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The Ordinary Stuff Behind Technological Breakthroughs · What's Your Problem?

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. It's easy to think that technology is just about ideas, words, numbers, math, algorithms,
0:29
Speaker 1: But of course technology is and always has been, about stuff,
0:34
Speaker 1: and in particular, it's about combining ideas with that stuff.
0:39
Speaker 1: It's about figuring out how to use copper to send
0:41
Speaker 1: electricity around the world, how to turn sand into glass
0:45
Speaker 1: and cement and chips. It's about coming up with clever
0:48
Speaker 1: ways to make cheap steel so that we can build
0:51
Speaker 1: basically anything we want. And looking at technology and the
0:55
Speaker 1: history of technology through the lens of those essential materials
0:59
Speaker 1: of that stuff turns out to be a really interesting
1:03
Speaker 1: and surprisingly useful way of thinking about the world. I'm
1:13
Speaker 1: Jacob Goldstein, and this is what's your problem. My guest
1:16
Speaker 1: today is Ed Conway. He's an economics journalist and he
1:20
Speaker 1: wrote a book called Material World, The Six raw Materials
1:24
Speaker 1: that shape Modern Civilization. I talked to Ed about three
1:28
Speaker 1: of the six materials. We talked about iron, because the
1:32
Speaker 1: story of iron really is the story of the industrial revolution,
1:36
Speaker 1: and for that matter, the story of the wealth and
1:38
Speaker 1: poverty of nations around the world today. We also talked
1:42
Speaker 1: about copper, which is of course the story of electricity
1:46
Speaker 1: and the energy transition we're going through now. But copper
1:49
Speaker 1: is also a story about humanity's ability to be very
1:53
Speaker 1: clever in getting the thing that we need, even when
1:56
Speaker 1: it seems like we're going to run out of that thing.
1:58
Speaker 1: So those two materials, copper and iron, they are the
2:01
Speaker 1: second part of the show. In the first part of
2:04
Speaker 1: the show, Ed and I talked about sand, sand, which
2:08
Speaker 1: after reading Ed's book, I have come to think is
2:10
Speaker 1: a highly underrated material. Sand, of course, is essential for
2:14
Speaker 1: making chips and making cement, both of which we have
2:18
Speaker 1: covered on other episodes of this show. So Ed and
2:21
Speaker 1: I focused on another material made out of sand, glass,
2:25
Speaker 1: And as Ed explains, glass really was central to the
2:29
Speaker 1: emergence of the modern world starting around the sixteenth century
2:33
Speaker 1: the Venetians.
2:34
Speaker 2: That was really the first moment where they were able
2:38
Speaker 2: to create a truly clear, perfect type of glass, of
2:42
Speaker 2: the type that we could recognize these days. Roman glass
2:45
Speaker 2: was often beautiful, but it was a bit cloudy. The
2:49
Speaker 2: Venetians really mastered it, and part of the trick to
2:51
Speaker 2: that was obviously expertise and bringing in people who knew
2:55
Speaker 2: how to do it. And they were based on this island,
2:57
Speaker 2: the island of Murano, which is.
2:58
Speaker 3: Just an off Venis.
3:00
Speaker 2: They were forbidden to leave so that there was this
3:04
Speaker 2: in the same way that people making silicon chips in
3:06
Speaker 2: Taiwan these days are not allowed to go to China.
3:08
Speaker 3: It was a same thing with morano.
3:10
Speaker 1: And it's like like a trade secret basically, like the
3:15
Speaker 1: Venetians are traders. This is like a competitive advantage essentially
3:19
Speaker 1: a technological advantage they have and they're logging it down exactly.
3:23
Speaker 2: It's really analogous to what, you know, what we have
3:26
Speaker 2: these days with silicon check, I mean silicon technology as well.
3:29
Speaker 3: That's also sad.
3:30
Speaker 2: They cracked it, and partly they cracked it because they
3:33
Speaker 2: found a really good source of sand. Actually it's little
3:36
Speaker 2: quartz chips that they found in the rivers just kind
3:39
Speaker 2: of on the Swiss Italian border, and because they cracked it.
3:42
Speaker 2: You know, if you look back, like one of my
3:45
Speaker 2: favorite kind of stories, it's kind of theory, but to
3:48
Speaker 2: me it's a really compelling theory, is that the Renaissance,
3:51
Speaker 2: you know, there's great flowering of artistic kind of ability and.
