Vaclav Smil is a historian of technical advances -- particularly in the field of energy -- and a Distinguished Professor at the University of Manitoba in Canada. Over the years, Smil has written more than 25 books and many dozens of articles. In recent years he has been examining human uses of energy over past millennia. As Smil says [PDF], "My firm belief is that looking far ahead is done most profitably by looking far back." His first conclusion [PDF] is that energy systems change very slowly. The modern world today relies on machines that were invented in the 1880s …

As the price of oil rises, coal company executives smell a huge opportunity: they are planning to ramp up a new global industry to turn coal into liquid fuels (diesel, kerosene and jet fuel), plus basic feedstocks for the chemical industry to make plastics, fertilizers, solvents, pesticides, and more. The coal-to-chemicals industry is already going gangbusters in China. U.S. coal companies like Peabody and Arch plan to combine well-known coal-to-liquids technology and rapidly-evolving coal-to-chemicals technologies with untested methods of capturing carbon dioxide (or CO2, the main global-warming gas), compressing it into a liquid, and injecting it a mile below ground, …