Material World

Ed Conway (2023).? Material world: The six raw materials that shape modern civilization.? Alfred A. Knopf: New York

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2? This is the reality of twenty-first-century resource exploitation: reducing vast quantities of rock into granules and chemically processing what remains.? It is both awe inspiring and disturbing

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5? gold … If this is what it takes to extract a metal we could mostly live without, then what does it take to extract those materials we really need?

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6-7? pretty much everything from social networks to retail to financial services is wholly reliant upon the physical infrastructure that facilitates it and the energy that powers it

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7? price is not the same thing as importance

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8? borosilicate glass … Corning … Pyrex

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10-11? consider a famous essay written in 1958 by Leonard Read … called “I, Pencil.” … There are a couple of straightforward lessons here.? The first is how little we understand about how everyday products are actually made.? The second is that, given all this complexity, no single human being could carry out, or for that matter direct, these numerous processes

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15? climate change.? It’s a crucial irony that pursuing our various environmental goals will … require considerably more materials … The upshot is that in the coming decades we are likely to extract more metals from the earth’s surface than ever before

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15? In 2019 … we mined, dug and blasted more materials from the earth’s surface than the sum total of everything we extracted from the dawn of humanity all the way through to 1950

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16? Even as we … pare back our consumption of fossil fuels we have redoubled our consumption of everything else

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17? This book about the Material World is told through six materials: sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium

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20? in economics nearly everything comes back to energy

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21? Albert Einstein … theory of relativity … “… if all material things disappeared out of the universe … time and space disappear together with the things.”

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21? the world’s oldest manufactured product (glass)

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27-30? Among the treasures discovered with the sarcophagus of Tutankhamen was a necklace depicting the sun god Ra … at its centre was a beetle carved out of a translucent, canary-yellow stone … no one had ever seen anything like this yellow material before … Only in the late 1990s did scientists finally confirm that … it was created … by a falling star.? That meteor 29 million years ago had turned the sand into a kind of glass – Libyan desert glass

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31? After oxygen … silicon is … the most common element in the earth’s crust

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32? In some corners of the world there are sand mafias who fight and kill for control of grains of silicon

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33? Sand … is at once the basis of the very oldest and the very newest products humankind has learned how to manufacture … It was our transformation of silicon into beads and cups and jewellery that marked the beginning of the era of Homo faber – man the manufacturer

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37? Is it a coincidence that countries which embraced glassmaking would be the very places where the Enlightenment and then the industrial revolution took hold …? … A few years ago … Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin, went methodically through 20 of the great experiments that advanced human knowledge … and discovered that all but four of them relied in some way on glass prisms or containers or contraptions

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40? despite it being one of the very oldest human-made substances, scientists still struggle to comprehend why glass behaves the way it does

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42? if you want the very clearest, finest glass, you need the very purest of all silica sands, sometimes called silver sands … The famous glass pyramid at the Louvre is made of Fontainebleau sand

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44? Composed of 99 per cent silica with barely a smidge of iron oxide, this sand is unlike any you have come across before … Lochaline [Scotland] ?

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46-50? the First World War, where glass played a role in one of the most extraordinary stories of modern military history … 1915 … field glasses … binoculars … So complete was the German monopoly on telescopic rifle sights that at the start of the war its snipers enjoyed a considerable advantage … the “glass famine” … British companies … all relied on glass from Germany … The only thing more remarkable than the Britons asking Germans to help was what happened next: Germany said yes … they desperately need something in return: rubber

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52? price is not the same thing as value … “supply shocks,”

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54? “total internal reflection,”

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54? The tale of how Germany passed Britain in this technological race owes something to … the window tax, first levied in 1696

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56? by the end of the war the UK was producing enough glass to supply its own troops and some of its allies

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60? in the 1960s at [Standard Telecommunication Laboratories] STL, the research wing of Standard Telephones and Cables Ltd, [Charles] Kao made the break-through that would transform long-distance communication, giving birth to the optical fibre era

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64? the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai … is … built atop shifting desert sands

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66? Dubai import[s] sand from Belgium, the Netherlands and … the UK

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73? cement is the magic ingredient, the glue, that sticks concrete together

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75? There is evidence of cement use in the floors and pillars in Neolithic ruins found in Turkey that date back more than 10,000 years … the recipe for the cement we mostly use today was patented in 1824 by … Joseph Aspdin.? He called it Portland cement, because its colour resembled the Portland stone quarried in Dorset

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76? Thomas Edison … perfected the mass production of concrete

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78? there are now more than 80 tonnes of concrete on this planet for every person alive

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81? concrete … is one of the biggest emitters of carbon on the planet … 7-8 per cent of all carbon emissions

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82? carbon capture and storage (CCS)

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84? concrete alone accounts for around a tenth of the world’s industrial water use?

