“Staggering in its empirical richness, Vaclav Smil provides a tract to better understand the challenges in the years ahead for industrial societies, for as he argues, the ‘gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast.’ Public policy across the globe must seriously grapple with how we get to a decarbonization of our societies. Achieving consensus on that goal – as hard as even that is – is one thing. Doing the things required to actually achieve that goal is quite another, and infinitely harder, task. Most public policy practitioners have a rough feel for how hard that end game will be. Smil accelerates that dialogue.”