Energy and Civilization: A History

Vaclav Smil's 2017 history of civilization told through its energy physics: muscle power and biomass, draft animals, waterwheels and wind, coal and steam, oil and electricity — and the material arithmetic of each era: energy density, power density, conversion losses, and why every transition took generations. It includes the energetics of farming (synthetic nitrogen now feeds a large share of humanity) and a deliberately prophecy-free look at the transition now underway.

"I wait for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie," Gates says, and he has read nearly all of them. Smil is the writer he cites most often as having shaped how he reasons about climate and infrastructure — quantities first, narrative second; the energy arithmetic in Gates's own How to Avoid a Climate Disaster runs on Smil's numbers.

The pattern recognition transfers to technology strategy: transitions that look inevitable in hindsight — steam, the dynamo, the combustion engine — each needed half a century or more to dominate, moving at the speed of infrastructure rather than invention. Founders building in climate, hardware, or any heavy-asset market are operating inside those rates; the book calibrates what 'fast' can realistically mean when atoms are involved.