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89? Semiconductors … The first switch, or transistor … 1947 by Walter Brattain and John Bardeen … the “integrated circuit,” … Robert Noyce … 1959

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98-99? the energy cost of ultra-pure silicon … is more than 3,000 times that of cement and 1,000 times that of turning iron into steel

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99? China has yet to master the manufacture of … semiconductor grade polysilicon … This can have as many as ten nines (99.99999999 percent purity)

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104? About 90 per cent of silicon production these days is … for solar panels, and nearly all of that takes place … in China … while much of the silicon in Europe is produced using alternative energy sources, especially hydro-power, the Chinese silicon industry is far more reliant on coal … there are concerns that some of China’s silicon producers … have inhumane working conditions

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105? if you want high-purity quartz … it has to come from Spruce Pine … North Carolina

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108? Southern Taiwan Science and Technology Park … TSMS … Fab 18 – the most advanced factory in the world … Morris Chang … Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company

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115-116? In steel production, cement, manufacturing, distribution and even social media, China has managed to catch up and even overtake the rest.? But not, crucially, in semiconductors … “… TSMC is gaining vital importance in geostrategic terms.”

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116? within the foundry … The process to create the world’s fastest technology turns out to be surprisingly slow and laborious … more than 10,000 different steps over … months

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127? to say salt is the stuff of life remains as true today as it was in Roman times

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128? If you want to understand capitalism and power, the best place to begin is with salt

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129? (you need a lot of salt to make a hard cheese like cheddar)

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131? Historians have long theorised that the reason much of human civilisation began on coastlines was because of easy access to salt

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135? In war, salt was weaponised

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135-137? There have been 13 major dynasties in China … throughout … there has been one … constant: the salt monopoly … As recently as 2013 China’s “salt police” – a 25,000-strong force … was cracking down on private merchants … battling iodine deficiency

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139? 1875 … Matthias Jakob Schleiden, wrote that there was a clear relationship between salt taxes and despotism

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140? the British took control of all Indian salt production

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142? Gandhi’s “salt satyagraha” was one of the pivotal waypoints on the road to Indian independence

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143-144? there are, broadly speaking, three ways to make salt.? You can evaporate it from the sea … You can dig rock salt out of the ground … The third and final way … is to extract it from the ground in the form of brine … “solution mining”

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150-152? today salt is the bedrock for the chemicals and pharmaceuticals industry … the chloralkali process … electrolysis cells … magnetic field … chlorine gas … hydrogen gas and sodium hydroxide, better known as caustic soda

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155? Tata Chemicals … owns British Salt.? That the Cheshire salt which once provided Gandhi with the cause for his iconic satyagraha is now produced by an Indian company is one of those ironies little appreciated

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164? The Chinese … called the salt huo yao – the “fire drug” – but in the West it became known as saltpetre – Latin for “salt of the stone” … Mix this salt with a tiny fraction of sulphur and charcoal dust and you have gunpowder

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168? caliche … sodium nitrate rather than potassium nitrate … it could be turned into nitric acid, nitroglycerine and dynamite, the high explosives that would make Alfred Nobel one of the world’s richest men … South American nitrates became one of the most important raw materials in the world

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170? 1884 … Chile won control of some of the most important mineral resources in the world … nitrates … copper and lithium

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173? when the First World War began … the … first naval engagement between German and British ships occurred … off the Pacific coast of Chile … Germany was cut off from Chilean caliche for the remainder of the war … suddenly vulnerable both to starvation and, without any source of explosives

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173-174? Fritz Haber … and … Carl Bosch … 1913 BASF … had begun to manufacture ammonia – that nitrogen/hydrogen compound which could then be converted into fertiliser and used to make explosives … The Haber-Bosch process … is one of the most important scientific and industrial discoveries in history.? It has … helped us to feed billions of people … Fritz Haber’s … work to develop chlorine gas … the Second Battle of Ypres … caused thousands of troops to die terrible deaths

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176? iodine … Chile … the world’s biggest producer

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176? for much of the past half-century nitrogen fertiliser has been used almost without limit.

