September 18, 2025 • 44 mins
Ed Conway is an economics journalist and author of the book “Material World: The Six Raw Materials that Shape Modern Civilization.”
On today’s show, Ed reveals how three of those often-overlooked materials—iron, copper, and sand—shaped human advancement from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution to the digital age. And he talks about what they mean for our future.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. It's easy to think that technology is just about ideas, words, numbers, math, algorithms,
But of course technology is and always has been, about stuff,
and in particular, it's about combining ideas with that stuff.
(00:39):
It's about figuring out how to use copper to send
electricity around the world, how to turn sand into glass
and cement and chips. It's about coming up with clever
ways to make cheap steel so that we can build
basically anything we want. And looking at technology and the
history of technology through the lens of those essential materials
(00:59):
of that stuff turns out to be a really interesting
and surprisingly useful way of thinking about the world. I'm
Jacob Goldstein, and this is what's your problem. My guest
today is Ed Conway. He's an economics journalist and he
(01:20):
wrote a book called Material World, The Six raw Materials
that shape Modern Civilization. I talked to Ed about three
of the six materials. We talked about iron, because the
story of iron really is the story of the industrial revolution,
and for that matter, the story of the wealth and
poverty of nations around the world today. We also talked
(01:42):
about copper, which is of course the story of electricity
and the energy transition we're going through now. But copper
is also a story about humanity's ability to be very
clever in getting the thing that we need, even when
it seems like we're going to run out of that thing.
So those two materials, copper and iron, they are the
second part of the show. In the first part of
(02:04):
the show, Ed and I talked about sand, sand, which
after reading Ed's book, I have come to think is
a highly underrated material. Sand, of course, is essential for
making chips and making cement, both of which we have
covered on other episodes of this show. So Ed and
I focused on another material made out of sand, glass,
(02:25):
And as Ed explains, glass really was central to the
emergence of the modern world starting around the sixteenth century
the Venetians.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
That was really the first moment where they were able
to create a truly clear, perfect type of glass, of
the type that we could recognize these days. Roman glass
was often beautiful, but it was a bit cloudy. The
Venetians really mastered it, and part of the trick to
that was obviously expertise and bringing in people who knew
(02:55):
how to do it. And they were based on this island,
the island of Murano, which is.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Just an off Venis.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
They were forbidden to leave so that there was this
in the same way that people making silicon chips in
Taiwan these days are not allowed to go to China.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
It was a same thing with morano.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
And it's like like a trade secret basically, like the
Venetians are traders. This is like a competitive advantage essentially
a technological advantage they have and they're logging it down exactly.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
It's really analogous to what, you know, what we have
these days with silicon check, I mean silicon technology as well.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
That's also sad.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
They cracked it, and partly they cracked it because they
found a really good source of sand. Actually it's little
quartz chips that they found in the rivers just kind
of on the Swiss Italian border, and because they cracked it.
You know, if you look back, like one of my
favorite kind of stories, it's kind of theory, but to
me it's a really compelling theory, is that the Renaissance,
(03:51):
you know, there's great flowering of artistic kind of ability and.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
Where painters discovered how to use perspective.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
You know, there's this moment where it goes from being
really two D kind of Giotto, medieval style paintings of
Christ and all of these different kind of icons to
being something that's three D and something's more recognizable as
a painting of the Renaissance. The prevailing theory is basically
what happened there, There was just this moment dawning realization,
and people worked out how to do perspective. And it's
(04:19):
this enlightenment to me, a much more compelling explanation.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
It's one that David Hockney and a few other theorists
have posited.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
David Harckney the artist, David Hockney.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
The artist has wrote a whole book on this a
few years ago and actually did this great documentary which
you can find on YouTube about this, basically saying, no,
what happened was they worked out how to use lenses.
They worked out how to make glass lenses that enabled
them to make camera obscurers and other different types of
contractions that enabled them to basically trace out the outline
(04:50):
of what was happening in a studio or in a
picture or whatever. And there are artifacts of this because
if you look at certain pictures, particularly from those early
kind of medieval, well early Renaissance paintings, and also some
from the Dutch Golden Era. You see, for instance, that
parts of the painting go out of focus and something
going focus. The human eye doesn't really go out of
(05:11):
focus in that way, but through a lens things do
go out of focus. And so Hockney points out, and
like I say, I think it's a really compelling case
that the places that where you had this flowering of
you know, enlightenments and beautiful paintings that use perspective also
happened to be close to the great places where glass
(05:31):
was being manufactured, so Venice, in the Netherlands, in England
as well to some extent, although our painting wasn't quite
so great, wherever there was great glass making there also
happened to be great enlightenment leaks forward.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
The Renaissance is sort of following, and so you need
the glass to be able to make the lens, and
in Hockney's argument, you need the lens to project the
world onto a two dimensional surface. Except from that projection
then you can learn perspective.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Exactly, Then you learn perspective, and obviously in the same
way that you have enabling technologies throughout history. You know,
right now we're thinking of AI.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
So was Leonardo t Yeah, yeah, he was.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
He was, and so were you know, so were many
of these artists. And I don't think there's anything kind
of to be ashamed of here.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
No, especially if you discover tracing. If you're like, wait
a minute, I can trace.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah, and then suddenly it's a lot of as every
kid knows, it's a lot easier suddenly, And that's what
they were doing. But they were doing it with great
panashion style, and we've kind of, I think, forgotten that.
But there's there's a very material explanation.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
In a similar thing. You also talk about the relationship
of improvements in glass technology to the scientific revolution, which was,
you know, around this same time.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Well, I mean if you look and again, I find
this kind of mind blowing.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
And that one seems clearer. Again, no pun intended that one.
That argument seems less tenuous.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Yeah, well, I don't know, I don't know, I don't
know if it's okay, respectful.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
How about this? That argument seems more compelling. That's a
nicer way of saying less tenuous.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
It's even more compelling, isn't it. Yeah, it's even more compelling.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
It's it's if you look at basically I think the
vast majority of scientific discoveries that were made in that
period of the great you know, the Enlightenment, the kind
of eighteenth nineteenth century, seventeenth some excent.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Even earlier, right, like Galileo, right, Like, you don't even
have to leave galileanly.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
So telescope, I mean, how do we pair into space?
And this was all thanks to our ability to harness sand,
turn it into glass, and then turn it into you know,
kind of sand that down into beautiful lenses that enabled
us to see further or indeed see kind of deepest,
so microscopically, that was glass.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
You don't discover the cell until you have a microscope,
and you don't have a microscope until you have really
good glass. Right. And I feel like tools, like this
is the story of tools, right, and tools are underrated
in scientific.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
Discovery, right, like totally.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Once you have a telescope, then somebody is going to
see the moons of Jupiter. Once you have a microscope,
somebody is going to see a cell. The hard part
is getting the telescope and the microscope.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Yeah, and yet the thing we celebrate and understandably is
we celebrate the Galileos and the van Luveruk, who's one
of those first great people looking down into microscopes. But yeah,
they needed the contractions and also they needed to rely
on people to make really good glass for them, because
you could you needed really clear glass to be able
to peer down into this. And the funny thing I've discovered,
(08:26):
you know, looking back through that history of the Enlightenment,
what you kind of notice if you look through lots
of the stories and the accounts, is that so many
of the people who were scientists and renowned actually as
scientists for something else.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
Michael Faraday is a really good example, you know.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Electoral magnets, electromagnets, basically the electricity.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
He's the electricity guy. He was also totally obsessed with glass,
so he used to make his own glass. Actually one
of the earliest recipes for something called boris silicate glass,
which is like these days what we use for test
tubes and the vials that you get your kind of
vaccines and medicines in.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
There's really hard type of glass.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
So is that related to pyrex to the glass you
can put in.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
The oven is Boris silicate glass. It's just you know,
the trademark. But Faraday, he I don't know if invented
to the right word. But he was a tinkerer with glass,
and he made an early form of boris silica glass
because everyone was doing it. And if you look back,
there's this great book Making of the Atomic Bomb by
Richard Rhodes. I was reading it after having written this book,
(09:24):
and I was struck by how many times within the
discovery of how to split the atom, people were waylaid
by getting hold of the right glass. Because you need
a glass within which to do your experiments, because glass
is very inert, obviously, and it's the inertness of glass
that makes it really important, you know, for doing chemical experiments,
for making vacuums, all of these things. So if you
(09:46):
look at pretty much I think the vast majority of
different scientific discoveries during the Enlightenment, and some authors did
a survey of here are the great discoveries, how many
of them depended one way or another on glass, whether
it's a test ubes, vacuum chambers, or indeed lenses.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
It's the majority of them.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
And so our scientific world is built on glass as well.
So we think this stuff is kind of historic. And
that goes by the way for even right now, because
there are when we're making silicon chips, and maybe we'll
come onto this. When you're making a lot of kind
of advanced equipments, you still need optics. And for great optics,
you still need excellent glass.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Well, fiber optics you talk about in the book, right right,
talk about fiber optics. That seems like the obvious contemporary yeah,
glass case.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
You know.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Fiber optics I think is a really good example of
the underlining of our forgetting of the materiality of our world.
