Very interesting, I guess that's another book on my reading list...
Do you know if this relates, in any way, to the energy economics and diminishing marginal returns from increasing complexity that Joseph Tainter[0] covers in The Collapse of Complex Societies[1]?
Generally, yes, though Smil doesn't really develop the concept of complexity and collapse as Tainter does.
Tainter is cited in the book, though unfortunately the citations / notes format is one that makes it exceedingly difficult to sort out where (this is one of my few complaints with this book, and Smil's writing generally -- he follows a social sciences citations format of (Author <year>) inline, which makes finding, and identifying, references tedious -- I'm the sort of cat who really likes either section-based endnotes or page-based footnotes for tracking things).
That said: Smil's citations are excellent, and his books are worth buying for the references alone. They're also far more worth buying (or reading) for the actual text, but good refs are a very strong bonus.
If you're interested in Tainter's view, I would suggest taking a look, if you can find a copy, at Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power, published in 2009, and covering much the same concept. Weissenbacher's approach is similar to Smil's, and the latter cites Smil's earlier book, Energy in World History (1992) extensively. Weissenbacher looks far more into the political aspects of energy regimes, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries, and arguably to a fault.
The book is also extensively researched, though far-less-evenly written than Smil's. Neither author is a native English speaker, but Smil has a far better command of the language, and the discipline and/or editorial assistance to tighten up and clean up his writing. That said, despite the similarities, the works do complement one another.
Another author I'd recommend is William Ophuls, particularly Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977, revised ~1994), which predates but also anticipates much of Tainter's work. Ophul's background and focus is politics and polity, but through the lenses of ecology and Limits to Growth particularly. His forecast of political developments strikes me as particularly good, capturing much of what actually did transpire, with few failures, save the quite notable one that we have so far managed to avoid an absolutely devastating general famine. But his national / regional assessment strikes me as pretty true -- it's based on the US, EU, USSR (still a thing, though he saw trouble for it), China, India, Africa, and Latin America, generally.
All fascinating, though I can't believe that we'll have devastating general famines. Agriculture is a technical problem, and the trend has been increased yields and decreasing prices, despite the many awful choices we've made at times.
Solar energy, cheap desalination and bioscience are likely to make food ever cheaper and more abundant, wouldn't you think?
Do you know if this relates, in any way, to the energy economics and diminishing marginal returns from increasing complexity that Joseph Tainter[0] covers in The Collapse of Complex Societies[1]?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter#Diminishing_ret...
[1] http://wtf.tw/ref/tainter.pdf