Roughly half of the nitrogen … has ended up … in our air and our water … it has fuelled giant algal blooms which suffocate other aquatic life … Farmers’ soils were becoming overworked and degraded, deprived of countless other minerals they needed

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179? nitrogen … phosphorus and potassium … NPK as they are often called after their chemical symbols – constitute the holy trinity of fertilisers

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181? polyhalite

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198? Iron … No other metal is quite so useful, with quite the same combination of strength, durability, and availability … iron is … the second most abundant metal in the earth’s crust (at 5 per cent, after aluminium which is 8 per cent)

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202? the first mass-manufactured steel plough, produced by John Deere

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203? steel matters

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204? Steel production is responsible for roughly 7-8 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions … The world’s twin goals of decarbonisation and development are heading for a collision

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205? China’s Mao Zedong was so obsessed with steel that in the late 1950s he steered his country towards catastrophe as he tried to increase production of the metal … 17 to 30 million – died of starvation and fatigue … between 1958 and 1962

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209-212? Mariupol … Almost by accident, Ukraine became one of the world’s biggest industrial producers of neon … Since Azovstal and its fellow Ukrainian steel mills were responsible for producing nearly half the world’s supply of neon, in the weeks after … the shutdown, the world began to run short of the gas … soon enough silicon-chip manufacturers in Taiwan, South Korea and even South Wales began to stockpile these gases

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213? twenty-first-century wars are still fought with steel … its production today nonetheless feels like a journey back in time, into the Middle Ages

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216? we cannot discuss iron and steel without discussing coal.? For every tonne of molten pig iron, you need just over a tonne of iron ore and just under a tonne of coal … The ore is rich in iron oxide … the … furnace is … to produce an environment where the oxygen can leave the iron and bond with the carbon from the coal … the main end product … is carbon dioxide, and lots of it

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217? Iron is a fossil fuel product … a … thousand or so blast furnaces operating around the world … its production entails the creation of enormous quantities of CO2 – around 7-8 per cent of the global total.? No other source of greenhouse gases is quite so concentrated into such a small number of sites

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219? if they pre-baked the coal … you ended up with a purer form of coal … coke, as it became known

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223? steel … turns out to have one of the highest recycling rates

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223-224? Here we run smack bang into the same lesson we learned from concrete: what makes steel a mainstay of the Material World? … it is both very good and very cheap

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225? Around 70 per cent of the world’s niobium … comes from a single mine in Brazil

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228? the “Jevons paradox,” … William Stanley Jevons … however much more efficient we would make our engines and machines, we would simply find new excuses to burn just as much (or more) coal

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229-230? In 2015 … Li Keqiang … picked up a ballpoint pen … “Why … can’t [China] produce a pen that writes as smoothly and easily?” … two years later … it had succeeded in making a quality nib.? The achievement was hailed by Chinese state television as a cause for national celebration

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230-231? But of all these steels perhaps the most obscure is something called low-background steel.? This is a metal that is completely uncontaminated with radionuclides – a type of nuclear energy … producing low-background steel from scratch is essentially impossible today.? Ever since the first atomic bombs were detonated, Earth’s atmosphere has contained tiny amounts of nuclear contamination … the only way of getting hold of low-background steel is to find a source of the metal that dates back before those first nuclear tests in 1945.? Old sunken battleships are a particular source

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235? Australia has more of the world’s mineable iron ore than any other country

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238? No other people on earth can claim to have had as long a continuous cultural history as the Aboriginal populations

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245? More than two-thirds of America’s steel is now made from scrap … Based on current trends, by the second half of this century we will be getting more steel from recycling than from iron ore

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246? “direct reduced iron”

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248? The moment steel began to change the world was not when it was first discovered thousands of years ago but when Sir Henry Bessemer developed a process

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252? When electricity came … the very first item most families bought was an electric iron

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253? no other substance can match copper for its sheer elemental importance

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255? The generators and transformers of our electrical systems … should be championed as among the most important … inventions in history

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258? copper … the discovery of how to smelt this metal probably happened … 6,000 years or so ago, probably somewhere in the triangle between Armenia, Turkey and Egypt

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260-261? Swansea became the world capital for copper production … despite mining barely a particle of the metal … but it did have plenty of coal … smelting copper … 3 tonnes of coal for every tonne of ore … Today, China is the world’s processer-in-chief

