They are modern Puritans seeking total authority.

From This Eminent Scientist Says Climate Activists Need to Get Real by David Marchese.

What an unexpected delight.  An interview in the New York Times which introduces me to a thinker with whom I was unfamiliar and who I will clearly enjoy reading.

And in the process, humiliates the interviewer and the New York Times' shibboleths and the authoritarian and totalitarian assumptions which underpin those shibboleths.  It is one thing to have a warped and distorted understanding of the world.  It is quite another to insist that everyone else should also indulge in those profound ignorances.  Vaclav Smil will have none of it.  

Marchese, wrapped in his rich urban leftist miasma of false assumptions keeps trying to get Smil to buy into assumptions which are not facts.  

What is not explicit in the interview are two profound constraints.  Smil highlights the issue without naming it - everything is about trade-offs.  If we want more or less of one thing (for example, less greenhouse gases), absent magic or unexpected technological innovations, that implies we can achieve that only by trading off something else (or many something elses) which are also valued.  

It is well and good to believe that, in the well established and documented cyclical global climate system which is noisy and constantly evolving in somewhat predictable cycles, by controlling a single greenhouse gas we can make a material difference in the outcome at some remote time in the future.  Smil is insisting that we confront the scientific realities and acknowledge the the probabilities and the constraints.  

There is, however, a second issue which is huge but not unaddressed.  Marchese's vision, even if you ignore the scientific improbabilities of his argument, still rests on a complete abandonment of our natural rights.  If you are going to address the hypothesized AGW world by decarbonization, you have to override the desires, wishes, and choices of citizens.  You have to deny them a place at the policy setting table.

However they might interpret the science, people are very bad at choosing to worsen their living conditions, especially for an uncertain outcome at a distant date.  

The Marcheses of the world are inherently authoritarian (people will have to do what Marchese wants them to do) and totalitarian (people will have to submit all their life conditions to the choices of Marchese).  They are true believers about whatever their chosen cause might be and are generally in denial of both reality as observed and measured and also perfectly comfortable subjugating everyone else to their capricious fantasies.  They are modern Puritans seeking total authority.  

Hence the stresses and strains in the political system.  

From the interview.  Marchese is in bold text and Smil in plain text.

We live in this world of exaggerated promises and delusional pop science. I’m trying to bring it onto some modest track of reality and common sense. The official goal in the U.S. is complete decarbonization of electricity generation by 2035. That’s Biden’s program: zero-carbon electricity in 2035. The country doesn’t have a national grid! How will you decarbonize and run the country by wind and solar without a national grid? And what will it take to build a national grid in a NIMBY society like the U.S.?

[snip]

This is the misunderstanding people have: that we’ve been slothful and neglectful and doing nothing. True, we have too many S.U.V.s and build too many big houses and waste too much food.  U.S. food waste has been estimated to total between 30 and 40 percent of our entire food supply.   But at the same time we are constantly transitioning and innovating. We went from coal to oil to natural gas, and then as we were moving into natural gas we moved into nuclear electricity, and we started building lots of large hydro, and they do not emit any carbon dioxide directly. So we’ve been transitioning to lower-carbon sources or noncarbon sources for decades. Moreover, we’ve been making our burning of carbon much more efficient. We are constantly transitioning to more efficient, more effective and less environmentally harmful things. So, yes, we’ve been wasteful, but our engineers are not asleep. Even those S.U.V.s, as wasteful as they are, are getting better than they were 10 years ago. The world is constantly improving.

[snip]

Even though we’re constantly improving, we’re also facing an imminent catastrophe in climate change. I wonder if that makes it hard for people to internalize the improvement. This is also making me think of a paper you wrote about the future of natural gas in which you referred to Bill McKibben as America’s “leading climate catastrophist.”

