Why Vaclav Smil Is Fed Up with Climate Activism | The acclaimed environmental scientist is annoyed with the eco movement and shunning media—just when we need him most

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1. > In 2019, the environmental scientist and energy historian Vaclav Smil published _Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities_. In the book, Smil charts the expansion of everything from algae blooms and embryos, domesticated chicken breasts and corn harvests, mountain ranges and skyscrapers and air travel to the destructive power of human weaponry, the storage capacity of microchips, the rise and fall of trees, forests, empires, and the economic outputs of country after country. The commonality among them, Smil finds, is disturbing: after a period of rapid, often exponential growth, any number of unpleasant things can happen, including precipitous collapse. _Growth_ was Smil’s fortieth book; he’s published seven more since.
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   > The renowned physicist and inventor David Keith has called Smil “a slayer of bullshit,” and _Growth_ reads like a 513-page assassination of one of civilization’s most cherished delusions: that a finite planet can accommodate infinite growth. Smil is quick to acknowledge the benefits of economic growth—dramatic gains in food production, life expectancy, energy access, and countless other indices of human progress. But unlike the Steven Pinkers of the world who downplay or ignore the costs of that progress, Smil emphasizes their central harm: “a multitude of assaults on the biosphere.” These range from the obliteration of global forests and terrifying declines in biodiversity to hundreds of gigatons of fossil carbon being released into the atmosphere.
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   > “Without a biosphere in a good shape, there is no life on the planet,” he told the _Guardian_ around _Growth_’s publication. “That’s all you need to know.” Smil was seventy-five when the book came out, eight years after he retired as a professor (now distinguished emeritus) at the University of Manitoba’s department of environment and geography. He was living with his wife in the humble, super-energy-efficient Winnipeg home he’d designed more than three decades earlier. For many, this would be a happy career denouement. But Smil’s action was rising. He was writing two or three books a year, delivering keynote speeches in international capitals, publishing articles and Q&As in prestigious publications. He became friendly with Bill Gates, who has blurbed most of his books since 2010, calling _Growth_ not just a “masterpiece” but “Smil’s latest masterpiece.” (In 2017, Gates wrote: “I wait for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie.”) In other words, Smil gave every indication of enjoying a surge of late-career fame that many Canadians had entirely failed to notice.
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   > He also seemed to resent that fame. It was around the time of _Growth_’s publication that something, or rather several things, clearly began to shift, causing Smil to sour on his audience and the public at large. One of those shifts was the surge in climate catastrophes that marked the late 2010s. These helped spark a global wave of environmental activism whose slogans rang like a dumbed down echo of Smil’s writing. In 2018, Extinction Rebellion began paralyzing traffic in London with theatrical protests that spurred the UK into declaring a climate emergency. The following year, Greta Thunberg headlined the historic global climate strike of 2019. Millions of protesters flooded streets in over 160 countries, covering every continent. The epicentre of that strike was New York City, where Thunberg’s presence drew 250,000 protesters ahead of the UN’s Climate Ambition Summit. Here the echo became uncanny. On September 21, 2019, Smil told the _Guardian_, “Growth must come to an end. Our economist friends don’t seem to realize that.” Two days later, Thunberg told an assembly of world leaders gathered in the UN’s New York headquarters, “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”
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   > But Smil does not seem to appreciate Thunberg. He’s never expressed a word of encouragement for the movement she represents. To the contrary, since 2019, in books and articles and interviews, Smil has directed his bullshit slaying almost exclusively _against_ popular climate-activist arguments: he called Bill McKibben America’s “leading climate catastrophist” in the magazine _IEEE Spectrum_; about the goals spelled out in the Paris Agreement—“People call it aspirational. I call it delusional,” he told the _New York Times_ in 2022; and he has accused the climate scientists writing reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of inventing “a new scientific genre where heavy doses of wishful thinking are commingled with a few solid facts.”

2. It may be delusional but what people are doing is not surprising at all.

3. He should publish his books for free. Make them available online.