people, I’ve heard about the highlights of Lincoln’s remarkable life as I passed through grade schools: the self-made lawyer and politician haunted by family tragedies, the epic struggle to end slavery while forging a truly United States of America, and the ultimate sacrifice for the cause at the zenith of his career.  Still, I am not quite sure how to make Tolstoy’s melodramatic assessment. The book partially solved the puzzle for me.

Goodwin’s narrative is constructed around, and often from the perspectives of, Lincoln’s key cabinet members who were once his rivals:  Salmon Chase (Secretary of Treasure), Henry Seward (Secretary of State), Edward Bates (Attorney General), and Edwin Stanton (Secretary of War). The first three men ran against him for the nomination of the Republican party, and Stanton, when serving with Lincoln as co-counsel in a lawsuit, not only questioned the then country lawyer’s legal expertise but openly ridiculed him as ‘a gorilla and an imbecile’.  As Goodwin follows Lincoln’s footsteps from the humble origins to the poignant end, she recounts many stories of these rivals, often quoting extensively from their public speeches and private letters.  This helps unlock the mystery in Lincoln’s persona that ‘led countless men, even old adversaries, to feel bound to him in admiration’.

Lincoln ‘possessed extraordinary empathy’ and a ‘melancholy temperament’, wrote Goodwin.  These qualities might be the result of the tragic losses he endured from an early age – at 26, he had already lost three women dearest to his life: his mother, his only sister, and his first love. Empathy can be a curse ‘in a world environed by cruelty and injustice’ because, as Goodwin noted, the fellow-feeling for the misery of others inevitably causes pain and suffering.  It also sometimes made him appear weak and lacking the will to do what must be done in difficult situations. His attorney general confided to a friend that Lincoln, despite ‘very near being a perfect man’, was ‘unfit to be entrusted with the pardoning power’, because he too easily succumbed to touching stories and women’s tears. Yet, empathy was a powerful tool for Lincoln to gain the respect, trust, and devotion of others through understanding their motives and desires.  It also rendered him a remarkably magnanimous man, demonstrating an incredible capacity to forgive even those who had opposed, wronged, and betrayed him.

Goodwin also lauded Lincoln’s `literary genius’ and his mastery of rhetorical power.   His ability to explain intricate concepts through storytelling, coupled with a sharp sense of humor, was unparalleled among his contemporaries.  In the strictest sense of the word, Lincoln might not be as great an orator as Seward, who could deliver stirring, completely improvised speeches to a crowd for hours.  Lincoln was much more careful with his words, but he perfected ‘a language of enduring clarity and beauty’ that made him an extremely persuasive and effective communicator.

Lincoln believed in ‘the better angels of our nature’, a term coined in his first inaugural address.  He once told a friend that he preferred to believe in the possibility of human perfection, when asked about whether George Washington was a perfect man.  His entire life may be seen as the pursuit of becoming that perfect, inspiring human being he envisioned. It is the unwavering conviction to ‘engrave his name in history’, Goodwin noted, that underscores Lincoln’s greatness, carrying him through the dreary childhood, the political failures, the personal tragedies, the disintegration of his beloved Union, as well as the devastating military defeats in the early phase of the Civil War.

But Lincoln was also a realist.  Unlike Chase and Seward, who had advocated for radical abolitionist policies on moral grounds, Lincoln carefully charted a moderate path confined within the limits set by public opinion on slavery. His famous Emancipation Proclamation was timed and configured to be perceived by the people of the North as an indispensable instrument to win the war and preserve the Union, rather than as a necessary step to end slavery once and for all.   Goodwin sees nothing wrong for politicians to go along with public opinion, even if that means they must slightly bend their moral compass.  If anything, that expediency made Lincoln ‘the most truly progressive man of the age’, because he neither ‘wasted strength in premature struggles’ with the public nor waited to be ‘dragged by the forces of events’.  To be sure, Lincoln did owe much of his success to his exceptional ability to read and follow the will of the people.  But that does not make him ‘the most truly progressive’.  Based on what I gathered from the book, Lincoln is more of a pragmatist, a shrewd politician, maybe even a ‘political genius’ (As Goodwin likes to call him). Yet, he does not seem to have the burning conviction to reshape the world in the image of his ideology that many a great man of history possesses.  That difference, I think, is precisely what sets Lincoln apart from (or above, depending on how much you love him) that league of great men.