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288? Reducing our carbon footprint will mean increasing our copper footprint … The real question is how much more of this blasting and digging people will tolerate

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290? the world’s biggest mountain range … the Mid-Atlantic Ridge

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293? The vast majority of the world’s cobalt reserves are to be found in one of the world’s most unstable countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where conditions in the mines can be notoriously poor … much of the world’s nickel is produced in Indonesia, where it often involves the destruction of pristine rainforests and where tailings are routinely dumped into rivers and the sea

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301? There is a chance deep-sea mining could be effectively banned before it has ever begun

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302? the Lost City

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312? As is often the case, the pursuit for wealth preceded the pursuit for understanding

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313? where there was salt, there was often oil and gas

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315? where oil forms and where it is eventually found are usually not the same place

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317? energy is pretty much everything

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318? oil and gas are so useful as well as so destructive

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322? [George P.] Mitchell … in 1981 one of his team wrote a paper suggesting … that one might be able to get gas directly from the “source rock” where it was forming, rather than the reservoirs where it eventually ends up … hydraulic fracturing … Fracking … combined … with … horizontal drilling … fracking was much more expensive than traditional oil extraction … Between 2007 and 2021 U.S. oil production more than doubled, and America leapfrogged Saudi and Russia to become comfortably the biggest crude producer in the world

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330? Most American refineries are set up for the kinds of heavy, sour crudes you get from Canada, Mexico and Venezuela … American shale oil … is typically light and high quality … in practice … It must keep sucking in heavy oils from elsewhere to feed its refineries while sending Texas crude off to Europe and Asia to be refined

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339? By 1945 the German air force was effectively grounded … The Second World War was not merely a war against refineries, it was a war of refineries … American refineries … produced high-grade 100-octane fuel, as opposed to the 87-octance variety coming out of places like Wesseling … The higher-octane fuel meant Spitfires and Lancasters could be equipped with superior engines, such as the Rolls-Royce Merlin.? They could fly 15 per cent faster than their German counterparts, had 1,500 miles more range … and a maximum altitude 10,000 feet higher

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348? The vast majority of the world’s crops are sustained by nitrogen fertilisers created from natural gas. ?The vast majority of the world’s animals are fed with food sustained by fertilisers created from natural gas

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349? a kilogram of greenhouse tomatoes generates as much as 3 kilograms of carbon emissions

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351? There are many, many different varieties of plastics – thousands in fact – but few are quite as versatile and useful as polyethylene

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353? Cheap plastic toys, beads, jewellery and other such trinkets often owed their existence less to consumer appetites than to a surplus of supply … The Hula Hoop craze of the sixties and seventies was, it turns out, created from a by-product of the plastic-industrial complex

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354? Today, polyethylene has become comfortably the most widely used plastic in the world

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355? five main families of human-made polymer … polystyrene … vinyl – polyvinyl chloride … nylon … polypropylene … thermo-setting materials like epoxy resin

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359? a symbol of the Anthropocene

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359? microplastics

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360? it is possible to recycle plastics at scale … plastic recycling rates remain … low (only about 25 per cent in Europe and 10 per cent in the U.S., compared with 80 per cent for steel)

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363? Were China to shift all its coal-fired power stations on to gas, then the world would immediately be on track to hits its climate goals

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364? we can turn natural gas into heat or power far more efficiently than any other fuel

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366? The fourth energy transition … natural gas is the most efficient and least pollutive of all the fossil fuels – producing a fifth less carbon than oil and a third less than the very best coal

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367? we must undergo a fifth energy transition … This time the objective is not to increase the energy density of our fuels, as in every previous transition, but to eliminate carbon emissions completely … hydroelectricity, solar power, wind and nuclear … Much, however, will depend on whether politicians can match some of their bold promises with actions

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368? Escaping from oil will set us on the road towards a new age of mineral exploitation

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373-374? lithium … Seth Fletcher … “The universe hasn’t given us anything better.” … Chile … The Salar de Atacama is the single biggest source of lithium anywhere

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376? lithium … up until recently, no one paid all that much attention to this element

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379 ?Decade after decade, scientific paper after paper pointed out that the ultimate battery would be based on a lithium chemistry.? But … no ingredient was more explosive than lithium

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381-383? [Stan] Whittingham … created the world’s first rechargeable lithium battery … John B. Goodenough … played the pivotal role in the battery breakthrough … the optimal recipe for the cathode … in a lithium-ion battery … lithium cobalt oxide … Akira Yoshino perfected the other ingredients … with an anode made from … graphite … He also worked out the best way to fit these two electrodes together … Whittingham, Goodenough and Yoshino.? The trio was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019

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384? Chile, Bolivia and Argentina … the “lithium triangle.”