Because when people think about the Internet, I think, because
we have Wi Fi, just.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
That last twenty feet is just the last twenty feet
that's going through the air.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
But that's the twenty feet that we're familiar with, you know,
That's what we're aware of.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
So what's the rest. What are the other I'm talking
to you, three thousand miles away, four thousand miles away,
what's going.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Through The majority of all of the bits that they're
enabling us to talk are going on fiber optics. They're
going on fiber optics. In our case, underneath the Atlantic Ocean,
there's only a teensy tiny bit where things are traveling
through the air. The World Wide Web is a physical
structure with loads of fiber optics, loads of service centers,
and each of those fiber optic cables is a tiny
(11:16):
little strand of glass. It's actually two types of glass,
kind of one inside the other. Which again, that's our world.
Our world depends on glass. We can't have the Internet
without glass. And again we forget that, we're kind of
encouraged to forget it.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Not anymore. I want to make one more stop on
glass before we move on, because it was truly surprising
to me, and I'm happy that I know it tell
me about the shortage of lenses in the UK in
World War One.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
I think this is actually a great story because it
tells you quite a lot about what we're going through
right now with period of you know, de industrialization in
the US, Europe everywhere else and wondering like how on
earth do we turn this around. So for a long time,
England was kind of at the cutting edge of glass
technol A lot of the great lenses were made here.
(12:11):
You've got Michael Faraday obsessing over glass and Crown glass.
A lot of achievements that then led to really good
optics happened in England. And then they decided the governments
as they often do needed to raise money for the
wars against France, and they decided to tax glass making
and they also tax windows.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
So in England you have lots of older.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Houses, particularly ones that are kind of Georgian and Queen
Anne's so kind of going back like two three hundred
years where if you look at them, suddenly some of
the windows have been bricked up. And the reason they
bricks up is because the government decided to impose a
tax on however many windows you had, you would have
to pay more tax.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
It's a sort of seeing like a state thing. Right,
It's like what can somebody walk down the street and
count from the street, right, Yeah the legibility, Yeah, legibility
is good, right yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Counting windows, but also actually chimneys was another thing.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
So the government wanted to tax glass, they wanted to
raise lots of money, and they did, and they raised
leads of money and that was great for them. But
partly as a result of that, a lot of the
innervation in glass shifted elsewhere.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
And actually Germany, which was.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Beginning to engage in what you today call industrial strategies,
so the government governmental organizations starting to introduce kind of subsidies.
They really focused on glass because it was you know,
this was an opportunity. This is eighteen hundreds and you've
got actually Gerte, the kind of famous statesman poet, was
(13:32):
really heavily involved in this, to the extent that in
what is now kind of towards the.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
East of Germany it became East Germany.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
You had in a town called Jenna, there was a
university that a lot of money went into which encouraged
investigation and also kind of manufacture of glass. And out
of that that hub of manufacturing came some names that
we will probably.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Recognize today, like Seis. A guy called Carl Seiss.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Became a really big kind of manufacturer of glass, indeed
of lenses. And the long story short is that Germany
became really dominant in the manufacture of really good, quite
cheap optical glass, and the English industry basically withered away.
France had slightly withered away as well, and in Germany's
Seiss binoculars and telescopes and sniperscopes became totally dominant, to
(14:23):
the extent that come nineteen fourteen, England is importing about
sixty percent of all of its binoculars from Germany's Zeiss binoculars.
So when war breaks out, then all of a sudden,
it is a terrible crisis. They call it the glass famine.
You've got people, you know, going to the trenches in
France and Belgium equipped with binoculars and opera glasses.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
That they've had to borrow off people.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
There was an appeal that was launched for people to
donate their used binoculars to troops because England didn't have
enough of them, and you know, people were getting killed
because the Germans had the better snipers. This was kind
of the First War. Really, the First World War was
the first war where you were able to fire your
weapons far further.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Than you could see.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
So your ability to see and your ability to see
far was the matter of difference between life and death.
And the Germans had by far and away the upper
hand on that. And it culminated in nineteen fifteen in
this extraordinary deal where Britain actually sent spies to meet
with their German counterparts in Switzerland to do a deal
to buy binoculars off the Germans so that they could
(15:32):
kill them better. The most extraordinary thing is the Germans
said yes.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Like why would the Germans agree to it?
Speaker 2 (15:39):
They said yes, And the reason they agreed to it,
and it comes back to materials again, is that they
were short of rubber. So Britain controlled most of the
global rubber supply, and you need a rubber obviously for
fan belts in your engines, for tires, for everything else.
And so the Germans were short of rubber, we were
short of glass. And rather than saying, okay, well this
is a bit of a pretty pass here, let's just
(16:00):
stop the war, they said, okay, we'll do the deal,
and then we can carry on killing each other a
little bit more effectively.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Let's make a deal, swer you could keep killing each other. Yeah,
And it happened, in fact, and.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
It's a great story and it did actually happen. But
what's even more interesting is that in the following years,
and this I think a lesson for where we are now.
In the following years, England did manage to increase its
glass manufacturing massively and really fast. And it just goes
to show so by the end of the war they
were producing more more binoculars than they needed. They were
sending some of them to America, and it just goes
(16:31):
to show you can do it. Like if you need
to try and create an industry. It is possible to
do it, but often you need a wartime situation to
encourage you to do it. The catch is you do
need a bit of a base to start from.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Well, And it's complicated, right, I mean, we're going to
talk about this later, but we can talk about it now.
Like there is a set of trade offs, right, Like
at certain margins, you know, comparative advantage, it makes sense
to do what you're good at and let other countries
do what they're good at, and you get more material
prosperity that way, right. But the asterisk is if Germany
is making all the lenses and you go to war
(17:03):
with Germany, that's going to be bad, right, And so
that is a hard We shouldn't try and make everything
like that seems clear, I mean, I guess there is
a big question which is like can you abstract lessons?
What should we try and make and what should we
not try and make for me?
Speaker 2 (17:22):
And I'm kind of thinking about this a lot, so
I'm kind of working on what might be in another
book on this kind of topic. Like comparative advantage, it's
not set in stone, you know, it is something you
can change and something you can influence sure.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Presumably you don't believe in autarchy. You don't think that
just because the country is a country, it should make everything.
Presumably you don't believe in like pure comparative advantage. Right.
The hard questions are at the margins, like how many
chips should we try and make in the United States?
Like that's a weird hard question.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Completely, and what are the trade offs there? And what
are you foregoing in order to do that? And I
think again, we are living through an exercise in that
right now.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Right, the pendulum is swinging back. Right, the pendulum is
swinging back toward domestic production.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
Now.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Yeah, And you know, I think that's some more new
an interesting conversation than it's often made out to be.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
I think that's the thing.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
I think when you when you start looking at some
of the history of technologies, you kind of realize this
stuff it didn't just come down from the sky. You know.
Most of the reason that things happen in particular countries
is because of various interventions. And some of those interventions
worked and some of those didn't.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
Still to come on the show, Iron and Copper, we'll
be back in a minute. Let's do Iron.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
So you're navigating this in a I have a plan.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
And it's going basically to plan. Yeah, tell me about
how iron production in the UK helped lead to the
Industrial Revolution. Okay, you need to break you get some water.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
No, I'm just wondering where you were taking me.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
I feel like that was a very straightforward turn right revolution.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Yeah, No, I mean so the industrial revolution really, you know,
it's kind of a two part thing. First of all,
came the moment where in England there's it's kind of
a semi environmental story. We were taking that iron out
of the ground, or taking the iron ground, smelting it
down into iron and burning a lot of charcoal along
(19:30):
the way to make that happen, and we cut down
a lot of trees to make it happen. This is
around the kind of fifteen sixteenth century, one of the
first kind of early ecological panics. Everyone started to panic
that we were running out of trees and that if
we carried on making as much iron as we wanted to,
not just iron, because it was other things like making
beer and glass and salt and things like that. For
(19:52):
all of these things, you kind of need to burn
a lot of charcoal and create your kind of industrial process.
Speaker 3 (19:59):
But people panics.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Everyone thought, we're going to run out of trees, and
as a result, the Royal Navy was going to have
to be shut down and you wouldn't have enough trees
for the masts that you need on the great ships
of the line. And what the first great kind of
innovation on this was this guy, Abraham Derby, who worked
out in the kind of the turn of the kind
of seventeenth eighteenth century, who worked out how to make
(20:21):
coal the fuel sauce rather than charcoal, and that meant
you didn't have to burn down trees. You could use
coal that you dug out of the ground. And it
was actually quite hard thing to do, but he managed
to do it, and that was the moment that the
fossil fuel world that we know it began. That's why
you can kind of like date the climate change story
in a way from that moment in the midlands of
(20:44):
England where he was like, okay, let's use coal. And essentially,
as a result of that, you're no longer bound by
the kind of organic constraints of how many trees you
can actually plant and cut down.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
In particular, because England happened to have abundant, relatively accessible coal, right,
an important piece of it.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Yeah, so two things in a way.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
It's this kind of this perfect coincidence, a coincidence having
quite a lot of coal in the ground. It's quite
good coal like anthracites, so it's kind of rich coal
that's good. But as well as that, we didn't have
enough trees. So France, which had far more forests than England's,
actually never really got onto this because they had enough
forest that they could turn those trees into charcoal and
(21:25):
then use them to carry on making steel or iron
the way they wanted to, whereas in England we just
didn't have enough trees because we just didn't have as
much land mass, and so that pushed us towards coal.
And by being pushed towards coal, then we started to
discover other things along the way.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Yes, you make the point that it was work in
the coal mines that led to the invention of the
steam engine, which is this sort of signature invention of
the industrial revolution in some ways, you know, the modern age.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Yes, steam engines were initially there not to move trains
or anything else. They were there just to pump water
out of coal mines basically, and from that then other
innovations happened. But I mean the second thing with iron
is so you can make your iron, but still really
hard to turn it into steel. And like I say,
(22:17):
steel is just so much better than different types of iron,
whether it's kind of cast iron or raught iron, it
is just so much stronger, it is much more resilient.
