P. 15 While material consumption is certainly falling in post-industrial nations like the Us and UK, on the other side of the world, in the countries whence Americans and Britons import most of their goods, it is rising at breakneck speed. … 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. .. you could have said the precisely the same thing about every year since 2012… out appetite for raw materials continues to grow, up by 2.8% in 2019, with not a single category of mineral extraction, from sand and metals to oil and coal, falling.”
p. 67 “geologists … estimated that the amount of sand, soil and rock we humans mine and quarry and dredge each year is some 24 times greater than the amount of sediment moved each year by Earth’s natural erosion processes.. Humans, in other words, are a considerably bigger geological force than nature itself, and have been, according to the data, ever since 1955… by 2020 the total weight of human-made products … was greater than the total weight of every natural living thing on the planet…. The sum total amount of material that we have dug out of the ground in the past century … 6.7 teratonnes (or to be even more precise, 6,742,000,000,000 tonnes). .. for every human-made object on this planet, every building, plane, train, car and phone, try to picture a pile of earth, sand and dirt six times its weight. And the pile of moved material is getting bigger with every year that passes.”
p. 70 “Sand is serious business. According to the UN Environment Programme, if we are to avert a ‘sand crisis’ we should be treating it not as a commonplace resource but as a strategic mineral, something to be uttered in the same breath as metals like copper or even battery materials like lithium.” (Fibre optic cables eg)
p. 75 The recipe for the cement we mostly use today was patented in 1824 by a man called Joseph Aspdin. He called it Portland cement, because its colour resembled the Portland Stone quarried in Dorset. In truth, however, there were all sorts of vying recipes around the same time, and no one is quite sure whether ASpidin, a slightly shady character, really won the race or actually purloined his blueprint from somebody else.”
p. 82 Cement production accounts for a staggering 7-8% of all carbon emissions. At the time of writing, those emissions were split roughly 60:40 between the chemical reaction occurring in chalk or limestone as it burns off its carbon in the process of becoming cement, and the energy needed to heat the kiln. The latter is relatively easy to resolve .. but the chemical reaction is a far harder nut to crack.”
p. 108 better known as the main production hub for a company whose name is emblazoned in red on the buildings, TSMC. This is Fab 18 – the most advanced factory in the world .. founded in 1987 …a business whose sole purpose is to manufacture the processors dreamed up by Apple or Tesla or ‘fabless’ chip companies like Nvidia and Qualcomm… pushing the boundaries of physics… over a 3-year period from 2021, TSMC was budgeting to invest $135 billion”
p. 116 China spends more money on importing computer chips these days than it does importing oil … import costs as of 2017 were greater than Saudi Arabia’s total revenue from oil exports, or for that matter the global trade in aircraft.”
p. 128 Steve Sherlock, 6,000 years ago in Britain, Street House “the late Stone Age … the saltern – salt factory – here was up and running, churning out salt and cheese and possibly other products too, a thousand years before Stonehenge’s standing stones were even erected. .. the people who worked here – who are thought to have come across from mainland Europe, possibly from France – had brought with them knowledge about how to turn natural resources into a product before selling or trading it onwards.”
p. 133 “As early as AD 523 when the Ostrogoths ruled what was once the Western Roman Empire, their administrator Cassiodorus wrote to the Venetians that: “All your energies are spent on your salt-fields; in them indeed lies your prosperity and your power to purchase those things which you have not. For though there may be men who have little need of gold, yet none live who desire not salt”
p. 174 Today it is estimated that around half the nitrogen in our bodies was fixed from the air via the Haber-Bosch process…. But in these earliest years, the main use these nitrates were put to was creating explosives for the German army.”
p. 203 “there is about 32 billion tonnes of steel out there in the world … you could build seven high-speed rail tracks between the earth and the sub. Or, were you to divide it between every person on the planet, you would end up with about 4 tonnes per person. Given you already know there are around 15 tonnes per person in the developed world, that underlines another important point: the stocks of iron around the world are very unequally distributed. .. the average person in China today has roughly 7 tonnes of steel. The average person living in sub-Saharan Africa has less than a tonne of steel per capita.”