I was always curious about Lincoln’s view on race.  According to the book, Lincoln was against slavery but did not believe in racial equality.  He said the physical difference between whites and blacks would ‘probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality.’  As a result, he was not in favor “of making voters or jurors of n****, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry.”  Nor did he just say these things to get the white people’s votes.  Lincoln was a passionate advocate for colonization, the idea of aiding freed slaves to establish a colony in Central America. To sell this proposal to the country, he even convened a conference of freed slaves at the White House, where he said in his opening remarks, “you and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races.”  By today’s standard, therefore, Lincoln is a textbook racist. Should harboring racism in 19^th century diminish his greatness?  I imagine Tolstoy and Goodwin would dismiss such a thought as quintessential presentism. But many from today’s political left would probably disagree with them.

‘Team of Rivals’ is a thick book of nearly 1000 pages, of which about a quarter were notes.  It was meticulously researched and elegantly written, though at times, the lengthy quotes and extravagant details about the lives of the people in Lincoln’s outer orbit feel a bit excessive. If you don’t want to read the whole book, do not miss the last chapter, in which Goodwin describes how Lincoln met his destiny.  I finished that chapter on an airplane – I still remember having tears in my eyes that I had to hastily cover when a flight attendant asked me if I needed a drink. That rarely happened to me.   I shall end with a quote taken from the very end of the book.

“With his death, Abraham Lincoln had come to seem the embodiment of his own words—’With malice toward none; with charity for all’. The deathless name he sought from the start had grown far beyond Sangamon County and Illinois, reached across the truly United States, until his legacy, as Stanton had surmised at the moment of his death, belonged not only to America but to the ages—to be revered and sung throughout all time.”

When I was in graduate school in the early 2000s, the phrase Artificial Intelligence, or AI, did not have the mesmerizing power it possesses today. The field might have been slowly recovering from the twilight of 1990s, but remained an obscure subject that did not exactly inspire enthusiasm among graduate students –– certainly not in my field of study.  I might be more biased against AI research than most in my cohort, having acquired a distaste for it from the Dreyfus brothers’ contentious book, Mind Over Machines, which I interpreted at the time, perhaps over simplistically, as a rebuke of AI aspiration.   Much has happened since then. In the past decade, AI has made breath-taking progress that enabled computers to navigate complex urban environments and beat the best human Go players.  The Dreyfus brothers would probably read the news of these developments with astonishment and disbelief, though they may still not be ready to withdraw their opposition. For me, the last straw was ChatGPT, the chatbot that demonstrates human- and superhuman-level performance in tasks that I never thought can be done by computers in my lifetime: write essays, produce arts, and even achieve top 1% scores in the GRE verbal test, all delivered instantly by conversing fluently in natural language.  I am convinced that I need to reassess my outdated opinions about AI.  This conviction led me to delve into Human Compatible, a book written by Stuart J. Russell in 2019, whose work I initially came across on Sam Harris’s Podcast.  Russell is a world-renowned AI researcher at UC Berkeley, where, ironically from my perspective, the Dreyfus brothers had spent most of their teaching careers.

Russell began by defining human intelligence loosely as the ability to achieve one’s objectives through actions.  He believed AI should be described and assessed similarly. Yet, he argued that the focus should not be the “strength” of that ability, but rather its “usefulness” to humanity.  In his words (the emphasis is mine), “machines are beneficial to the extent that their actions can be expected to achieve our objectives.”

Paradoxically, a machine that strives to achieve our goals could still be an eminent danger to us.  For one thing, humans do not always know their real objectives.  Steve Jobs famously said, “people don’t know what they want until you show them.” Russell quipped about the perils of “getting exactly what you wish for”, as everyone who has been granted three wishes by a god can relate to.  He calls this the King Midas problem, because the legendary Greek King demanded that everything he touched would turn into gold, only to later regret his ill-fated wish.  Second, a rigid, human-specified goal can often be best achieved by violating norms and values that we humans consider common sense.  In a thought experiment, Russell imagined a super-intelligent machine, being asked by its human masters to cure cancer, decided to deliberately induce tumors in human beings so that it may carry out medical trials of “millions of potentially effective but previously untested chemical compounds”.  Be the fastest cure as this strategy may, it is an abhorrent violation of the established ethical standards in the field of medicine. This is the infamous value alignment problem in AI research.