3:54
Speaker 3: Where painters discovered how to use perspective.
3:57
Speaker 2: You know, there's this moment where it goes from being
3:59
Speaker 2: really two D kind of Giotto, medieval style paintings of
4:04
Speaker 2: Christ and all of these different kind of icons to
4:08
Speaker 2: being something that's three D and something's more recognizable as
4:10
Speaker 2: a painting of the Renaissance. The prevailing theory is basically
4:14
Speaker 2: what happened there, There was just this moment dawning realization,
4:17
Speaker 2: and people worked out how to do perspective. And it's
4:19
Speaker 2: this enlightenment to me, a much more compelling explanation.
4:22
Speaker 3: It's one that David Hockney and a few other theorists
4:25
Speaker 3: have posited.
4:26
Speaker 1: David Harckney the artist, David Hockney.
4:28
Speaker 2: The artist has wrote a whole book on this a
4:30
Speaker 2: few years ago and actually did this great documentary which
4:32
Speaker 2: you can find on YouTube about this, basically saying, no,
4:36
Speaker 2: what happened was they worked out how to use lenses.
4:39
Speaker 2: They worked out how to make glass lenses that enabled
4:42
Speaker 2: them to make camera obscurers and other different types of
4:45
Speaker 2: contractions that enabled them to basically trace out the outline
4:50
Speaker 2: of what was happening in a studio or in a
4:52
Speaker 2: picture or whatever. And there are artifacts of this because
4:55
Speaker 2: if you look at certain pictures, particularly from those early
4:58
Speaker 2: kind of medieval, well early Renaissance paintings, and also some
5:02
Speaker 2: from the Dutch Golden Era. You see, for instance, that
5:06
Speaker 2: parts of the painting go out of focus and something
5:08
Speaker 2: going focus. The human eye doesn't really go out of
5:11
Speaker 2: focus in that way, but through a lens things do
5:15
Speaker 2: go out of focus. And so Hockney points out, and
5:18
Speaker 2: like I say, I think it's a really compelling case
5:20
Speaker 2: that the places that where you had this flowering of
5:24
Speaker 2: you know, enlightenments and beautiful paintings that use perspective also
5:28
Speaker 2: happened to be close to the great places where glass
5:31
Speaker 2: was being manufactured, so Venice, in the Netherlands, in England
5:35
Speaker 2: as well to some extent, although our painting wasn't quite
5:38
Speaker 2: so great, wherever there was great glass making there also
5:41
Speaker 2: happened to be great enlightenment leaks forward.
5:44
Speaker 1: The Renaissance is sort of following, and so you need
5:47
Speaker 1: the glass to be able to make the lens, and
5:50
Speaker 1: in Hockney's argument, you need the lens to project the
5:54
Speaker 1: world onto a two dimensional surface. Except from that projection
5:58
Speaker 1: then you can learn perspective.
6:00
Speaker 2: Exactly, Then you learn perspective, and obviously in the same
6:02
Speaker 2: way that you have enabling technologies throughout history. You know,
6:06
Speaker 2: right now we're thinking of AI.
6:07
Speaker 1: So was Leonardo t Yeah, yeah, he was.
6:11
Speaker 2: He was, and so were you know, so were many
6:14
Speaker 2: of these artists. And I don't think there's anything kind
6:16
Speaker 2: of to be ashamed of here.
6:17
Speaker 1: No, especially if you discover tracing. If you're like, wait
6:20
Speaker 1: a minute, I can trace.
6:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then suddenly it's a lot of as every
6:25
Speaker 2: kid knows, it's a lot easier suddenly, And that's what
6:27
Speaker 2: they were doing. But they were doing it with great
6:29
Speaker 2: panashion style, and we've kind of, I think, forgotten that.
6:32
Speaker 2: But there's there's a very material explanation.
6:34
Speaker 1: In a similar thing. You also talk about the relationship
6:38
Speaker 1: of improvements in glass technology to the scientific revolution, which was,
6:42
Speaker 1: you know, around this same time.
6:44
Speaker 3: Yeah.
6:45
Speaker 2: Well, I mean if you look and again, I find
6:47
Speaker 2: this kind of mind blowing.
6:48
Speaker 1: And that one seems clearer. Again, no pun intended that one.
6:52
Speaker 1: That argument seems less tenuous.
6:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I don't know, I don't know, I don't
6:56
Speaker 2: know if it's okay, respectful.
