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1 " But if today's low-income countries are to move from poverty to an incipient affluence... then none of those factors could make a difference without the rising consumption of fuels and electricity: a decoupling of economic growth and energy consumption during early stages of modern economic development would defy the laws of thermodynamics." (p. 350, italics added) "
― Vaclav Smil , Energy and Civilization: A History
2 " Could such a shift be accomplished without eventually converting to a no-growth economy and reducing the current global population? For individuals, this would mean a no less revolutionary delinking of social status from material consumption. "
3 " Despite many differences in agronomic practices and in cultivated crops, all traditional agricultures shared the same energetic foundation. They were powered by the photosynthetic conversion of solar radiation, producing food for people, feed for animals, recycled wastes for the replenishment of soil fertility, and fuels for smelting the metals needed to make simple farm tools. Consequently, traditional farming was, in principle, fully renewable. "
4 " The period of very rapid advances after 1700 was ushered in by ingenious practical innovators. But its greatest successes during the nineteenth century were driven by close feedbacks between the growth of scientific knowledge and the design and commercialization of new inventions (Rosenberg and Birdzell 1986; Mokyr 2002; Smil 2005). The energy foundations of nineteenth-century advances included the development of steam engines and their widespread adoption as both stationary and mobile prime movers, iron smelting with coke, the large-scale production of steel, and the introduction of internal combustion engines and of electricity generation. The extent and rapidity of these changes came from a novel combination of these energy innovations with new chemical syntheses and with better modes of organizing factory production. "