You can build big buildings out of it. And so
the real moment that everything changed and provided us with
the materials we need to make skyscrapers, for instance, was
the Bessemer process, and that was kind of later on.
(22:39):
That was in the kind of mid eighteen hundreds where
Henry Bessemer and there was another guy who was kind
of working on this as well, I think in the
States at the same time, worked out how to use
oxygen basically kind of to puff a lot of oxygen
into the to the mix of this molten iron, which
again is just getting rid of more of the carbon
(23:01):
and getting it down to just the right amount of carbon.
What was so revolutionary about Bessemer is up until then
it was just really hard to make and so just
you couldn't really make it in large quantities. After Bessemus,
suddenly you're able to make steel in massive quantities, and
so something that was incredibly expensive became cheap.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
It goes from being artisanal to being.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
In dust exactly. And that's like with all of these technologies.
That's the moment the world changes. It's the same, you
know with salt, it's the same with with glass. The
moment that you can make something, make a process that
enables you to turn it out at scale of there's
a great economic paper on this, can't remember the author,
but I talked about it in the book about the
price of nails and how nails used to be one
of the most expensive things. We used to spend more
(23:44):
as an economy on nails than we do today on computers.
And because nails are now so cheap, because you can
turn out metal and steel in such great quantities and
they're better as well, that the world has changed. If
the Titanic had steel nails of the kind that we
have today on it rather than the rivets they were
using back then, just the quality of the metal that
(24:06):
it probably never would have been sunk by the iceberg,
history would have been different.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
A comfort to a comfort to cruisers everywhere exactly. So
you also read about how today making steel is this
incredibly large share of global carbon emissions. Just talk about that.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
For a minute.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Yeah, so it's the blast furnace stage. I had this
kind of striking moment where I stood in front of
a blast furnace in the UK and that one of
the people working there looked at me and said, you know,
actually the main product of this blast furnace is not iron,
it's carbon by weight.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
By weight, that.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
Figures the carbon is carbon dioxide gas. Just to be clear, right.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Exactly, But if you weigh it, which you could, you know,
which I think you can do in theory but maybe
in practice. But if you weigh it, there is more
carbon dioxide gas, more carbon being produced in tons than
there is the equivalent amount of iron. And that's because
in order to you know, when you chuck this stuff in,
you're chucking iron ore inside that furnace, an extraordinary chemic
(25:09):
or reaction is happening where the carbon, which is an
amazing molecule, is ripping the oxygen off of the iron ore.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
It's sort of derusting it.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, because if you see iron ore, it's
kind of it looks like rust. And you know, there
aren't that many blast furnaces left in the world. There's
only I don't know, there's like four left. In the US,
We've only got one, or there's a pair of them
left going, and they were very nearly shut down recently.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
In the UK.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
There's not many of these places left in the world.
But each of these sites is invariably the single biggest
producer of carbon in what whatever country it is the
single biggest one. So I was there in this place
in Wales is the single biggest producer of carbon dioxide
in our country. And now that's been shut down, and
so there's the other one over on the other side
(25:55):
of the country.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
It'll be the same in America.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
And the only way of making still in large quantities
at a relatively cheap price that makes this stuff worthwhile
is in a blast furnace, and that creates crazy amounts
of carbon dioxide. And this is the massive, big black
hole at the heart of many of the kind of
models you see about how this is how we get
to that zero. No one is quite accounted for the
(26:18):
fact there's a lot of people who just want to
see their living standards increase, and in order to do so,
they want to burn some iron ore and turn it
into steel.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
So it's a quandary.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Did you look at people working on green steel do
you have a view on Yeah, yeah, probability of that
working at scale in an economic way.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
The main truly green steel kind of method people talk
about is hydrogen dri so direct reduced iron. Using hydrogen
as your kind of adjutant, you kind of add it
to the to the mix. It's so expensive, it's so
so expensive to make iron that way. So for some
of us, you know, it's it's Sweden is big in it.
They're trying to make volvos using this stuff. You know,
(26:59):
for many of us who want to have green steel
and are able to afford a bit more, that's that's fine.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
But that's not the one we care about, right. We
care about green steel that is pray competitive with whatever
you call it, round steel.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
I fear that's a long time coming, maybe never. And
there's the electric arc furnaces. So in the US you
get eighty percent of your steel from electric arc furnaces,
which is recycling steel, which actually is really low carbon.
But again, you've got the steel. Think about it. You've
got your fifteen tons of steel, and you can keep
on recycling that, you know, not forever you need to
(27:33):
every so often, you need to add a bed of UI.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
Into the mix.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
But we're kind of okay, We've got enough steel around
us to keep on recycling it. The issue is like,
it's sub Saharan Africa, it's parts of Asia, that it's
parts of South America. They want more steel and they
want better living standards, so they want to use more
energy and why not. And I think there's this clash
at the moment between our understandable concern about climate change
(27:58):
and other parts of the world which just want to
have better standards of living. And in order to get
those standards of living, pretty much every process you can
do to get there is going to create more carbon.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Let's talk about copper.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
Let's talk about copper.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
So tell me about copper as the secret story of
the Second Industrial Revolution. Tell me about copper as the
secret story behind electrification of the world.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Okay, I think of all of the different kind of
materials in our relationships with them, maybe this is kind
of like the most intuitive because if you have a
power cut, you know you're screwed.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
And copper is electricity.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
I think you're conscious of that a bit more, and
you're conscious that electricity is of all the life support
systems for civilization. You know, we could probably survive without
the internet. If we don't have electricity, then we're truly scoppered.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Well, and so I mean speaking of electricity, right, part
of the reason I wanted to talk about copper. Among
the things he wrote about is we need a lot
more copper in order to electrify the world, which is
like a good thing, right, we want to electrify the world.
It's a good thing. Asterisk. Well, we got to get
a bunch more. And so there is this recent history
(29:19):
of wondering are we going to be able to get
more copper?
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Right?
Speaker 1 (29:22):
There's this famous bet from the seventies, Right, it was
in the seventies between the biologist Paul Erleck and the
economist Julian Simon. Tell me about that bet in the
history of copper.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
So, Paul Olik was this incredibly charismatic scientist who, I think,
like a lot of people, particularly in the nineteen seventies,
was very worried about the rise in global population. He
wrote a very famous book called The Population Bomb, which
contained a lot of forecasts that turned out to be
kind of nonsense.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
And they were very high conviction right Like in this book,
he doesn't say like we should be worried. He says, like,
we are screwed already. There are so many people that
there are going to be famines. It's a certainty because
we won't be able to grow enough food to feed everybody.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
I think one of one of the predictions was that
England wouldn't exist as a country in like two thousand
or something.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
Like that you showed and here we are still not almost.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
But the point is, yeah, I think people who can
can say somewhat outrageous things with great conviction are compelling
and they get listened to.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Indeed, there is abundant evidence for that fact, for that claim.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
But it turns out actually when you kind of peel
away stuff, I mean, doubt is not super fashionable, but
it turns out, you know, it's quite it's kind of
important within the scientific you know, the Enlightenment is kind
of about doubt. And so all Erlik was basically saying
we're going to hell in a handcock to some extent,
reprising some of Thomas Malthus's prognostications from the nineteenth century,
(30:57):
saying that the population was rising too fast, We're going
to run out of stuff, and there's kind of two
ways this is going to be manifested.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
We're going to run out of food, but we're also.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Going to run out of the materials we need to
make stuff, and so he was very pessimistic. This guy
called Julian Simon, who was a slightly obscure economist but
you know, kind of somewhat libertarian economists, heard Alic talking.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
He got absolutely infuriated that this guy was.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Getting all the attention, that he'd go on all of
the Tonight Show and so on, because he was entertaining,
you know, that was the thing he was entertaining, and
he had conviction.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
Simon never went on.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
The Tonight Show, but he certainly got the attention of
Paul Erlik because he basically wrote him a few letters
in journals saying this is nonsense. You're totally wrong.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
So why did Simon think Erlic was wrong?
Speaker 2 (31:42):
He just thought that human ingenuity has throughout history been
able to come up with solutions to our problems, and
that economics and the market are a profoundly powerful way
of resolving issues of shortage. And he thought that listen,
if we were to run short of copper, we'd come
(32:04):
up with some other material that would enable us to
create electrical network. And so as a result of that,
he just thought there was something instinctively wrong about what
Erleck was saying. But I think there's something instinctively within
humanity because we know that the planet is finite, it's there,
we can see it. That makes maybe the Erlick view
quite compelling.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
I think zero some thinking is intuitive and positive some
thinking is not. Yeah, And I think in this debate,
Erlic is very much zero side totally, and Simon is positive.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
So Simon challenges publicly challenges I believe in science and
the journal science. Right, he challenges Eric to a bet.
What is the bet?
Speaker 2 (32:45):
Yeah, No, it's worth saying Erle Erlick was by far
and away the more prominent person. Erlik is famous and
Simon No one's heard of Simon, and so he punches up.