At this point, most readers would probably breathe a sigh of relief and dismiss these so-called dangers as the illusion of doomsayers.  Surely enough, no machines that we know of can grant us wishes or cure cancer without any human supervision, right? Russell warned such complacency is dangerous and irresponsible, given the rapidly improving competence of AI systems. Contrary to what Hollywood movies lead us to believe, a conscious machine is not necessarily dangerous even if it hates humans. But a highly competent one surely is.

When it comes to the future of AI competence, Russell can be described as a cautious optimist. Not only does he believe artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is possible, but he once predicted “it would probably happen in the lifetime of my children”. He reminded us, furthermore, he is “considerably more conservative” than most active AI researchers, adding that it is entirely possible that AGI could come much sooner than his humble forecast.  In part, Russell’s confidence stems from seemingly boundless computing power available to machines. At the time of his writing, the fastest computer on earth, the Summit machine at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has gained a raw processing capacity in par with human brain, roughly 10¹⁷ operations per second (ops).  But this is infinitesimal compared to what machines could acquire in theory: 10⁵¹ ops for a laptop-sized computer, according to an estimate “based on quantum theory and entropy”.

To be sure, faster does not mean more intelligent.  As Russell said, a faster machine may simply “give you the wrong answer more quickly”.   According to him, reaching AGI still awaits several conceptual breakthroughs that may be hard to come by, which include: (i) understanding and extracting information from natural language; (ii) cumulative learning and discovery, which is essential to advancing science; (iii) planning and executing activities hierarchically to achieve complex objectives (e.g., going to Mars); and (iv) becoming an autonomous thinker that can manage one’s own mental activity (i.e., knows what and when to think).

Russell asserted that natural language technology was “not up to the task of reading and understanding millions of books”, and even though the existing language models can “extract simple information from clearly stated facts”, they can neither “build complex knowledge structure from text” or engage in “chains of reasoning with information from multiple sources”.  That was four years ago.  Today it seems clear that our first line of defense against AGI has already begun to fall to the advent of ChatGPT.  While this entirely unexpected breakthrough may have caught Russell himself by surprise, it actually proves that he was right all along: we must embrace and prepare for a future in which AGI is an integral part, not in spite of, but precisely because of huge uncertainty.

Russel thinks a super-intelligent machine can understand the world far better and more quickly, cooperate with each other far more effectively, and look much further into the future with far greater accuracy, than any human could ever hope to do.  In a nutshell, in a world with AGI,

“there would be no need to employ armies of specialists in different disciplines, organized into hierarchies of contractors and subcontractors, in order to carry out a project. All embodiments of AGI would have access to all the knowledge and skills of the human race, and more besides.”

What does this extraordinary technological triumph mean for human society?

First, the omnipotent AGI would drive up factor productivity to such a level that scarcity and poverty would be eliminated. When “the pie is essentially infinite”, Russell asked, why fight each other for a larger share? If this utopia sounds familiar, it is because Karl Marx said the same thing about communist society.   This crown achievement, however, will come at the cost of shattering job losses. Russell believed few of us could keep our jobs. It is delusional to think AGI will create more new jobs than it renders obsolete or enhance workers rather than replace them.  His metaphor of “the worker in an online-shopping fulfillment warehouse” is as enlightening as it is frightening.  He wrote,

“She is more productive than her predecessors because she has a small army of robots bringing her storage bins to pick items from; but she is a part of a larger system controlled by intelligent algorithms that decide where she should stand and which items she should pick and dispatch. She is already partly buried in the pyramid, not standing on top of it. It’s only a matter of time before the sand fills the spaces in the pyramid and her role is eliminated.”

The implication seems clear: no matter how indispensable you think you are, there will come a time when you too will be replaced.   That said, Russell told us everything will be just fine, if only humans could, as Keynes had famously advised 90 years ago, cope with their permanent plight of joblessness by learning “the art of life itself”.

Second, we must solve the alignment problem before entrusting all human affairs to AGI and retiring to the purer pursuit of happiness.  The solution to the problem is Russell’s expertise and the essence of the book. Russell argued that AGI development must follow the “Principles for Beneficial Machines”, which state “(i) the machine’s only objective is to maximize the realization of human preferences; (ii) the machine is initially uncertain about what those preferences are and (iii) the ultimate source of information about human preferences is human behavior.”   In a nutshell, Russell’s machine would continuously learn and strive to fulfill the preferences of their human masters. Whenever in doubt, it always defers to them, pausing its actions and seeking permission before proceeding.