6:58
Speaker 1: How about this? That argument seems more compelling. That's a
7:01
Speaker 1: nicer way of saying less tenuous.
7:03
Speaker 3: It's even more compelling, isn't it. Yeah, it's even more compelling.
7:07
Speaker 2: It's it's if you look at basically I think the
7:09
Speaker 2: vast majority of scientific discoveries that were made in that
7:12
Speaker 2: period of the great you know, the Enlightenment, the kind
7:14
Speaker 2: of eighteenth nineteenth century, seventeenth some excent.
7:17
Speaker 1: Even earlier, right, like Galileo, right, Like, you don't even
7:20
Speaker 1: have to leave galileanly.
7:22
Speaker 2: So telescope, I mean, how do we pair into space?
7:24
Speaker 2: And this was all thanks to our ability to harness sand,
7:28
Speaker 2: turn it into glass, and then turn it into you know,
7:30
Speaker 2: kind of sand that down into beautiful lenses that enabled
7:33
Speaker 2: us to see further or indeed see kind of deepest,
7:36
Speaker 2: so microscopically, that was glass.
7:39
Speaker 1: You don't discover the cell until you have a microscope,
7:43
Speaker 1: and you don't have a microscope until you have really
7:45
Speaker 1: good glass. Right. And I feel like tools, like this
7:49
Speaker 1: is the story of tools, right, and tools are underrated
7:53
Speaker 1: in scientific.
7:53
Speaker 3: Discovery, right, like totally.
7:56
Speaker 1: Once you have a telescope, then somebody is going to
7:58
Speaker 1: see the moons of Jupiter. Once you have a microscope,
8:01
Speaker 1: somebody is going to see a cell. The hard part
8:03
Speaker 1: is getting the telescope and the microscope.
8:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, and yet the thing we celebrate and understandably is
8:08
Speaker 2: we celebrate the Galileos and the van Luveruk, who's one
8:11
Speaker 2: of those first great people looking down into microscopes. But yeah,
8:15
Speaker 2: they needed the contractions and also they needed to rely
8:18
Speaker 2: on people to make really good glass for them, because
8:21
Speaker 2: you could you needed really clear glass to be able
8:23
Speaker 2: to peer down into this. And the funny thing I've discovered,
8:26
Speaker 2: you know, looking back through that history of the Enlightenment,
8:30
Speaker 2: what you kind of notice if you look through lots
8:32
Speaker 2: of the stories and the accounts, is that so many
8:34
Speaker 2: of the people who were scientists and renowned actually as
8:36
Speaker 2: scientists for something else.
8:38
Speaker 3: Michael Faraday is a really good example, you know.
8:40
Speaker 1: Electoral magnets, electromagnets, basically the electricity.
8:43
Speaker 2: He's the electricity guy. He was also totally obsessed with glass,
8:46
Speaker 2: so he used to make his own glass. Actually one
8:49
Speaker 2: of the earliest recipes for something called boris silicate glass,
8:51
Speaker 2: which is like these days what we use for test
8:54
Speaker 2: tubes and the vials that you get your kind of
8:57
Speaker 2: vaccines and medicines in.
8:59
Speaker 3: There's really hard type of glass.
9:00
Speaker 1: So is that related to pyrex to the glass you
9:02
Speaker 1: can put in.
9:03
Speaker 2: The oven is Boris silicate glass. It's just you know,
9:06
Speaker 2: the trademark. But Faraday, he I don't know if invented
9:10
Speaker 2: to the right word. But he was a tinkerer with glass,
9:12
Speaker 2: and he made an early form of boris silica glass
9:15
Speaker 2: because everyone was doing it. And if you look back,
9:17
Speaker 2: there's this great book Making of the Atomic Bomb by
9:21
Speaker 2: Richard Rhodes. I was reading it after having written this book,
9:24
Speaker 2: and I was struck by how many times within the
9:27
Speaker 2: discovery of how to split the atom, people were waylaid
9:31
Speaker 2: by getting hold of the right glass. Because you need
9:33
Speaker 2: a glass within which to do your experiments, because glass
9:36
Speaker 2: is very inert, obviously, and it's the inertness of glass
9:39
Speaker 2: that makes it really important, you know, for doing chemical experiments,
9:43
Speaker 2: for making vacuums, all of these things. So if you
9:46
Speaker 2: look at pretty much I think the vast majority of
9:48
Speaker 2: different scientific discoveries during the Enlightenment, and some authors did
9:52
Speaker 2: a survey of here are the great discoveries, how many
9:54
Speaker 2: of them depended one way or another on glass, whether
9:56
Speaker 2: it's a test ubes, vacuum chambers, or indeed lenses.