Erlik takes takes notice of him and says, okay, right,
we're going to do a bet. Actually I can't I
can't remember whether Simon's just bet. I think maybe Simon
suggested the bet, and Eerlic says, okay, you're on. And
the bet is basically, we're going to pick a date
(33:07):
in the future, and we'll look at the price of
all of these a selection of different commodities. One of
those materials was copper, and to work out whether at
the end of a decade or so, whether they went
up in price or down in price. And if their
price has gone up, then it's a sign that there
is scarcity and the people were potentially running out. And
(33:30):
if it's gone down, then the opposite. If it gets
the price goes up, Erlick wins the bet. If the
price goes down or stays the same, Simon wins the bet.
And so the years pass and lo and behold Erlck loses.
Simon wins. The prices don't go through the roof of
this stuff.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
What does it mean that he won?
Speaker 2 (33:49):
I think, in hindsight, a powerful reminder that the world
is not zero sum, and that we are really good
at devising solutions for things that seem like they are
runaway problems. And that also, I think there's another deeper
thing which I don't think Simon ever, he wasn't thinking
as a geologist, and I'm not, but I've come to
(34:10):
think a bit more like a geologist. The world of
minerals is far more plentiful than we might think. Even
though we're down to the kind of you know, the
junk stuff, there is still a lot of it out there.
And the human ability to devise ever more ingenious ways
of squeezing let's say copper, because we're talking about it,
(34:31):
copper out of rock that might previously have been seen
as junk rock. That ability is amazing, and to me
it's one of the great triumphs, totally unsung triumphs of
the last kind of fifty years. Is that far from
actually running out of copper? Because copper, of all of
the materials that I look at and that we use
on an industrial scale, copper is perhaps the most scarce.
(34:54):
You know, there's lots of iron in the Earth's cross,
there's lots of you know, alumino, which we use to
make aluminium. There's loads of these things. There's not that
much copper. And yet over that period we have produced
an incredible amount of copper. You know, I felt tall
about this because, on the one hand, this period in
the nineteen seventies, you know, when the bet was kind
(35:14):
of happening, was this dawning moment, this dawning realization, you know,
Earth Day and all of these things were happening.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
And real legislation, right the key environmental legislation in the
United States was passed around this time.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
Yeah, like all the EPA stuff.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
So there are many kind of positives that have come
out of this, and our water courses much better, the
air quality is so much better in most of our
countries as a result of I think that dawning consciousness
that we needed to do something. But at the same time,
because there was so much catastrophism about it, I think
a lot of people got kind of overly freaked out
by it. And there were certain things like copper that
(35:47):
we never came close to running out of. And like
I say, one of the greatest unsung achievements is we
have not run out of this stuff. Far from running out,
we have got more than ever before. Yes, there are
big environmental questions about how much of the ground we're
churning up to get it. But China was able to urbanize.
China wouldn't have been able to urbanize. You wouldn't have
(36:07):
been able to have as many, you know, eight billion people,
you know, getting toward nine billion people in the world
were it not for the discovery of clever ways to
get copper out of the ground.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
So there is the environmental question right of we've dug
giant holes in the ground to get copper out. And
there is a particularly i don't know, fraught environmental question now,
which is in order to do the energy transition, in
order to shift from fossil fuel to electrification, which is
good and I think good on net, we need a
lot more copper. Like you have gone and looked at
(36:40):
giant copper minds, seen the cost of it, Like how
do you think about copper and the energy transition?
Speaker 2 (36:48):
When standing on the lip of one of these big
mines in Chile, I went to this mine called Chicki Kamata,
which is this This is one that's been going since,
you know, for one hundred and twenty years or so.
This is like one of the minds, the big minds
that we got the copper for the early Edison electrical age,
(37:09):
and we're still getting copper out of it. Is a
hole that is the biggest man made hole on the
planet in terms of it's just the amount of earth
that's been displaced from it. You stand on the edge,
you look down, it's like looking at the Grand Canyon.
You know, it's one of those moments of like whoa,
because this is this is so deep, and yet we
(37:29):
made that. We made that hole in order to get
the copper out. You need, in order to fulfill all
the promises that we have made for the energy transition,
you need another three or four of these mines to
be built every year between now and twenty fifty, and
right now we're basically not really building any And on
(37:51):
the contrary, you know, there are minds that the famous
example is a mine in Panama, copper mine which has
basically been shut down because the government is you know,
concerned about the environmental impacts and the impacts on the
local community.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
Which is reasonable, right, Like, that's why this is such
a hard It's ablutely reasonable. I don't want to live
next to a copper mind.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
And to be honest with you, what happens. I'll tell
you what happens if you live next to a copper mine.
Eventually the copper mine gets so big that your house
gets covered in the waste rock for the copper mine,
and you know, you're you're covered and you're covered in rock.
Because that's what happens at this place. There was a
there was a town next door. It was like a
pretty advanced town. It had the most advanced hospital in
Latin America. It is now abandoned and half covered in
(38:32):
the waste rock from the mine. They had to they
had to move everyone out because the mine just got
so big. But this is the point that there aren't
many of these places, but where there are, they are big,
and there's environmental implications and all around that particular mine
in Chile, the copper mine. You know, you've got more
arsenic in the air than in most other places, partly
(38:52):
just because there's arsenic in the earth and it's being displaced,
and the particular the nature of that Andean soil is
is it's got more arsenic than you would normally find.
The tailings down Okay, so where the toxic waste is put.
And bear in mind they used to just chuck this
stuff into the rivers and into the sea. Now it
goes in this damn system. So you've got all of
this quite nasty stuff in a damn system. It's basically
(39:14):
a big block of earth, and I drove alongside it
with damn walls all around it. This total size of
the tailings down at this single mind chew Kikumata in
Chile is bigger than Manhattan just for one mind, and
so the amount of impact that these places have is enormous.
But now a lot of these places, including Chile, are
starting to ask, well, hang on, is this actually what
(39:36):
we want?
Speaker 3 (39:36):
And you've got a lot of governments.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Like I say, including in Santiago, who are saying, okay, now,
actually we want to shut down some of these places
because local communities have been affected by pollution and it's unacceptable.
So for me, one of the biggest challenges for the
energy transition it's not necessarily the technology, it's not necessarily
the kind of enthusiasm that it's a lot of politics
going on, But actually it's are we actually going to
(40:00):
manage to persuade people who live where all of these
resources are that it is right to get this stuff
out of the ground. It's it's human willingness rather than
techle logical or geological constraints.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round,
of course, m m okay, we're going to finish with
the lightning round. If you were to add a seventh
material to the book, what would it be?
Speaker 2 (40:35):
I was actually going to have a seventh material, which
was going to be wood. I would wood is great,
like we can use word as an amazing construction material
these days. Obviously there's all the history about woods, you know, fire, humanity, fire, charcoal,
all that stuff.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
Yeah, I mean the first energy transition arguably was fine, right.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
Right, Yeah, the first and the greatest in a way.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
Yeah, So wood, it was gonna be.
Speaker 2 (40:59):
Wood, and wood is great because also, like I say,
you can you can build skyscrapers out of wood. You
still need a bit of steal, to be honest with you,
but you can build skyscrapers out of wood. You can
use word as a kind of ingreen for making chemicals
as well. So it was going to be words. But
the book you've read the book, it's long. It's too
long already, And so it was going to be seven.
(41:19):
Like seven is a great number, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Seven's a better number than six. Let's be honest. You
could have gone down to five.
Speaker 3 (41:25):
It's the fault of like glass.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Glass was too interesting, and you know, so I just
I overdid it, basically, I overcooked it.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
Well done. What's your least favorite material?
Speaker 3 (41:35):
Do you mean in the book or do you mean
and no, in the world. Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
I mean, like, I'm not an enormous fan of polyester.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
I don't know if you have any like running shirts
or workout shirts. Like, they don't call them polyester, they
call them whatever, Capeline or whatever brand name, but they're
basically polyester. Polyester is amazing.
Speaker 3 (41:57):
Now, that's the thing. That's why I have states saying this.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
Yeah, I mean plastic, polyester is plastic.
Speaker 3 (42:03):
Blast is plastic. It's a petrochemical.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
Yeah, it is a petrochemical, and.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
I think we, the English, we invented it. We basically
we invented a lot of the bad stuff we invented,
you know, the using fossil fuels. But that's also kind
of there's been many benefits from that.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
Yeah, the Industrial Revolution. I'm unbalance grateful for the Industrial Revolution.
It's a complicated legacy, but I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
Yeah, but we invented polyethylene, which is like the plastic
that you make plastic bags out of. Again, I don't
think we should be ashamed of it in the slightest,
but we are. You go to the place where they
invented polyethylene and there's a little plaque they've kind of
hidden on a building.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
I mean plastic bags I feel more ambivalent about than
the Industrial Revolution.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
Weirdly, polyethylene is not just plastic bags. It's basically, you know,
it's kind of everything. It's also you can make like
bulletproof fests out of it. You can make it is
the most adaptable of all of the plastics. It is
by far and away the most the biggest. I'm used
to kind of shitty old polyester, like you know, the
old kind of shirts like yeah, that make you sweat,
(43:04):
that make you sweat. These days, I think, particularly the Chinese,
this is kind of a thing. The Chinese have become
incredible at making really good fabrics out of polyester. And
so actually the polyester, like you saying of twenty twenty five,
is such a different thing, and that's I think largely
thanks to the Chinese being really clever about weaving it,
and also just particular types of glens. So I would
(43:26):
say polyesta, but then then I'd go back on myself,
just like I am now.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
Ed Conway is the author of Material World, the six
raw materials that shape of modern civilization. Please email us
at problem at Pushkin dot FM. We are always looking
for new guests for the show. Today's show was produced
by Trinamnino and Gabriel Hunter Chang, who was edited by
Alexander Garriton and engineered by Sarah Bruguier. I'm Jacob Goldstein
(43:59):
and we'll be back next week with another episode of
What's Your Pop
Pushkin. It's easy to think that technology is just about ideas, words, numbers, math, algorithms,
But of course technology is and always has been, about stuff,
and in particular, it's about combining ideas with that stuff.