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385? lithium … in China … Australia … has overtaken Chile as the world’s biggest lithium producer … processed in China

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387? lithium.? The real question is not so much whether enough exists but what it will take – both in terms of money and environmental impact – to remove it

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391? How to balance these two things: on the one hand, the demand for stuff … and on the other hand, the consequences?

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391? this country is one of the world’s most unequal economies, Chile

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392? Chile … the most mineral-rich nation in the world

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393? [Cristina Dorador] “It’s a big paradox.? In the middle of the Atacama Desert – the driest desert in the world – to be evaporating water,”

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396? a shift in the world’s geopolitical map … today … petrostates like Saudi or Russia … a new breed of electrostates: countries like Chile, Argentina, Australia and, of course, China … dictators and despots in the Middle East and Russia

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400? Tesla’s Fremont, California factory … doesn’t even make cars … What really matters in the electric car business … is making batteries … Panasonic

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402? [footnote]? dissecting batteries.? Never do this: they are quite literally high explosives

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406? in an electric car, the battery, not the engine, is the most valuable component … China controls about 80 per cent of the world’s battery production capacity

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406? the Tesla/Panasonic giga-factory in Nevada

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407? The Chinese company … Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL) … sells its batteries to … GM, VW, BMW and … Tesla

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407-408? the most valuable component of a battery is not the engineering or the casing, but the raw materials pasted in slurry form on to those cathodes and anodes … the refining and mixing of metals into ultra-pure cathode active materials – is where the real magic happens

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409? A typical electric car battery contains about 40kg of lithium … 10kg of cobalt, 10kg of manganese and 40kg of nickel … graphite

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414? The legacy of colonialism is the unpleasant underbelly of the Material World

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415? the Belgian Congo … the Democratic Republic of Congo (the DRC).? Here, income per capita is among the world’s lowest, as is life expectancy … Yet no other country in the world has quite the same kind of endowment of critical minerals

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419? “urban miner.” … refining metals … from waste

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420? The concept of the “circular economy” holds that we should try increasingly to treat waste as a kind of resource in and of itself

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421? “unmanufactured” … a Canadian start-up called Li-Cycle

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424? in attempting to build our way to net zero, we are confronting the inescapable limitations of thermodynamics and material constraints

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427? The battery in a Tesla Model S cost around $12,000 in 2022

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427? the learning curve

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428? [Theodore] Wright … every time the production of an item doubles, its cost falls by about 15 per cent … Wright’s law

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429? We have come to expect that gradually, each year, things just get better

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430? without fossil fuels, roughly half of us would not be alive.? Yet now, the carbon emissions from those fossils fuels are causing problems that threaten us all

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430? 2050 … net zero … This is incredibly ambitious … and we are still reliant on coal for more of our energy than oil

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431-432? energy storage … Batteries … are not energy-dense enough … hydrogen … green hydrogen, created from wind power.

However, using electrolysis to create hydrogen is eye-wateringly inefficient

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434? fossil fuels … Building, not burning, is the name of the game in the coming decades

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434? We will, if policymakers have any sense, have built many new nuclear power stations … and will have electrified road transport

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435-436? Consider what it takes to replace a small natural gas turbine, pumping out 100 megawatts of electricity, enough for up to 100,000 homes, with wind power.? You would need around 20 enormous wind turbines ... 30,000 tonnes of iron ... 50,000 tonnes of concrete ... 900 tonnes of plastics and fibreglass … and 540 tonnes of copper (or three times that for an off-shore wind farm).? The gas turbine, on the other hand, would take … 300 tonnes of iron, 2,000 tonnes of concrete … 50 tonnes of copper

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436? let’s assume everything goes to plan and we get to net zero by 2050 … The first generation to benefit … are the children of the children who are being born today

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438? the potential impact of countries around the world choosing autarky – trying to survive without imports – would be severe

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442? Eliminating carbon emissions means having to reimagine the industrial revolution.? It means having to rethink nearly every process in the Material World

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443? We are also capable of living far more sustainable, cleaner lives, diminishing our destruction and contamination and living in closer harmony with the planet