Dr. Vaclav Smil, the world’s premier energy transitions expert, and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of the Environment, has weighed in on how possible it is to transition from oil and gas by legislative decree.

The University of Saskatchewan’s Johnson Shoyama School of Public Policy recently published an excerpt from Dr. Smil’s work, including this summary: “Designing hypothetical roadmaps outlining complete elimination of fossil carbon from the global energy supply by 2050 is nothing but an exercise in wishful thinking that ignores fundamental physical realities.”

You can read the entire excerpt here.

The full policy brief can be downloaded here as a pdf.