(00:39):
It's about figuring out how to use copper to send
electricity around the world, how to turn sand into glass
and cement and chips. It's about coming up with clever
ways to make cheap steel so that we can build
basically anything we want. And looking at technology and the
history of technology through the lens of those essential materials
(00:59):
of that stuff turns out to be a really interesting
and surprisingly useful way of thinking about the world. I'm
Jacob Goldstein, and this is what's your problem. My guest
today is Ed Conway. He's an economics journalist and he
(01:20):
wrote a book called Material World, The Six raw Materials
that shape Modern Civilization. I talked to Ed about three
of the six materials. We talked about iron, because the
story of iron really is the story of the industrial revolution,
and for that matter, the story of the wealth and
poverty of nations around the world today. We also talked
(01:42):
about copper, which is of course the story of electricity
and the energy transition we're going through now. But copper
is also a story about humanity's ability to be very
clever in getting the thing that we need, even when
it seems like we're going to run out of that thing.
So those two materials, copper and iron, they are the
second part of the show. In the first part of
(02:04):
the show, Ed and I talked about sand, sand, which
after reading Ed's book, I have come to think is
a highly underrated material. Sand, of course, is essential for
making chips and making cement, both of which we have
covered on other episodes of this show. So Ed and
I focused on another material made out of sand, glass,
(02:25):
And as Ed explains, glass really was central to the
emergence of the modern world starting around the sixteenth century
the Venetians.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
That was really the first moment where they were able
to create a truly clear, perfect type of glass, of
the type that we could recognize these days. Roman glass
was often beautiful, but it was a bit cloudy. The
Venetians really mastered it, and part of the trick to
that was obviously expertise and bringing in people who knew
(02:55):
how to do it. And they were based on this island,
the island of Murano, which is.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Just an off Venis.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
They were forbidden to leave so that there was this
in the same way that people making silicon chips in
Taiwan these days are not allowed to go to China.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
It was a same thing with morano.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
And it's like like a trade secret basically, like the
Venetians are traders. This is like a competitive advantage essentially
a technological advantage they have and they're logging it down exactly.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
It's really analogous to what, you know, what we have
these days with silicon check, I mean silicon technology as well.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
That's also sad.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
They cracked it, and partly they cracked it because they
found a really good source of sand. Actually it's little
quartz chips that they found in the rivers just kind
of on the Swiss Italian border, and because they cracked it.
You know, if you look back, like one of my
favorite kind of stories, it's kind of theory, but to
me it's a really compelling theory, is that the Renaissance,
(03:51):
you know, there's great flowering of artistic kind of ability and.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
Where painters discovered how to use perspective.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
You know, there's this moment where it goes from being
really two D kind of Giotto, medieval style paintings of
Christ and all of these different kind of icons to
being something that's three D and something's more recognizable as
a painting of the Renaissance. The prevailing theory is basically
what happened there, There was just this moment dawning realization,
and people worked out how to do perspective. And it's
(04:19):
this enlightenment to me, a much more compelling explanation.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
It's one that David Hockney and a few other theorists
have posited.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
David Harckney the artist, David Hockney.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
The artist has wrote a whole book on this a
few years ago and actually did this great documentary which
you can find on YouTube about this, basically saying, no,
what happened was they worked out how to use lenses.
They worked out how to make glass lenses that enabled
them to make camera obscurers and other different types of
contractions that enabled them to basically trace out the outline
(04:50):
of what was happening in a studio or in a
picture or whatever. And there are artifacts of this because
if you look at certain pictures, particularly from those early
kind of medieval, well early Renaissance paintings, and also some
from the Dutch Golden Era. You see, for instance, that
parts of the painting go out of focus and something
going focus. The human eye doesn't really go out of
(05:11):
focus in that way, but through a lens things do
go out of focus. And so Hockney points out, and
like I say, I think it's a really compelling case
that the places that where you had this flowering of
you know, enlightenments and beautiful paintings that use perspective also
happened to be close to the great places where glass
(05:31):
was being manufactured, so Venice, in the Netherlands, in England
as well to some extent, although our painting wasn't quite
so great, wherever there was great glass making there also
happened to be great enlightenment leaks forward.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
The Renaissance is sort of following, and so you need
the glass to be able to make the lens, and
in Hockney's argument, you need the lens to project the
world onto a two dimensional surface. Except from that projection
then you can learn perspective.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Exactly, Then you learn perspective, and obviously in the same
way that you have enabling technologies throughout history. You know,
right now we're thinking of AI.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
So was Leonardo t Yeah, yeah, he was.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
He was, and so were you know, so were many
of these artists. And I don't think there's anything kind
of to be ashamed of here.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
No, especially if you discover tracing. If you're like, wait
a minute, I can trace.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah, and then suddenly it's a lot of as every
kid knows, it's a lot easier suddenly, And that's what
they were doing. But they were doing it with great
panashion style, and we've kind of, I think, forgotten that.
But there's there's a very material explanation.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
In a similar thing. You also talk about the relationship
of improvements in glass technology to the scientific revolution, which was,
you know, around this same time.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Well, I mean if you look and again, I find
this kind of mind blowing.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
And that one seems clearer. Again, no pun intended that one.
That argument seems less tenuous.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Yeah, well, I don't know, I don't know, I don't
know if it's okay, respectful.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
How about this? That argument seems more compelling. That's a
nicer way of saying less tenuous.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
It's even more compelling, isn't it. Yeah, it's even more compelling.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
It's it's if you look at basically I think the
vast majority of scientific discoveries that were made in that
period of the great you know, the Enlightenment, the kind
of eighteenth nineteenth century, seventeenth some excent.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Even earlier, right, like Galileo, right, Like, you don't even
have to leave galileanly.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
So telescope, I mean, how do we pair into space?
And this was all thanks to our ability to harness sand,
turn it into glass, and then turn it into you know,
kind of sand that down into beautiful lenses that enabled
us to see further or indeed see kind of deepest,
so microscopically, that was glass.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
You don't discover the cell until you have a microscope,
and you don't have a microscope until you have really
good glass. Right. And I feel like tools, like this
is the story of tools, right, and tools are underrated
in scientific.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
Discovery, right, like totally.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Once you have a telescope, then somebody is going to
see the moons of Jupiter. Once you have a microscope,
somebody is going to see a cell. The hard part
is getting the telescope and the microscope.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Yeah, and yet the thing we celebrate and understandably is
we celebrate the Galileos and the van Luveruk, who's one
of those first great people looking down into microscopes. But yeah,
they needed the contractions and also they needed to rely
on people to make really good glass for them, because
you could you needed really clear glass to be able
to peer down into this. And the funny thing I've discovered,
(08:26):
you know, looking back through that history of the Enlightenment,
what you kind of notice if you look through lots
of the stories and the accounts, is that so many
of the people who were scientists and renowned actually as
scientists for something else.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
Michael Faraday is a really good example, you know.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Electoral magnets, electromagnets, basically the electricity.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
He's the electricity guy. He was also totally obsessed with glass,
so he used to make his own glass. Actually one
of the earliest recipes for something called boris silicate glass,
which is like these days what we use for test
tubes and the vials that you get your kind of
vaccines and medicines in.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
There's really hard type of glass.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
So is that related to pyrex to the glass you
can put in.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
The oven is Boris silicate glass. It's just you know,
the trademark. But Faraday, he I don't know if invented
to the right word. But he was a tinkerer with glass,
and he made an early form of boris silica glass
because everyone was doing it. And if you look back,
there's this great book Making of the Atomic Bomb by
Richard Rhodes. I was reading it after having written this book,
(09:24):
and I was struck by how many times within the
discovery of how to split the atom, people were waylaid
by getting hold of the right glass. Because you need
a glass within which to do your experiments, because glass
is very inert, obviously, and it's the inertness of glass
that makes it really important, you know, for doing chemical experiments,
for making vacuums, all of these things. So if you
(09:46):
look at pretty much I think the vast majority of
different scientific discoveries during the Enlightenment, and some authors did
a survey of here are the great discoveries, how many
of them depended one way or another on glass, whether
it's a test ubes, vacuum chambers, or indeed lenses.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
It's the majority of them.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
And so our scientific world is built on glass as well.
So we think this stuff is kind of historic. And
that goes by the way for even right now, because
there are when we're making silicon chips, and maybe we'll
come onto this. When you're making a lot of kind
of advanced equipments, you still need optics. And for great optics,
you still need excellent glass.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Well, fiber optics you talk about in the book, right right,
talk about fiber optics. That seems like the obvious contemporary yeah,
glass case.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
You know.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Fiber optics I think is a really good example of
the underlining of our forgetting of the materiality of our world.
Because when people think about the Internet, I think, because
we have Wi Fi, just.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
That last twenty feet is just the last twenty feet
that's going through the air.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
But that's the twenty feet that we're familiar with, you know,
That's what we're aware of.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
So what's the rest. What are the other I'm talking
to you, three thousand miles away, four thousand miles away,
what's going.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Through The majority of all of the bits that they're
enabling us to talk are going on fiber optics. They're
going on fiber optics. In our case, underneath the Atlantic Ocean,
there's only a teensy tiny bit where things are traveling
through the air. The World Wide Web is a physical
structure with loads of fiber optics, loads of service centers,
and each of those fiber optic cables is a tiny
(11:16):
little strand of glass. It's actually two types of glass,
kind of one inside the other. Which again, that's our world.
