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Vaclav Smil Quotes


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Quotes by Vaclav Smil

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Collaboration and augmentation are the foundational principles of innovation.

~Vaclav Smil

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The great hope for a quick and sweeping transition to renewable energy is wishful thinking.

~Vaclav Smil

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Our increasingly electrified, electronic, and data-driven society places steadily rising demand on reliable baseload power - that is, on electricity available 24/7/365. Servers never sleep, nor does air conditioning during hot nights, and in Asia's megacities, subways and electric trains take only brief naps between midnight and 5 A.M.

~Vaclav Smil

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People shouldn't be living in certain places - on earthquake faults or on flood plains. But they do, and there are consequences.

~Vaclav Smil

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This is the question I'm asking: Do Americans live twice as long because they consume twice as much energy as Europeans? Are you people twice as smart as the average Frenchman? Do you enjoy life twice as much as the average Danish guy? What have we gotten for consuming twice as much energy as Europe? What have we gotten in return?

~Vaclav Smil

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There is no doubt that human evolution has been linked to meat in many fundamental ways. Our digestive tract is not one of obligatory herbivores; our enzymes evolved to digest meat, whose consumption aided higher encephalization and better physical growth.

~Vaclav Smil

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Renewable energy is very significant.

~Vaclav Smil

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I live in a province where we have the cheapest electricity in North America - indeed, in the Western world - but all of it is perfectly renewable because we have beautiful Manitoba Hydro. Every few tens of kilometers, we can put a river dam. Bingo. One gigawatt here. One gigawatt here.

~Vaclav Smil

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The problems that ail the U.S. economy and American society are one and the same: Both consume too much and refuse to make badly needed changes. This is true above all in the realm of energy.

~Vaclav Smil

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We insist on celebrating lone heroic path-finders, but even the most admired and the most successful inventors are part of a more remarkable supply chain of innovators who are largely ignored for the simpler mythology of one man or one eureka moment.

~Vaclav Smil

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Biography

Nationality: Czechoslovakian

Type: Scientist

Born: December 9th, 1943

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