10:01
Speaker 3: It's the majority of them.
10:02
Speaker 2: And so our scientific world is built on glass as well.
10:06
Speaker 2: So we think this stuff is kind of historic. And
10:08
Speaker 2: that goes by the way for even right now, because
10:11
Speaker 2: there are when we're making silicon chips, and maybe we'll
10:14
Speaker 2: come onto this. When you're making a lot of kind
10:16
Speaker 2: of advanced equipments, you still need optics. And for great optics,
10:19
Speaker 2: you still need excellent glass.
10:22
Speaker 1: Well, fiber optics you talk about in the book, right right,
10:26
Speaker 1: talk about fiber optics. That seems like the obvious contemporary yeah,
10:29
Speaker 1: glass case.
10:31
Speaker 3: You know.
10:32
Speaker 2: Fiber optics I think is a really good example of
10:34
Speaker 2: the underlining of our forgetting of the materiality of our world.
10:38
Speaker 2: Because when people think about the Internet, I think, because
10:40
Speaker 2: we have Wi Fi, just.
10:41
Speaker 1: That last twenty feet is just the last twenty feet
10:44
Speaker 1: that's going through the air.
10:45
Speaker 2: But that's the twenty feet that we're familiar with, you know,
10:47
Speaker 2: That's what we're aware of.
10:49
Speaker 1: So what's the rest. What are the other I'm talking
10:51
Speaker 1: to you, three thousand miles away, four thousand miles away,
10:53
Speaker 1: what's going.
10:54
Speaker 2: Through The majority of all of the bits that they're
10:57
Speaker 2: enabling us to talk are going on fiber optics. They're
11:00
Speaker 2: going on fiber optics. In our case, underneath the Atlantic Ocean,
11:03
Speaker 2: there's only a teensy tiny bit where things are traveling
11:07
Speaker 2: through the air. The World Wide Web is a physical
11:10
Speaker 2: structure with loads of fiber optics, loads of service centers,
11:14
Speaker 2: and each of those fiber optic cables is a tiny
11:16
Speaker 2: little strand of glass. It's actually two types of glass,
11:20
Speaker 2: kind of one inside the other. Which again, that's our world.
11:25
Speaker 2: Our world depends on glass. We can't have the Internet
11:29
Speaker 2: without glass. And again we forget that, we're kind of
11:33
Speaker 2: encouraged to forget it.
11:34
Speaker 1: Not anymore. I want to make one more stop on
11:38
Speaker 1: glass before we move on, because it was truly surprising
11:41
Speaker 1: to me, and I'm happy that I know it tell
11:44
Speaker 1: me about the shortage of lenses in the UK in
11:50
Speaker 1: World War One.
11:51
Speaker 2: I think this is actually a great story because it
11:53
Speaker 2: tells you quite a lot about what we're going through
11:56
Speaker 2: right now with period of you know, de industrialization in
12:00
Speaker 2: the US, Europe everywhere else and wondering like how on
12:03
Speaker 2: earth do we turn this around. So for a long time,
12:06
Speaker 2: England was kind of at the cutting edge of glass
12:08
Speaker 2: technol A lot of the great lenses were made here.
12:11
Speaker 2: You've got Michael Faraday obsessing over glass and Crown glass.
12:15
Speaker 2: A lot of achievements that then led to really good
12:18
Speaker 2: optics happened in England. And then they decided the governments
12:22
Speaker 2: as they often do needed to raise money for the
12:24
Speaker 2: wars against France, and they decided to tax glass making
12:28
Speaker 2: and they also tax windows.
12:29
Speaker 3: So in England you have lots of older.
12:33
Speaker 2: Houses, particularly ones that are kind of Georgian and Queen
12:36
Speaker 2: Anne's so kind of going back like two three hundred
12:38
Speaker 2: years where if you look at them, suddenly some of
12:40
Speaker 2: the windows have been bricked up. And the reason they
12:42
Speaker 2: bricks up is because the government decided to impose a
12:44
Speaker 2: tax on however many windows you had, you would have
12:47
Speaker 2: to pay more tax.