Our world depends on glass. We can't have the Internet
without glass. And again we forget that, we're kind of
encouraged to forget it.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Not anymore. I want to make one more stop on
glass before we move on, because it was truly surprising
to me, and I'm happy that I know it tell
me about the shortage of lenses in the UK in
World War One.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
I think this is actually a great story because it
tells you quite a lot about what we're going through
right now with period of you know, de industrialization in
the US, Europe everywhere else and wondering like how on
earth do we turn this around. So for a long time,
England was kind of at the cutting edge of glass
technol A lot of the great lenses were made here.
(12:11):
You've got Michael Faraday obsessing over glass and Crown glass.
A lot of achievements that then led to really good
optics happened in England. And then they decided the governments
as they often do needed to raise money for the
wars against France, and they decided to tax glass making
and they also tax windows.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
So in England you have lots of older.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Houses, particularly ones that are kind of Georgian and Queen
Anne's so kind of going back like two three hundred
years where if you look at them, suddenly some of
the windows have been bricked up. And the reason they
bricks up is because the government decided to impose a
tax on however many windows you had, you would have
to pay more tax.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
It's a sort of seeing like a state thing. Right,
It's like what can somebody walk down the street and
count from the street, right, Yeah the legibility, Yeah, legibility
is good, right yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Counting windows, but also actually chimneys was another thing.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
So the government wanted to tax glass, they wanted to
raise lots of money, and they did, and they raised
leads of money and that was great for them. But
partly as a result of that, a lot of the
innervation in glass shifted elsewhere.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
And actually Germany, which was.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Beginning to engage in what you today call industrial strategies,
so the government governmental organizations starting to introduce kind of subsidies.
They really focused on glass because it was you know,
this was an opportunity. This is eighteen hundreds and you've
got actually Gerte, the kind of famous statesman poet, was
(13:32):
really heavily involved in this, to the extent that in
what is now kind of towards the.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
East of Germany it became East Germany.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
You had in a town called Jenna, there was a
university that a lot of money went into which encouraged
investigation and also kind of manufacture of glass. And out
of that that hub of manufacturing came some names that
we will probably.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Recognize today, like Seis. A guy called Carl Seiss.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Became a really big kind of manufacturer of glass, indeed
of lenses. And the long story short is that Germany
became really dominant in the manufacture of really good, quite
cheap optical glass, and the English industry basically withered away.
France had slightly withered away as well, and in Germany's
Seiss binoculars and telescopes and sniperscopes became totally dominant, to
(14:23):
the extent that come nineteen fourteen, England is importing about
sixty percent of all of its binoculars from Germany's Zeiss binoculars.
So when war breaks out, then all of a sudden,
it is a terrible crisis. They call it the glass famine.
You've got people, you know, going to the trenches in
France and Belgium equipped with binoculars and opera glasses.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
That they've had to borrow off people.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
There was an appeal that was launched for people to
donate their used binoculars to troops because England didn't have
enough of them, and you know, people were getting killed
because the Germans had the better snipers. This was kind
of the First War. Really, the First World War was
the first war where you were able to fire your
weapons far further.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Than you could see.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
So your ability to see and your ability to see
far was the matter of difference between life and death.
And the Germans had by far and away the upper
hand on that. And it culminated in nineteen fifteen in
this extraordinary deal where Britain actually sent spies to meet
with their German counterparts in Switzerland to do a deal
to buy binoculars off the Germans so that they could
(15:32):
kill them better. The most extraordinary thing is the Germans
said yes.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Like why would the Germans agree to it?
Speaker 2 (15:39):
They said yes, And the reason they agreed to it,
and it comes back to materials again, is that they
were short of rubber. So Britain controlled most of the
global rubber supply, and you need a rubber obviously for
fan belts in your engines, for tires, for everything else.
And so the Germans were short of rubber, we were
short of glass. And rather than saying, okay, well this
is a bit of a pretty pass here, let's just
(16:00):
stop the war, they said, okay, we'll do the deal,
and then we can carry on killing each other a
little bit more effectively.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Let's make a deal, swer you could keep killing each other. Yeah,
And it happened, in fact, and.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
It's a great story and it did actually happen. But
what's even more interesting is that in the following years,
and this I think a lesson for where we are now.
In the following years, England did manage to increase its
glass manufacturing massively and really fast. And it just goes
to show so by the end of the war they
were producing more more binoculars than they needed. They were
sending some of them to America, and it just goes
(16:31):
to show you can do it. Like if you need
to try and create an industry. It is possible to
do it, but often you need a wartime situation to
encourage you to do it. The catch is you do
need a bit of a base to start from.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Well, And it's complicated, right, I mean, we're going to
talk about this later, but we can talk about it now.
Like there is a set of trade offs, right, Like
at certain margins, you know, comparative advantage, it makes sense
to do what you're good at and let other countries
do what they're good at, and you get more material
prosperity that way, right. But the asterisk is if Germany
is making all the lenses and you go to war
(17:03):
with Germany, that's going to be bad, right, And so
that is a hard We shouldn't try and make everything
like that seems clear, I mean, I guess there is
a big question which is like can you abstract lessons?
What should we try and make and what should we
not try and make for me?
Speaker 2 (17:22):
And I'm kind of thinking about this a lot, so
I'm kind of working on what might be in another
book on this kind of topic. Like comparative advantage, it's
not set in stone, you know, it is something you
can change and something you can influence sure.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Presumably you don't believe in autarchy. You don't think that
just because the country is a country, it should make everything.
Presumably you don't believe in like pure comparative advantage. Right.
The hard questions are at the margins, like how many
chips should we try and make in the United States?
Like that's a weird hard question.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Completely, and what are the trade offs there? And what
are you foregoing in order to do that? And I
think again, we are living through an exercise in that
right now.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Right, the pendulum is swinging back. Right, the pendulum is
swinging back toward domestic production.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
Now.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Yeah, And you know, I think that's some more new
an interesting conversation than it's often made out to be.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
I think that's the thing.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
I think when you when you start looking at some
of the history of technologies, you kind of realize this
stuff it didn't just come down from the sky. You know.
Most of the reason that things happen in particular countries
is because of various interventions. And some of those interventions
worked and some of those didn't.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
Still to come on the show, Iron and Copper, we'll
be back in a minute. Let's do Iron.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
So you're navigating this in a I have a plan.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
And it's going basically to plan. Yeah, tell me about
how iron production in the UK helped lead to the
Industrial Revolution. Okay, you need to break you get some water.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
No, I'm just wondering where you were taking me.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
I feel like that was a very straightforward turn right revolution.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Yeah, No, I mean so the industrial revolution really, you know,
it's kind of a two part thing. First of all,
came the moment where in England there's it's kind of
a semi environmental story. We were taking that iron out
of the ground, or taking the iron ground, smelting it
down into iron and burning a lot of charcoal along
(19:30):
the way to make that happen, and we cut down
a lot of trees to make it happen. This is
around the kind of fifteen sixteenth century, one of the
first kind of early ecological panics. Everyone started to panic
that we were running out of trees and that if
we carried on making as much iron as we wanted to,
not just iron, because it was other things like making
beer and glass and salt and things like that. For
(19:52):
all of these things, you kind of need to burn
a lot of charcoal and create your kind of industrial process.
Speaker 3 (19:59):
But people panics.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Everyone thought, we're going to run out of trees, and
as a result, the Royal Navy was going to have
to be shut down and you wouldn't have enough trees
for the masts that you need on the great ships
of the line. And what the first great kind of
innovation on this was this guy, Abraham Derby, who worked
out in the kind of the turn of the kind
of seventeenth eighteenth century, who worked out how to make
(20:21):
coal the fuel sauce rather than charcoal, and that meant
you didn't have to burn down trees. You could use
coal that you dug out of the ground. And it
was actually quite hard thing to do, but he managed
to do it, and that was the moment that the
fossil fuel world that we know it began. That's why
you can kind of like date the climate change story
in a way from that moment in the midlands of
(20:44):
England where he was like, okay, let's use coal. And essentially,
as a result of that, you're no longer bound by
the kind of organic constraints of how many trees you
can actually plant and cut down.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
In particular, because England happened to have abundant, relatively accessible coal, right,
an important piece of it.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Yeah, so two things in a way.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
It's this kind of this perfect coincidence, a coincidence having
quite a lot of coal in the ground. It's quite
good coal like anthracites, so it's kind of rich coal
that's good. But as well as that, we didn't have
enough trees. So France, which had far more forests than England's,
actually never really got onto this because they had enough
forest that they could turn those trees into charcoal and
(21:25):
then use them to carry on making steel or iron
the way they wanted to, whereas in England we just
didn't have enough trees because we just didn't have as
much land mass, and so that pushed us towards coal.
And by being pushed towards coal, then we started to
discover other things along the way.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Yes, you make the point that it was work in
the coal mines that led to the invention of the
steam engine, which is this sort of signature invention of
the industrial revolution in some ways, you know, the modern age.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Yes, steam engines were initially there not to move trains
or anything else. They were there just to pump water
out of coal mines basically, and from that then other
innovations happened. But I mean the second thing with iron
is so you can make your iron, but still really
hard to turn it into steel. And like I say,
(22:17):
steel is just so much better than different types of iron,
whether it's kind of cast iron or raught iron, it
is just so much stronger, it is much more resilient.
