[Editor’s note: This is Part I of a five-part series by Vaclav Smil that provides an essential basis for the understanding of energy transitions and use. Dr. Smil is widely considered to be one of the world’s leading energy experts. His views deserve careful study and understanding as a basis for today’s contentious energy policy debates. Good intentions or simply desired ends must square with energy reality, the basis of Smil’s worldview.]

Energy transitions – be they the shifts from dominant resources to new modes of supply (from wood coal, from coal to hydrocarbons, from direct use of fuels to electricity), diffusion of new prime movers (from steam engines to steam turbines or to diesel engines), or new final energy converters (from incandescent to fluorescent lights) – are inherently protracted affairs that unfold across decades or generations.…

[Editor note: Bryce’s Power Hungry, released today, is his second book on energy after Gusher of Lies and fourth book overall.]

In his brand new book Power Hungry, energy journalist and Austin apiarist Robert Bryce marshals many numbers to plainly show how modern culture exacts power from energy to save time, increase wealth, and raise standards of living. Bryce also dispenses common sense to citizens and policy makers for an improved environment, a more productive economy, and a more enlightened civil society.

Inspired by enegy writings of Rockefeller University’s Jesse Ausubel, and the University of Manitoba’s prolific Vaclav Smil, he makes the case for continuing down the path of de-carbonizing our machine fuels—a process begun two hundred years ago when we turned from wood to fossil fuels and huge reservoirs of impounded water.…

Dr. Pierre Desrochers, Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Toronto Mississauga, is the scholar’s scholar. In an age where few read all important material on all sides of their subject, this professor stands out.

Can President Obama strike a deal with the University of Toronto to make this course available to his top energy and environmental aides, even smartest-guy-in-the-room John Holdren? Energy legislation is currently stalled, and the summer might be a good time for a “time out” to learn the basics of energy and the free society.

Here is the syllabus for GGR 333H5F

The development of new energy sources has had a major impact on the development of both human societies and the environment. This course will provide a broad survey of past and current achievements, along with failures and controversies, regarding the use of various forms of energy.…

Modern technical innovations operate unlike the traditional, pre-industrial advances: they too have their phases of gradual improvements based on tinkering and everyday experiences with running a machine or a process. But the initial accomplishments result almost invariably from deliberate and systematic pursuits of theoretical understanding. Only once that knowledge is sufficiently mastered the process moves to its next stage of experimental design followed by eventual commercialization.

That is precisely how Charles Parsons, Rudolf Diesel, and their collaborators/successors invented and commercialized the two machines that work–unseen and unsung–as the two most important prime movers of modern economies:

steam turbo-generators, which still generate most of the world’s electricity and

diesel engines, which power every tanker and every container ship besides energizing most of the trucks and freight trains.

The process of process is also how we got gas turbines (jet engines) and nuclear reactors, and many other taken-for-granted converters and processes.…