p. 216 “The ore is rock rich in iron oxide, essentially granulated rust, and turning that into a metal means ripping the oxygen atoms away from the iron atoms. And that, ultimately, is what this enormous furnace is here for: to provide an environment where the oxygen can leave the iron and bond with the carbon from the coal.”
p. 217 “Iron is a fossil fuel product. Each year we empty staggering quantities of coal – more than a billion tonnes … into the thousand or so blast furnaces operating around the world. The iron that comes out the other end may not have much carbon embedded in it, but its production entails the creation of enormous quantities of CO2 – around 7-8 percent of the global total.”
p. 221 “In 1800, 95% of Britain’s energy came from coal; at the very same point, almost all of France’s energy – over 90% – still came from burning wood.”
p. 225 “Around 70% of the world’s niobium = a rare earth element that helps harden steel for use in jet engines, critical pipelines, superconducting magnets, and the skeletons of bridges and skyscrapers – comes from a single mine in Brazil. During the Second World War, the Germans and British vies for the affections of neutral Turkey, in part because it produced nearly all of the chromium the Nazis used in their weapons and machinery.”
p. 230 “low-background steel … completely uncontaminated with radionucleotides … essential for the production of sensitive equipment like Geiger counters and some medical devices… the only way … is to find a source of the metal that dates back before those first nuclear tests in 1945. Old sunken battleships are a particularly popular source. .. there is a roaring trade in metal piracy from old warships, especially in the South China Sea.”
p. 287 “The flipside of getting ever more effective at mining ever poorer copper ores is that we displace ever more amounts of the planet in our bid to do so. Between 2004 and 2016 Chilean miners increased annual cooper production by 2.6%. Yet the amount of ore they had to dig out of the ground to produce this marginal increase in refined copper rose by 75% ,,, the numbers … show up in no environmental accounts of material flow analysis, which count only the refined metal. When it comes to even the United Nations’ measure of how much humans are affecting the planet, this waste rock doesn’t count.”
p. 340 “Engine knock was one of the great early challenges faced by the motor industry. In an effort to outdo its rivals at Ford, GM began in the 1920s to look for a way to quiet the engines in its Cadillacs. One of its engineers, a man called Thomas Midgeley, discovered that a drop of tetraethyl lead in gasoline would miraculously increase octane levels and stop all the pinging. And so began one of the most shameful stories of pollution in modern history … everyone knew the risks of putting lead in petrol right from the start. .. rather than seek a way to remove lead, GM simply removed the word from the chemical’s brand name, they called it ‘Ethyl”. There were warning signs from the start, with a spate of illnesses at a refinery in New Jersey shortly after it entered the market. Men were quite literally going mad, hallucinating and then working themselves up into a frenzy. Six men died who all worked in the same place, the section of the refinery where they synthesised tetraethyl lead … some states banned the use of leaded gasoline … but then, in an extraordinary stunt, the inventor, Thomas Midgley, held a press conference where he wasted his hands in a solution of tetraethyl lead and spent a minute inhaling its fumes … unbeknownst to the journalists witnessing it, Midgley had just spent a period in Florida recuperating from lead poisoning itself. GM and its lawyers suggested the men who died must have fallen victim to their own negligence .. This was the Roaring Twenties where anything went, and state by state the bans were revoked and the age of leaded petrol began.”
p. 352 polyethylene … “by the late 1930s, ICI came up with a system for mass prodicing the plastic… When war broke out shortly afterwards, this wonder substance was rapidly co-opted for the national effort. After Japan took control of Malaysia and all its rubber plantations, suddenly polyethylene was of critical importance . Production went into overdrive … the Royal Air Force could use it to cut the weight of its radar systems just enough to fit them inside its planes … pretty much every ton of polyethylene produced up to 1945 went into those radar cables, but once the war ended ICI was left with a sudden glut of the plastic, so it went looking for buyers. This would soon become a recurrent theme. Cheap plastic toys, beads, jewellery and other such trinkets often owed their existence less to consumer appetites than to a surplus of supply”.
p. 385 “Australia … has overtaken Chile as the world’s biggest lithium producer, though nearly all of their spodumene is actually shipped off to be processed in China …. It means Australia need not take responsibility for all the emissions produced when they are refined, which is rather a lot.”
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