12:48
Speaker 1: It's a sort of seeing like a state thing. Right,
12:50
Speaker 1: It's like what can somebody walk down the street and
12:53
Speaker 1: count from the street, right, Yeah the legibility, Yeah, legibility
12:56
Speaker 1: is good, right yeah.
12:57
Speaker 2: Counting windows, but also actually chimneys was another thing.
13:00
Speaker 3: Uh.
13:01
Speaker 2: So the government wanted to tax glass, they wanted to
13:03
Speaker 2: raise lots of money, and they did, and they raised
13:04
Speaker 2: leads of money and that was great for them. But
13:07
Speaker 2: partly as a result of that, a lot of the
13:08
Speaker 2: innervation in glass shifted elsewhere.
13:11
Speaker 3: And actually Germany, which was.
13:12
Speaker 2: Beginning to engage in what you today call industrial strategies,
13:16
Speaker 2: so the government governmental organizations starting to introduce kind of subsidies.
13:22
Speaker 2: They really focused on glass because it was you know,
13:25
Speaker 2: this was an opportunity. This is eighteen hundreds and you've
13:28
Speaker 2: got actually Gerte, the kind of famous statesman poet, was
13:32
Speaker 2: really heavily involved in this, to the extent that in
13:36
Speaker 2: what is now kind of towards the.
13:38
Speaker 3: East of Germany it became East Germany.
13:40
Speaker 2: You had in a town called Jenna, there was a
13:43
Speaker 2: university that a lot of money went into which encouraged
13:47
Speaker 2: investigation and also kind of manufacture of glass. And out
13:50
Speaker 2: of that that hub of manufacturing came some names that
13:54
Speaker 2: we will probably.
13:55
Speaker 3: Recognize today, like Seis. A guy called Carl Seiss.
13:58
Speaker 2: Became a really big kind of manufacturer of glass, indeed
14:02
Speaker 2: of lenses. And the long story short is that Germany
14:06
Speaker 2: became really dominant in the manufacture of really good, quite
14:09
Speaker 2: cheap optical glass, and the English industry basically withered away.
14:14
Speaker 2: France had slightly withered away as well, and in Germany's
14:18
Speaker 2: Seiss binoculars and telescopes and sniperscopes became totally dominant, to
14:23
Speaker 2: the extent that come nineteen fourteen, England is importing about
14:28
Speaker 2: sixty percent of all of its binoculars from Germany's Zeiss binoculars.
14:33
Speaker 2: So when war breaks out, then all of a sudden,
14:35
Speaker 2: it is a terrible crisis. They call it the glass famine.
14:39
Speaker 2: You've got people, you know, going to the trenches in
14:42
Speaker 2: France and Belgium equipped with binoculars and opera glasses.
14:47
Speaker 3: That they've had to borrow off people.
14:49
Speaker 2: There was an appeal that was launched for people to
14:52
Speaker 2: donate their used binoculars to troops because England didn't have
14:56
Speaker 2: enough of them, and you know, people were getting killed
14:59
Speaker 2: because the Germans had the better snipers. This was kind
15:01
Speaker 2: of the First War. Really, the First World War was
15:03
Speaker 2: the first war where you were able to fire your
15:06
Speaker 2: weapons far further.
15:07
Speaker 3: Than you could see.
15:09
Speaker 2: So your ability to see and your ability to see
15:11
Speaker 2: far was the matter of difference between life and death.
15:13
Speaker 2: And the Germans had by far and away the upper
15:15
Speaker 2: hand on that. And it culminated in nineteen fifteen in
15:18
Speaker 2: this extraordinary deal where Britain actually sent spies to meet
15:23
Speaker 2: with their German counterparts in Switzerland to do a deal
15:27
Speaker 2: to buy binoculars off the Germans so that they could
15:32
Speaker 2: kill them better. The most extraordinary thing is the Germans
15:35
Speaker 2: said yes.
15:37
Speaker 1: Like why would the Germans agree to it?
15:39
Speaker 2: They said yes, And the reason they agreed to it,
15:41
Speaker 2: and it comes back to materials again, is that they
15:44
Speaker 2: were short of rubber. So Britain controlled most of the
15:47
Speaker 2: global rubber supply, and you need a rubber obviously for
15:50
Speaker 2: fan belts in your engines, for tires, for everything else.
