Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

by Ed Conway

For a standard gold bar (400 troy ounces) they would have to dig about 5,000 tonnes of earth. That’s nearly the same weight as ten fully laden Airbus A380 super-jumbos, the world’s largest passenger planes – for one bar of gold.

Later I would learn that while it might once have taken about 0.3 tonnes of ore, extracted via more traditional mining methods, to obtain enough gold for a typical wedding ring, these days it might take between 4 and 20 tonnes of rock. Standing there with the detonator in front of me, I felt like someone who has just enjoyed a slap-up sausage and egg breakfast before being shown around the abattoir.

It is all very well knowing the price of something, but price is not the same thing as importance.

The Material World is where you will find the most important companies you’ve never heard of, companies like CATL, Wacker, Codelco, Shagang, TSMC and ASML.

It’s a crucial irony that pursuing our various environmental goals will, in the short and medium term, require considerably more materials to build the electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels needed to replace fossil fuels. The upshot is that in the coming decades we are likely to extract more metals from the earth’s surface than ever before.

In 2019, the latest year of data at the time of writing, 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.

For it turns out oil and other fossil fuels have only ever represented a fraction of the total mass of resources we’re extracting from the earth. For every tonne of fossil fuels, we exploit 6 tonnes of other materials – mostly sand and stone, but also metals, salts and chemicals. Even as we citizens of the ethereal world pare back our consumption of fossil fuels we have redoubled our consumption of everything else. But, somehow, we have deluded ourselves into believing precisely the opposite.

Next time you see a concrete block in Britain’s capital and are tempted to dismiss it as a modernist monstrosity, ponder for a moment that it may well have been made of the sands from this mysterious drowned world, out in the middle of the North Sea.

For all the attention lavished on other sources of greenhouse gases such as aviation or deforestation, the production of cement generates more CO2 than those two sectors combined. Cement production accounts for a staggering 7–8 per cent of all carbon emissions.

concrete use alone accounts for around a tenth of the world’s industrial water use. That is perfectly supportable where there is a reliable supply of water, but now consider that much of the world’s fresh concrete is currently being poured in countries that face droughts and water insecurity.

For the very same atom that comprises the backbone of concrete is the atom upon which we etched and formed the computer age.

‘Here’s something scary,’ says one veteran of the sector. ‘If you flew over the two mines in Spruce Pine with a crop duster loaded with a very particular powder, you could end the world’s production of semiconductors and solar panels within six months.’ No high-purity quartz means no Czochralski crucibles, which means no monocrystalline silicon wafers, which means, well, the end of computer chip manufacture as we know it. We would adapt; find a new process or an alternative substance. But it would be a grisly few years.

China spends more money on importing computer chips these days than it does importing oil.

Even if China invaded Taiwan and even if TSMC’s fabs survived the assault (some have suggested that the company incorporates explosives into the foundations, to be detonated upon invasion much as armies destroy bridges before retreating), that would not resolve its issue.

There have been many great transitions in history, some of which we will cover in the following chapters, but this moment, in which our early ancestors corralled their friends and family together to work to produce something not for their own consumption but to trade or sell to others, stands as an important watershed. That salt was the product in question might sound peculiar to the modern reader, who probably takes this staple product for granted, cheap and ubiquitous as it is. But it was not always so; until relatively recently making salt was very hard work indeed.

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.

For much of the ancient world, salt was a signifier of wealth. In Africa it was traded with merchants in exchange for gold. It was used as a form of currency, to pay for goods and sometimes for slaves. This is not just ancient history, by the way. During the Second World War, as Nigeria faced shortages and the threat of famine, salt was used as a currency in many of the villages in the north, with British salt fetching the highest exchange rate.

Understand the history of salt and you don’t merely comprehend the origins of trade and commerce; you understand the origins of power and tyranny. For as long as there have been rulers, they have sought to rule with salt, controlling it, regulating it and taxing it to cement their power, and in no country has this been more evident than in China.

One and a half thousand years before Machiavelli wrote Il Principe, China had the Guanzi – arguably the first great work on realpolitik – and the Guanzi was concerned, in part, with salt.

‘The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest number of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing.’

In the Cheshire town of Northwich, not far from where the brine comes out of the ground, you will find another part of this salt diaspora, an old ICI site run these days by Tata Chemicals, which also owns British Salt. That the Cheshire salt which once provided Gandhi with the cause for his iconic satyagraha is now being produced by an Indian company is one of those ironies little appreciated outside the Material World.

If much of what makes us human is our determination to turn one substance into another, then salt is among our most important tools.

There is a phrase you sometimes hear: if it’s not grown, it’s mined. Salt, however, is a substance we mine to help us grow

there is a reason we still walk old salt routes. There is a reason why so many of our chemical and pharmaceutical plants still sit atop slabs of halite. There is a reason ancient documents such as the Chinese Discourse on Salt and Iron ring true. For much of history, those who controlled these substances controlled the world.

Not everything in the world is made of steel, but nearly everything in the world is made with machines made of steel.

If what defines humans is our ability to collaborate and wield tools then iron and steel are part of what makes us human. And if sand is the fabric for much of the world and salt is the magic ingredient that helps us transform our world, then iron is what enables us to do things, whether that is going places, building things, making products or, for that matter, killing each other. Iron and steel are the common thread.

The world’s twin goals of decarbonisation and development are heading for a collision. As countries become richer and more prosperous, are they really to be denied the concrete or steel the West poured and forged as it developed?

This is a small-scale example of what economists sometimes call the ‘Jevons paradox’, after the economist William Stanley Jevons, who posited back in the nineteenth century that 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.

What makes these substances so useful is not merely their physical properties but the fact that we are able to procure them so easily and at relatively low cost.

As Robert Friedland, a mercurial mining billionaire puts it, ‘Based on world ecological and environmental problems, every single solution drives you to copper.’

Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto (1848), wrote that ‘The productivity of the soil can be increased ad infinitum by the application of capital, labour and science.’

Such views were not fringe. There were ‘perhaps ten years left’ to save the planet, said U Thant, the secretary-general of the United Nations, in 1969, calling for a global partnership to avert catastrophe. In 1970 Nobel Prize-winning biologist George Wald said that ‘civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind’.

What is striking here at Grasberg and at Chuqui is not merely the scale or the extent to which the environment has been scarred by copper exploitation but also something else: how few people it takes to do so much work. During the twentieth century the number of people working in copper mining and production in the United States fell by two-thirds, but the amount of copper produced more than quadrupled.

This brings us back to a recurrent theme of the Material World. As the amount of stuff we remove from the ground and turn into extraordinary products continues to increase, the proportion of people needed to make this happen decreases.

Reports of imminent catastrophe tend to get far more attention than hard statistics about the real world, so here’s a datapoint to keep in mind. Between 2010 and 2020 we mined 207 million tonnes of copper around the world, but far from falling, the total global reserves of copper grew by 240 million tonnes. Ponder that for a moment. Humankind is managing to increase our accessible supplies of this vital material at a rate that comfortably outpaces our actual exploitation of it.