You can build big buildings out of it. And so
the real moment that everything changed and provided us with
the materials we need to make skyscrapers, for instance, was
the Bessemer process, and that was kind of later on.
(22:39):
That was in the kind of mid eighteen hundreds where
Henry Bessemer and there was another guy who was kind
of working on this as well, I think in the
States at the same time, worked out how to use
oxygen basically kind of to puff a lot of oxygen
into the to the mix of this molten iron, which
again is just getting rid of more of the carbon
(23:01):
and getting it down to just the right amount of carbon.
What was so revolutionary about Bessemer is up until then
it was just really hard to make and so just
you couldn't really make it in large quantities. After Bessemus,
suddenly you're able to make steel in massive quantities, and
so something that was incredibly expensive became cheap.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
It goes from being artisanal to being.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
In dust exactly. And that's like with all of these technologies.
That's the moment the world changes. It's the same, you
know with salt, it's the same with with glass. The
moment that you can make something, make a process that
enables you to turn it out at scale of there's
a great economic paper on this, can't remember the author,
but I talked about it in the book about the
price of nails and how nails used to be one
of the most expensive things. We used to spend more
(23:44):
as an economy on nails than we do today on computers.
And because nails are now so cheap, because you can
turn out metal and steel in such great quantities and
they're better as well, that the world has changed. If
the Titanic had steel nails of the kind that we
have today on it rather than the rivets they were
using back then, just the quality of the metal that
(24:06):
it probably never would have been sunk by the iceberg,
history would have been different.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
A comfort to a comfort to cruisers everywhere exactly. So
you also read about how today making steel is this
incredibly large share of global carbon emissions. Just talk about that.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
For a minute.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Yeah, so it's the blast furnace stage. I had this
kind of striking moment where I stood in front of
a blast furnace in the UK and that one of
the people working there looked at me and said, you know,
actually the main product of this blast furnace is not iron,
it's carbon by weight.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
By weight, that.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
Figures the carbon is carbon dioxide gas. Just to be clear, right.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Exactly, But if you weigh it, which you could, you know,
which I think you can do in theory but maybe
in practice. But if you weigh it, there is more
carbon dioxide gas, more carbon being produced in tons than
there is the equivalent amount of iron. And that's because
in order to you know, when you chuck this stuff in,
you're chucking iron ore inside that furnace, an extraordinary chemic
(25:09):
or reaction is happening where the carbon, which is an
amazing molecule, is ripping the oxygen off of the iron ore.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
It's sort of derusting it.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, because if you see iron ore, it's
kind of it looks like rust. And you know, there
aren't that many blast furnaces left in the world. There's
only I don't know, there's like four left. In the US,
We've only got one, or there's a pair of them
left going, and they were very nearly shut down recently.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
In the UK.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
There's not many of these places left in the world.
But each of these sites is invariably the single biggest
producer of carbon in what whatever country it is the
single biggest one. So I was there in this place
in Wales is the single biggest producer of carbon dioxide
in our country. And now that's been shut down, and
so there's the other one over on the other side
(25:55):
of the country.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
It'll be the same in America.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
And the only way of making still in large quantities
at a relatively cheap price that makes this stuff worthwhile
is in a blast furnace, and that creates crazy amounts
of carbon dioxide. And this is the massive, big black
hole at the heart of many of the kind of
models you see about how this is how we get
to that zero. No one is quite accounted for the
(26:18):
fact there's a lot of people who just want to
see their living standards increase, and in order to do so,
they want to burn some iron ore and turn it
into steel.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
So it's a quandary.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Did you look at people working on green steel do
you have a view on Yeah, yeah, probability of that
working at scale in an economic way.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
The main truly green steel kind of method people talk
about is hydrogen dri so direct reduced iron. Using hydrogen
as your kind of adjutant, you kind of add it
to the to the mix. It's so expensive, it's so
so expensive to make iron that way. So for some
of us, you know, it's it's Sweden is big in it.
They're trying to make volvos using this stuff. You know,
(26:59):
for many of us who want to have green steel
and are able to afford a bit more, that's that's fine.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
But that's not the one we care about, right. We
care about green steel that is pray competitive with whatever
you call it, round steel.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
I fear that's a long time coming, maybe never. And
there's the electric arc furnaces. So in the US you
get eighty percent of your steel from electric arc furnaces,
which is recycling steel, which actually is really low carbon.
But again, you've got the steel. Think about it. You've
got your fifteen tons of steel, and you can keep
on recycling that, you know, not forever you need to
(27:33):
every so often, you need to add a bed of UI.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
Into the mix.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
But we're kind of okay, We've got enough steel around
us to keep on recycling it. The issue is like,
it's sub Saharan Africa, it's parts of Asia, that it's
parts of South America. They want more steel and they
want better living standards, so they want to use more
energy and why not. And I think there's this clash
at the moment between our understandable concern about climate change
(27:58):
and other parts of the world which just want to
have better standards of living. And in order to get
those standards of living, pretty much every process you can
do to get there is going to create more carbon.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Let's talk about copper.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
Let's talk about copper.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
So tell me about copper as the secret story of
the Second Industrial Revolution. Tell me about copper as the
secret story behind electrification of the world.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Okay, I think of all of the different kind of
materials in our relationships with them, maybe this is kind
of like the most intuitive because if you have a
power cut, you know you're screwed.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
And copper is electricity.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
I think you're conscious of that a bit more, and
you're conscious that electricity is of all the life support
systems for civilization. You know, we could probably survive without
the internet. If we don't have electricity, then we're truly scoppered.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Well, and so I mean speaking of electricity, right, part
of the reason I wanted to talk about copper. Among
the things he wrote about is we need a lot
more copper in order to electrify the world, which is
like a good thing, right, we want to electrify the world.
It's a good thing. Asterisk. Well, we got to get
a bunch more. And so there is this recent history
(29:19):
of wondering are we going to be able to get
more copper?
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Right?
Speaker 1 (29:22):
There's this famous bet from the seventies, Right, it was
in the seventies between the biologist Paul Erleck and the
economist Julian Simon. Tell me about that bet in the
history of copper.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
So, Paul Olik was this incredibly charismatic scientist who, I think,
like a lot of people, particularly in the nineteen seventies,
was very worried about the rise in global population. He
wrote a very famous book called The Population Bomb, which
contained a lot of forecasts that turned out to be
kind of nonsense.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
And they were very high conviction right Like in this book,
he doesn't say like we should be worried. He says, like,
we are screwed already. There are so many people that
there are going to be famines. It's a certainty because
we won't be able to grow enough food to feed everybody.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
I think one of one of the predictions was that
England wouldn't exist as a country in like two thousand
or something.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
Like that you showed and here we are still not almost.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
But the point is, yeah, I think people who can
can say somewhat outrageous things with great conviction are compelling
and they get listened to.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Indeed, there is abundant evidence for that fact, for that claim.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
But it turns out actually when you kind of peel
away stuff, I mean, doubt is not super fashionable, but
it turns out, you know, it's quite it's kind of
important within the scientific you know, the Enlightenment is kind
of about doubt. And so all Erlik was basically saying
we're going to hell in a handcock to some extent,
reprising some of Thomas Malthus's prognostications from the nineteenth century,
(30:57):
saying that the population was rising too fast, We're going
to run out of stuff, and there's kind of two
ways this is going to be manifested.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
We're going to run out of food, but we're also.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Going to run out of the materials we need to
make stuff, and so he was very pessimistic. This guy
called Julian Simon, who was a slightly obscure economist but
you know, kind of somewhat libertarian economists, heard Alic talking.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
He got absolutely infuriated that this guy was.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Getting all the attention, that he'd go on all of
the Tonight Show and so on, because he was entertaining,
you know, that was the thing he was entertaining, and
he had conviction.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
Simon never went on.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
The Tonight Show, but he certainly got the attention of
Paul Erlik because he basically wrote him a few letters
in journals saying this is nonsense. You're totally wrong.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
So why did Simon think Erlic was wrong?
Speaker 2 (31:42):
He just thought that human ingenuity has throughout history been
able to come up with solutions to our problems, and
that economics and the market are a profoundly powerful way
of resolving issues of shortage. And he thought that listen,
if we were to run short of copper, we'd come
(32:04):
up with some other material that would enable us to
create electrical network. And so as a result of that,
he just thought there was something instinctively wrong about what
Erleck was saying. But I think there's something instinctively within
humanity because we know that the planet is finite, it's there,
we can see it. That makes maybe the Erlick view
quite compelling.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
I think zero some thinking is intuitive and positive some
thinking is not. Yeah, And I think in this debate,
Erlic is very much zero side totally, and Simon is positive.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
So Simon challenges publicly challenges I believe in science and
the journal science. Right, he challenges Eric to a bet.
What is the bet?
Speaker 2 (32:45):
Yeah, No, it's worth saying Erle Erlick was by far
and away the more prominent person. Erlik is famous and
Simon No one's heard of Simon, and so he punches up.
Erlik takes takes notice of him and says, okay, right,
we're going to do a bet. Actually I can't I
can't remember whether Simon's just bet. I think maybe Simon
suggested the bet, and Eerlic says, okay, you're on. And
the bet is basically, we're going to pick a date
(33:07):
in the future, and we'll look at the price of
all of these a selection of different commodities. One of
those materials was copper, and to work out whether at
the end of a decade or so, whether they went
up in price or down in price. And if their
price has gone up, then it's a sign that there
is scarcity and the people were potentially running out. And
(33:30):
if it's gone down, then the opposite. If it gets
the price goes up, Erlick wins the bet. If the
price goes down or stays the same, Simon wins the bet.