15:53
Speaker 2: And so the Germans were short of rubber, we were
15:55
Speaker 2: short of glass. And rather than saying, okay, well this
15:58
Speaker 2: is a bit of a pretty pass here, let's just
16:00
Speaker 2: stop the war, they said, okay, we'll do the deal,
16:02
Speaker 2: and then we can carry on killing each other a
16:04
Speaker 2: little bit more effectively.
16:05
Speaker 1: Let's make a deal, swer you could keep killing each other. Yeah,
16:07
Speaker 1: And it happened, in fact, and.
16:09
Speaker 2: It's a great story and it did actually happen. But
16:11
Speaker 2: what's even more interesting is that in the following years,
16:14
Speaker 2: and this I think a lesson for where we are now.
16:16
Speaker 2: In the following years, England did manage to increase its
16:20
Speaker 2: glass manufacturing massively and really fast. And it just goes
16:24
Speaker 2: to show so by the end of the war they
16:26
Speaker 2: were producing more more binoculars than they needed. They were
16:28
Speaker 2: sending some of them to America, and it just goes
16:31
Speaker 2: to show you can do it. Like if you need
16:33
Speaker 2: to try and create an industry. It is possible to
16:36
Speaker 2: do it, but often you need a wartime situation to
16:38
Speaker 2: encourage you to do it. The catch is you do
16:41
Speaker 2: need a bit of a base to start from.
16:43
Speaker 1: Well, And it's complicated, right, I mean, we're going to
16:45
Speaker 1: talk about this later, but we can talk about it now.
16:47
Speaker 1: Like there is a set of trade offs, right, Like
16:50
Speaker 1: at certain margins, you know, comparative advantage, it makes sense
16:53
Speaker 1: to do what you're good at and let other countries
16:55
Speaker 1: do what they're good at, and you get more material
16:57
Speaker 1: prosperity that way, right. But the asterisk is if Germany
17:01
Speaker 1: is making all the lenses and you go to war
17:03
Speaker 1: with Germany, that's going to be bad, right, And so
17:05
Speaker 1: that is a hard We shouldn't try and make everything
17:08
Speaker 1: like that seems clear, I mean, I guess there is
17:12
Speaker 1: a big question which is like can you abstract lessons?
17:18
Speaker 1: What should we try and make and what should we
17:20
Speaker 1: not try and make for me?
17:22
Speaker 2: And I'm kind of thinking about this a lot, so
17:23
Speaker 2: I'm kind of working on what might be in another
17:26
Speaker 2: book on this kind of topic. Like comparative advantage, it's
17:30
Speaker 2: not set in stone, you know, it is something you
17:33
Speaker 2: can change and something you can influence sure.
17:35
Speaker 1: Presumably you don't believe in autarchy. You don't think that
17:38
Speaker 1: just because the country is a country, it should make everything.
17:41
Speaker 1: Presumably you don't believe in like pure comparative advantage. Right.
17:44
Speaker 1: The hard questions are at the margins, like how many
17:47
Speaker 1: chips should we try and make in the United States?
17:49
Speaker 1: Like that's a weird hard question.
17:51
Speaker 2: Completely, and what are the trade offs there? And what
17:53
Speaker 2: are you foregoing in order to do that? And I
17:55
Speaker 2: think again, we are living through an exercise in that
17:58
Speaker 2: right now.
17:59
Speaker 1: Right, the pendulum is swinging back. Right, the pendulum is
18:02
Speaker 1: swinging back toward domestic production.
18:05
Speaker 3: Now.
18:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, And you know, I think that's some more new
18:09
Speaker 2: an interesting conversation than it's often made out to be.
18:12
Speaker 3: I think that's the thing.
18:13
Speaker 2: I think when you when you start looking at some
18:15
Speaker 2: of the history of technologies, you kind of realize this
18:19
Speaker 2: stuff it didn't just come down from the sky. You know.
18:21
Speaker 2: Most of the reason that things happen in particular countries
18:24
Speaker 2: is because of various interventions. And some of those interventions
18:27
Speaker 2: worked and some of those didn't.
18:30
Speaker 1: Still to come on the show, Iron and Copper, we'll
18:34
Speaker 1: be back in a minute. Let's do Iron.
18:45
Speaker 3: So you're navigating this in a I have a plan.
18:49
Speaker 1: And it's going basically to plan. Yeah, tell me about
18:53
Speaker 1: how iron production in the UK helped lead to the
18:55
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution. Okay, you need to break you get some water.
19:01
Speaker 3: No, I'm just wondering where you were taking me.