I am skeptical these principles would be enough to save us from an AGI apocalypse.  The last part of the book discusses extensively the imperfection of humans, which are “composed of nasty, envy-driven, irrational, inconsistent, unstable, computationally limited, complex, evolving, heterogeneous” individuals.   Given that our species leaves so much to be desired, it seems strange to insist AGI must learn from our behaviors and help advance our (often) ruinous self-interests. Also, history has shown, time and again, humans of ordinary intelligence are perfectly capable of wreaking havoc on earth and perpetuating horrific violence against each other.  It stands to reason that the scale of destruction they can inflict would be incomprehensible when armed with superintelligence.  Unfortunately, that infinite pie Russell promised won’t eradicate human conflicts, because humans fight and kill as much for differences and status as for survival.

To his credit, Russell did concede that AGI must mind the interest of others, as well as that of its own master.  Having reviewed the theories of ethics, he suggested that utilitarianism –– which advocates for maximizing the sum of everyone’s utilities while treating their preferences equally –– might work.  Comparing utilities across individuals is meaningful and doable, Russell reasoned, and therefore, machines can be trained to master the science of ethics by what he called inverse reinforcement learning.  What he did not elaborate, though, is what mechanisms will be used to reconcile the inevitable conflicts between private and public interests. Humans invented pluralistic politics to deal with this ancient and intricate problem. However, super-intelligent machines are likely to find such politics too messy, too stupid, and too ineffective for their taste. Instead, they may favor a top-down approach that promises to “optimize” everything for everyone.  Unfortunately, this very promise had been made and broken before, often with devastating consequences.

Even if Russell’s “beneficial principles” ensure AGI never evolve into a tyrant – a big IF – they are still vulnerable to the “wireheading” trap, which is “the tendency of animals to short-circuit normal behavior in favor of direct stimulation of their own reward system”. Once the machines learn about the shortcut – say, directly stimulating a human’s brain to release pleasure-inducing chemicals – they would exploit it relentlessly to maximize the “total happiness” of humanity.  This tactic is not in violation of Russell’s principles because simulated happiness is still happiness, and to many it is an authentic experience.  The reader may recall that, in the famous movie The Matrix, many people willingly choose that virtual experience (the blue pill) over the real one (the red pill). Even Pascal admitted, “the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know”.  How could you blame AGI for gleefully encouraging their human masters to want what their heart loves more than their reason does?

Perhaps the gravest concern for humanity in the era of AGI will be the potential loss of autonomy.  In order for our civilization to endure, Russell explained, we must recreate it “in the mind of new generations”.   With AGI, this is no longer necessary since machines can store our knowledge and essentially “run our civilization for us”.  What is the point for any individual to spend a significant portion of their life acquiring knowledge and skills that they have no use for, except for the purpose of preserving our collective autonomy? Sadly, human nature being what it is, this tragedy of the commons may trap us all for eternity.

Russell’s writing exhibits a delightful wit, and the breadth of his knowledge in social sciences is remarkable, especially considering he specializes in computer science.  The book would make a stimulating but comfortable read for anyone who has some basic understanding of game theory and machine learning. A reader without such a background may find some materials less accessible.  Nevertheless, if Russell wanted to assuage the public’s concerns about AI safety, he might have fallen short.  If anything, the book had rendered me more pessimistic about AGI’s human compatibility.  While the Dreyfus brothers may be wrong about the superiority of mind over machines, deep down, I still wish they were right after all. To end on a desperately needed positive note, allow me to indulge a favorite quote from their book (again, the emphasis is mine):

“The truth is that human intelligence can never be replaced with machine intelligence simply because we are not ourselves “thinking machines”. Each of us has, and use every day, a power of intuitive intelligence that enables us to understand, to speak, and to cope skillfully with our everyday environment. We must learn what this power is, how it works, where it fits into our lives, and how it can be preserved and developed.”

My former colleague and mentor, Prof. David Boyce, loved Vaclav Smil’s How the World Really Works.  In a short email sent earlier this year, he urged me to read it, adding, “of the nearly 100 books I read this year, this one was the best”.  As encouragement he even mailed a hardcopy to me all the way from his retirement home in Arizona, to my pleasant surprise.  I’ve never heard of Smil before.   According to Wikipedia, he is a prolific and decorated author who counts Bill Gates among his fans.  An immigrant from Czech Republic, he had a PhD in geography but wrote about a wide variety of topics ranging from energy and environment to economics and public policy.

