Economic and technical imperatives - not any preconceived directives - will keep propelling the process of energy transition.
Interpretation
Energy transition is driven by economic realities and technical needs rather than prior plans.
The quote emphasizes that the shift towards alternative energy sources is primarily influenced by the economic and technical conditions of the time instead of any pre-existing guidelines or intentions. Vaclav Smil suggests that it is the practical aspects of energy production and consumption that will dictate how and when the transition occurs, highlighting the importance of adaptability and responsiveness to changing circumstances in the energy sector.
In practice
In a speech about future energy policies, I emphasized how economic and technical factors shape our transition strategies.
I've read about 80 books a year for the past 50 years. I come from cultural breeding. I don't have a cellphone. When you spend all your time checking your cellphone messages, or updating your Facebook (of course I don't have a Facebook page) then you don't have any time for reading.
Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing - from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What's very important is in-house research.
America tends to assume Silicon Valley-style innovators can drive quick and transformative changes, but even Silicon Valley's would-be masters of the universe have discovered that energy transitions are subject to time spans and technical constraints that defy their reach.
Everyone [in higher education] was what I call drillers of deeper wells. These academics sit at the bottom of a deep well and they look up and see a sliver of the sky. They know everything about that little sliver of sky and nothing else. I scan all my horizons.
Most scientific or engineering discoveries would never become successful products without contributions from other scientists or engineers. Every major invention is the child of far-flung parents who may never meet.
I'm old fashioned. I'm not one of these young guys who think they are so smart that they can prescribe what humanity ought to do. Humanity never learns any lessons. Prescriptions don't matter. We already know exactly what to do. We just don't do it.
It is a misfortune for a science to be born too late when the means of observation have become too perfect. That is what is happening at this moment with respect to physical chemistry; the founders are hampered in their general grasp by third and fourth decimal places.
...99 percent confident that the world really was getting warmer and that there was a high degree of probability that it was due to human-made greenhouse gases.
Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.
For since the fabric of the universe is most perfect and the work of a most wise Creator, nothing at all takes place in the universe in which some rule of maximum or minimum does not appear.
We live on a minute island of known things. Our undiminished wonder at the mystery which surrounds us is what makes us human. In science fiction we can approach that mystery, not in small, everyday symbols, but in bigger ones of space and time.
There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. . . It seems as though somebody has fine tuned nature's numbers to make the Universe. . . The impression of design is overwhelming.
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