That was in a paper published by a nonprofit arm of the Spain-based natural gas and electricity company Naturgy, in which Smil took aim at the climate activist McKibben’s contention that moving from coal to natural gas was tantamount to breaking “our Oxycontin habit by taking up heroin instead.”   Is he wrong? What is “imminent”? In science you have to be careful with your words. We’ve had these problems ever since we started to burn fossil fuels on a large scale. We haven’t bothered to do anything about it. There is no excuse for that. We could have chosen a different path. But this is not our only imminent and global problem. About one billion people are either undernourished or malnourished. The fact of possible nuclear war these days. Remember what they used to say about Gerald Ford? He can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. This is the problem of society today. We cannot do three things at the same time. So who decides what is imminent?

That’s not quite an answer to the question. I may have used the word “imminent” coarsely, but what about the word “catastrophe”? For more than 30 years, global warming has been making headlines. We’ve been aware of this for 30 years, on a planetary scale — all these I.P.C.C. meetings. Our emissions have been going up steadily every year. So here’s the question: Why haven’t we done anything? I could give you a list of things we could do but we haven’t done. Why do we keep saying it’s a catastrophic problem but do nothing about it?

[snip]

So am I naïve, or are you pessimistic? Yes and no. It depends. Also, there is nothing wrong with the heat pump, but proper insulation, that’s much better in the long run. The point is that we are being greedy, we are wasting yet improving our efficiencies at the same time. This is where I become unpalatable to the media because I do not have one message like “everything is getting better.” I see it as checkered. People do sacrifice for our children, take the right steps. But the same people who will buy a solar panel and heat pump will buy an S.U.V. People will stop eating meat, then fly for a vacation in Toscana. We are messy, hard-to-define individuals. We are subject to fashions and whims — this is the beauty of humanity. Most of us are trying to do the right things with climate, but it is difficult when you have to move on the energy front, food front, materials front. People have to realize that this problem is unprecedented because of the numbers — billions of everything — and the pressure of acting rapidly as we never acted before. This doesn’t make it hopeless, but it makes it excruciatingly more difficult.

Do you think we are facing a civilizational threat in climate change? I cannot answer that question without having the threat defined. What does it mean? You’ve seen it with Covid: Was Covid an unprecedented catastrophe, as many people portrayed it? Or was it nothing, as other people portrayed it? Anti-lockdown, anti-mask people would say, Oh, it’s another flu. Clearly it was not another flu. But you know as well that it was not an unprecedented catastrophe. What do you want me to say? I cannot tell you that we don’t have a problem because we do have a problem. But I cannot tell you it’s the end of the world by next Monday because it is not the end of the world by next Monday. What’s the point of you pressing me to belong to one of these groups? We have a problem; it will be difficult to solve. Even more difficult than people think.

Does your understanding of the science around energy and climate change compel you in any particularly political directions? No. I used to live in the westernmost part of the evil empire, what’s now the Czech Republic. They forever turned me off any stupid politics because they politicized everything. So it is now, unfortunately, in the West. Everything’s politics. No it is not! You can be on this side or that side, but the real world works on the basis of natural law and thermodynamics and energy conversions, and the fact is if I want to smelt my steel, I need a certain amount of carbon or hydrogen to do it. The Red Book of Mao or Putin’s speeches or Donald Trump is no help in that. We need less politics to solve our problems. We need to look at the realities of life and to see how we can practically affect them.

[snip]

Not today. Maybe tomorrow. Not tomorrow. Again, it’s the scale. You see, you have almost become a victim. It’s inevitable because you are living in it, you are soaked in it, you are in New York City — this pushing people to one side or the other. We don’t need pushing to the sides. What we need is the dull, factually correct and accurate middle. Because only from that middle will come the solutions. Solutions never come from extremes. It’s also irresponsible to state the problem in ways where, when you look closer, it’s not like that. There are these billions of people who want to burn more fossil fuel. There is very little you can do about that. They will burn it unless you give them something different. But who will give them something different? You have to recognize the realities of the world, and the realities of the world tend to be unpleasant, discouraging and depressing.