I don’t quite know how to make sense of the book’s seemingly pretentious title. If not for David’s recommendation, the title would probably have turned me away.  Having read the book, I suspect Smil had chosen the title to hide the controversial thesis of the book, which I think is an earnest pushback on the current “mainstream” climate policies and initiatives. Had the book been entitled to reflect this position, however, I imagine many people from the left would reject it out of hand as a manifesto from yet another climate change denier.  Here is Smil’s thesis in a nutshell:

“Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat, or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near-miraculous technical advances. But who is going, willingly, to engineer the former while we are still lacking any convincing, practical, affordable global strategy and technical means to pursue the latter?”

Let me first unpack how he reached this conclusion.

Citing Ludwig Boltzmann, Smil argues that free energy (i.e., energy available for conversion) is “the object of struggle for life”.   In the past two centuries, humans have gradually gained access to “a tremendous amount of energy at low cost” from burning fossil fuels.  This has largely transformed life on earth, from scarcity and misery that plagued much of human history to abundance and comfort that so many today had taken for granted.  By 2020, the annual energy consumed by an average person reached 34 GJ, equal to the energy content of about 0.8 tons of crude oil.  If the person would source this amount of energy from physical labor, Smil estimates they would need 60 adult servants working non-stop, day and night.  In affluent countries, this number would increase to approximately 200 to 240.  Clearly, before the energy revolution, only a very small minority could ever hope to avoid hard labor necessary to sustain and advance civilization.  As Thomas Piketty explained in his Capital in 21^st Century, in such a world, social inequality was not only inevitable but maybe necessary because “if there had not been a sufficiently wealthy minority, no one would have been able to worry about anything other than survival.” Moreover, “without a fortune it was impossible to live a dignified life”.   Of course, the energy revolution did not eradicate inequality; but living a dignified life and thinking beyond mere survival is no longer the privilege of the super-rich. For this newfound luxury we have the fossil fuel industry to thank.

Central to Smil’s argument is, therefore, the observation that humanity has become deeply dependent on the cheap energy provided by fossil fuels.  The book explores this dependency in the production of electricity, food, industrial materials, and transportation.

• Although the share of renewable energy (hydropower, solar and wind) in global electricity generation has reached 32% by 2022, fossil fuels (coal and natural gas) remained the dominant source (about 60%). As the uptake of renewables continues, however, the challenge lies not so much in converting solar and wind energy to electricity as in addressing their uneven spatiotemporal distribution.   Tackling this challenge requires the ability to store a massive amount of electricity and transmit it across vast distances. The former is contingent upon a technological breakthrough and the latter, even if we tolerate the cost of transmission, needs expensive infrastructure that currently does not exist. As Peter Nihan pointed out, there is a reason why “95 percent of humanity sources its electricity from power plants less than fifty miles away”.  Indeed, Germany had to keep almost 90% of its fossil fuel power plants as backup despite more than half of the country’s electricity is now generated from renewable sources.
• The agricultural industries depend on fossil fuels for synthetic fertilizers, among other things (e.g., power for machinery). Smil estimates that more than two thirds of the nitrogen needed for growing crops worldwide is supplied by fertilizers produced from natural gas using the Haber-Bosch process. If we decide to only feed crops by organic wastes, he concluded, more than half of the current global population would be wiped out, and those lucky enough to stick around would struggle to afford regular consumption of meat.  To drive home the crucial importance of fossil fuel to our food supply, Smil painstakingly calculated the life cycle “oil contents” in several staple food items. Perhaps the most memorable example was the tomato grown in the heated greenhouses of Almería, Spain, which consumes more than half liter diesel fuel per kilogram of edible fruit. In contrast, a kilogram of chicken, the most “efficient” meat in terms of energy conversion, can be produced with as little as 0.15 liters of diesel fuel.
• Smil also surveyed the ubiquitous presence of cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia in our life. The production of these “four pillars of modern civilization”, as he like to call them, relies heavily on energy- and carbon-intensive processes, collectively accounting for about one sixth of the global energy supply and a quarter of all fossil fuel consumption.  Smil asserts that we won’t be able to displace these materials anytime soon given their extensive current utilization. Nor could they be readily decarbonized because their established production processes have no “commercially available and readily deployable mass-scale alternatives”.
• As for transportation, there are two major obstacles. First, electric motors are still far from a viable substitute to turbofan engines currently powering long-haul aviation.  After all, the energy density of today’s best Li-ion batteries only amounts to about 5% that of jet fuel.  Second, the raw materials needed to build batteries – lithium, cobalt, and nickel, to name a few – may not be able to keep up with the enthusiasm of EV advocates.   To reach a 50% EV market share globally by 2050, Smil estimated that the demand for lithium, cobalt and nickel would grow by a factor of, respectively, 20, 19 and 31.  Take cobalt for example.  A quick Google search shows that, as of now (2022), the world has a cobalt reserve of about 8.3 million tons and an annual production of about 190,000 tons. Per Smil’s estimation, the production of cobalt would rise to nearly 4 million tons in 2050, or nearly half of the entire current reserve.

