The affluent world has used hundreds of billions of tons of it to create its high quality of life, but right now we do not have any affordable non-carbon alternatives that could be rapidly deployed on mass scales in order to energize the production of enormous quantities of what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization—ammonia, steel, cement, and plastics—which will be needed in Africa and Asia in the decades to come. The contrasts between the expressed concerns about global warming, the continued release of record volumes of carbon, and our capabilities to change that in the near
...more