And so the years pass and lo and behold Erlck loses.
Simon wins. The prices don't go through the roof of
this stuff.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
What does it mean that he won?
Speaker 2 (33:49):
I think, in hindsight, a powerful reminder that the world
is not zero sum, and that we are really good
at devising solutions for things that seem like they are
runaway problems. And that also, I think there's another deeper
thing which I don't think Simon ever, he wasn't thinking
as a geologist, and I'm not, but I've come to
(34:10):
think a bit more like a geologist. The world of
minerals is far more plentiful than we might think. Even
though we're down to the kind of you know, the
junk stuff, there is still a lot of it out there.
And the human ability to devise ever more ingenious ways
of squeezing let's say copper, because we're talking about it,
(34:31):
copper out of rock that might previously have been seen
as junk rock. That ability is amazing, and to me
it's one of the great triumphs, totally unsung triumphs of
the last kind of fifty years. Is that far from
actually running out of copper? Because copper, of all of
the materials that I look at and that we use
on an industrial scale, copper is perhaps the most scarce.
(34:54):
You know, there's lots of iron in the Earth's cross,
there's lots of you know, alumino, which we use to
make aluminium. There's loads of these things. There's not that
much copper. And yet over that period we have produced
an incredible amount of copper. You know, I felt tall
about this because, on the one hand, this period in
the nineteen seventies, you know, when the bet was kind
(35:14):
of happening, was this dawning moment, this dawning realization, you know,
Earth Day and all of these things were happening.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
And real legislation, right the key environmental legislation in the
United States was passed around this time.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
Yeah, like all the EPA stuff.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
So there are many kind of positives that have come
out of this, and our water courses much better, the
air quality is so much better in most of our
countries as a result of I think that dawning consciousness
that we needed to do something. But at the same time,
because there was so much catastrophism about it, I think
a lot of people got kind of overly freaked out
by it. And there were certain things like copper that
(35:47):
we never came close to running out of. And like
I say, one of the greatest unsung achievements is we
have not run out of this stuff. Far from running out,
we have got more than ever before. Yes, there are
big environmental questions about how much of the ground we're
churning up to get it. But China was able to urbanize.
China wouldn't have been able to urbanize. You wouldn't have
(36:07):
been able to have as many, you know, eight billion people,
you know, getting toward nine billion people in the world
were it not for the discovery of clever ways to
get copper out of the ground.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
So there is the environmental question right of we've dug
giant holes in the ground to get copper out. And
there is a particularly i don't know, fraught environmental question now,
which is in order to do the energy transition, in
order to shift from fossil fuel to electrification, which is
good and I think good on net, we need a
lot more copper. Like you have gone and looked at
(36:40):
giant copper minds, seen the cost of it, Like how
do you think about copper and the energy transition?
Speaker 2 (36:48):
When standing on the lip of one of these big
mines in Chile, I went to this mine called Chicki Kamata,
which is this This is one that's been going since,
you know, for one hundred and twenty years or so.
This is like one of the minds, the big minds
that we got the copper for the early Edison electrical age,
(37:09):
and we're still getting copper out of it. Is a
hole that is the biggest man made hole on the
planet in terms of it's just the amount of earth
that's been displaced from it. You stand on the edge,
you look down, it's like looking at the Grand Canyon.
You know, it's one of those moments of like whoa,
because this is this is so deep, and yet we
(37:29):
made that. We made that hole in order to get
the copper out. You need, in order to fulfill all
the promises that we have made for the energy transition,
you need another three or four of these mines to
be built every year between now and twenty fifty, and
right now we're basically not really building any And on
(37:51):
the contrary, you know, there are minds that the famous
example is a mine in Panama, copper mine which has
basically been shut down because the government is you know,
concerned about the environmental impacts and the impacts on the
local community.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
Which is reasonable, right, Like, that's why this is such
a hard It's ablutely reasonable. I don't want to live
next to a copper mind.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
And to be honest with you, what happens. I'll tell
you what happens if you live next to a copper mine.
Eventually the copper mine gets so big that your house
gets covered in the waste rock for the copper mine,
and you know, you're you're covered and you're covered in rock.
Because that's what happens at this place. There was a
there was a town next door. It was like a
pretty advanced town. It had the most advanced hospital in
Latin America. It is now abandoned and half covered in
(38:32):
the waste rock from the mine. They had to they
had to move everyone out because the mine just got
so big. But this is the point that there aren't
many of these places, but where there are, they are big,
and there's environmental implications and all around that particular mine
in Chile, the copper mine. You know, you've got more
arsenic in the air than in most other places, partly
(38:52):
just because there's arsenic in the earth and it's being displaced,
and the particular the nature of that Andean soil is
is it's got more arsenic than you would normally find.
The tailings down Okay, so where the toxic waste is put.
And bear in mind they used to just chuck this
stuff into the rivers and into the sea. Now it
goes in this damn system. So you've got all of
this quite nasty stuff in a damn system. It's basically
(39:14):
a big block of earth, and I drove alongside it
with damn walls all around it. This total size of
the tailings down at this single mind chew Kikumata in
Chile is bigger than Manhattan just for one mind, and
so the amount of impact that these places have is enormous.
But now a lot of these places, including Chile, are
starting to ask, well, hang on, is this actually what
(39:36):
we want?
Speaker 3 (39:36):
And you've got a lot of governments.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Like I say, including in Santiago, who are saying, okay, now,
actually we want to shut down some of these places
because local communities have been affected by pollution and it's unacceptable.
So for me, one of the biggest challenges for the
energy transition it's not necessarily the technology, it's not necessarily
the kind of enthusiasm that it's a lot of politics
going on, But actually it's are we actually going to
(40:00):
manage to persuade people who live where all of these
resources are that it is right to get this stuff
out of the ground. It's it's human willingness rather than
techle logical or geological constraints.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round,
of course, m m okay, we're going to finish with
the lightning round. If you were to add a seventh
material to the book, what would it be?
Speaker 2 (40:35):
I was actually going to have a seventh material, which
was going to be wood. I would wood is great,
like we can use word as an amazing construction material
these days. Obviously there's all the history about woods, you know, fire, humanity, fire, charcoal,
all that stuff.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
Yeah, I mean the first energy transition arguably was fine, right.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
Right, Yeah, the first and the greatest in a way.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
Yeah, So wood, it was gonna be.
Speaker 2 (40:59):
Wood, and wood is great because also, like I say,
you can you can build skyscrapers out of wood. You
still need a bit of steal, to be honest with you,
but you can build skyscrapers out of wood. You can
use word as a kind of ingreen for making chemicals
as well. So it was going to be words. But
the book you've read the book, it's long. It's too
long already, And so it was going to be seven.
(41:19):
Like seven is a great number, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Seven's a better number than six. Let's be honest. You
could have gone down to five.
Speaker 3 (41:25):
It's the fault of like glass.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Glass was too interesting, and you know, so I just
I overdid it, basically, I overcooked it.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
Well done. What's your least favorite material?
Speaker 3 (41:35):
Do you mean in the book or do you mean
and no, in the world. Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
I mean, like, I'm not an enormous fan of polyester.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
I don't know if you have any like running shirts
or workout shirts. Like, they don't call them polyester, they
call them whatever, Capeline or whatever brand name, but they're
basically polyester. Polyester is amazing.
Speaker 3 (41:57):
Now, that's the thing. That's why I have states saying this.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
Yeah, I mean plastic, polyester is plastic.
Speaker 3 (42:03):
Blast is plastic. It's a petrochemical.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
Yeah, it is a petrochemical, and.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
I think we, the English, we invented it. We basically
we invented a lot of the bad stuff we invented,
you know, the using fossil fuels. But that's also kind
of there's been many benefits from that.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
Yeah, the Industrial Revolution. I'm unbalance grateful for the Industrial Revolution.
It's a complicated legacy, but I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
Yeah, but we invented polyethylene, which is like the plastic
that you make plastic bags out of. Again, I don't
think we should be ashamed of it in the slightest,
but we are. You go to the place where they
invented polyethylene and there's a little plaque they've kind of
hidden on a building.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
I mean plastic bags I feel more ambivalent about than
the Industrial Revolution.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
Weirdly, polyethylene is not just plastic bags. It's basically, you know,
it's kind of everything. It's also you can make like
bulletproof fests out of it. You can make it is
the most adaptable of all of the plastics. It is
by far and away the most the biggest. I'm used
to kind of shitty old polyester, like you know, the
old kind of shirts like yeah, that make you sweat,
(43:04):
that make you sweat. These days, I think, particularly the Chinese,
this is kind of a thing. The Chinese have become
incredible at making really good fabrics out of polyester. And
so actually the polyester, like you saying of twenty twenty five,
is such a different thing, and that's I think largely
thanks to the Chinese being really clever about weaving it,
and also just particular types of glens. So I would
(43:26):
say polyesta, but then then I'd go back on myself,
just like I am now.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
Ed Conway is the author of Material World, the six
raw materials that shape of modern civilization. Please email us
at problem at Pushkin dot FM. We are always looking
for new guests for the show. Today's show was produced
by Trinamnino and Gabriel Hunter Chang, who was edited by
Alexander Garriton and engineered by Sarah Bruguier. I'm Jacob Goldstein
(43:59):
and we'll be back next week with another episode of
What's Your Pop
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