Having explained why we will be stuck with fossil fuels in the foreseeable future, Smil turned to address what he considered hyperbolic responses to the unfolding climate crisis.  To be sure, Smil is no climate change denier. However, he does raise serious concerns regarding climate science and the way it is being portrayed to mobilize mass action.   Smil tells us the cutting-edge global climate models contributed little to advance our understanding about the greenhouse effect and its long-term consequences.   Instead, the scientific community has been “aware of them for more than 150 years, and in a clear and explicit manner for more than a century”.  He also questions the value of performing long-term forecast with these large, ostensibly sophisticated, and complex models.  Such exercises may produce headlines decorated with impressive numbers.  However, riddled with “layered and often questionable assumptions”, they are little more than “computerized fairy tales”, whose primary function is to help the users
“reinforce their own prejudices or to dismiss plausible alternatives”, rather than reliably informing decision making. Smil’s distaste for complex forecasting models reminds me of Douglas J. Lee who, in his famous Requiem for Large-Scale Models, criticized the development of integrated land use and transportation models for the purpose of infrastructure planning. To explain why a more complex model isn’t necessarily better, Lee wrote,

“Including more components in a model generates the illusion that refinements are being added and uncertainty eliminated, but, in practice, every additional component introduces less that is known than is not known”.

In a nutshell, the climate models cannot really tell us what is going to happen in 30 years and to believe otherwise is “to mistake the science of global warming for the religion of climate change”.  Thus, Smil rejects the grim warning that our fossil-fueled civilization will soon collapse unless we immediately take drastic actions to decarbonize the world economy.   He also dismisses the grandiose claims that technological breakthroughs will somehow save humanity from this impending calamity, if only we have faith in them.  He ruthlessly mocks the “techno-optimists” –– who promised that 80 percent of global energy supply can be decarbonized by 2030, and an economy fueled by 100% renewables actually “needs less energy, costs less, and creates more jobs” –– and likens them to “green hymn” singers.

So, what is Smil for?  First, he prefers steady and mundane strategies to “sudden desperate actions aimed at preventing a catastrophe”. Two specific actions he suggested does make sense: reducing food waste, which shockingly amounts to a third of the overall food supply, and curtailing the ownership of SUVs, whose wide adoption had more than offset in the past decade the decarbonization gains resulting from the slow adoption of EVs.  Second, he wants us to “be agnostic about the distant future”, to admit the limits of our understanding, to “approach all planetary challenges with humility”, and to recognize no amount of planning can assure ultimate success.

Smil likes to build his argument around numbers and facts.  However, absorbing all the numbers can sometimes become such a mental burden that the reader may be distracted from the flow of the book.  Of course, this may be a feature rather than a bug; after all, Smil also wrote a popular book called Numbers Do Not Lie.  The chapter discussing risks and life expectancy seems a little baffling to me: it may be interesting in its own right, but a poor fit for the main theme.   That said, the book is a joy to read overall: Smil writes elegantly, his argument well-construed and his conclusions convincing.  Harsh as his critique of the climate modelers may be, it did resonate with me –– and I am a bit of a modeler myself.  However, I am probably not the kind of audience that Smil intends (need) to win over. To young liberals like AOC and Greta Thunberg, Smil’s even-headed message may be too conservative to swallow.  They might even find his lectures on “how the world really works” nerdy and old-fashioned, if not condescending and insulting.  Many a climate action enthusiast would probably never have time and patience to hear the old man out anyway, as they are so preoccupied by the continuous flow of new bad news that implore them to do something, anything, here and now, and at any cost if necessary.