19:04
Speaker 1: I feel like that was a very straightforward turn right revolution.
19:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, I mean so the industrial revolution really, you know,
19:14
Speaker 2: it's kind of a two part thing. First of all,
19:16
Speaker 2: came the moment where in England there's it's kind of
19:19
Speaker 2: a semi environmental story. We were taking that iron out
19:23
Speaker 2: of the ground, or taking the iron ground, smelting it
19:27
Speaker 2: down into iron and burning a lot of charcoal along
19:30
Speaker 2: the way to make that happen, and we cut down
19:33
Speaker 2: a lot of trees to make it happen. This is
19:35
Speaker 2: around the kind of fifteen sixteenth century, one of the
19:38
Speaker 2: first kind of early ecological panics. Everyone started to panic
19:43
Speaker 2: that we were running out of trees and that if
19:45
Speaker 2: we carried on making as much iron as we wanted to,
19:48
Speaker 2: not just iron, because it was other things like making
19:49
Speaker 2: beer and glass and salt and things like that. For
19:52
Speaker 2: all of these things, you kind of need to burn
19:54
Speaker 2: a lot of charcoal and create your kind of industrial process.
19:59
Speaker 3: But people panics.
20:00
Speaker 2: Everyone thought, we're going to run out of trees, and
20:02
Speaker 2: as a result, the Royal Navy was going to have
20:04
Speaker 2: to be shut down and you wouldn't have enough trees
20:05
Speaker 2: for the masts that you need on the great ships
20:08
Speaker 2: of the line. And what the first great kind of
20:10
Speaker 2: innovation on this was this guy, Abraham Derby, who worked
20:15
Speaker 2: out in the kind of the turn of the kind
20:17
Speaker 2: of seventeenth eighteenth century, who worked out how to make
20:21
Speaker 2: coal the fuel sauce rather than charcoal, and that meant
20:25
Speaker 2: you didn't have to burn down trees. You could use
20:27
Speaker 2: coal that you dug out of the ground. And it
20:29
Speaker 2: was actually quite hard thing to do, but he managed
20:30
Speaker 2: to do it, and that was the moment that the
20:34
Speaker 2: fossil fuel world that we know it began. That's why
20:37
Speaker 2: you can kind of like date the climate change story
20:40
Speaker 2: in a way from that moment in the midlands of
20:44
Speaker 2: England where he was like, okay, let's use coal. And essentially,
20:48
Speaker 2: as a result of that, you're no longer bound by
20:51
Speaker 2: the kind of organic constraints of how many trees you
20:53
Speaker 2: can actually plant and cut down.
20:55
Speaker 1: In particular, because England happened to have abundant, relatively accessible coal, right,
21:01
Speaker 1: an important piece of it.
21:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, so two things in a way.
21:03
Speaker 2: It's this kind of this perfect coincidence, a coincidence having
21:07
Speaker 2: quite a lot of coal in the ground. It's quite
21:08
Speaker 2: good coal like anthracites, so it's kind of rich coal
21:11
Speaker 2: that's good. But as well as that, we didn't have
21:14
Speaker 2: enough trees. So France, which had far more forests than England's,
21:19
Speaker 2: actually never really got onto this because they had enough
21:22
Speaker 2: forest that they could turn those trees into charcoal and
21:25
Speaker 2: then use them to carry on making steel or iron
21:28
Speaker 2: the way they wanted to, whereas in England we just
21:30
Speaker 2: didn't have enough trees because we just didn't have as
21:32
Speaker 2: much land mass, and so that pushed us towards coal.
21:36
Speaker 2: And by being pushed towards coal, then we started to
21:38
Speaker 2: discover other things along the way.
21:40
Speaker 1: Yes, you make the point that it was work in
21:44
Speaker 1: the coal mines that led to the invention of the
21:47
Speaker 1: steam engine, which is this sort of signature invention of
21:51
Speaker 1: the industrial revolution in some ways, you know, the modern age.
21:55
Speaker 2: Yes, steam engines were initially there not to move trains
21:59
Speaker 2: or anything else. They were there just to pump water
22:02
Speaker 2: out of coal mines basically, and from that then other
22:08
Speaker 2: innovations happened. But I mean the second thing with iron
22:11
Speaker 2: is so you can make your iron, but still really
22:15
Speaker 2: hard to turn it into steel. And like I say,
22:17
Speaker 2: steel is just so much better than different types of iron,
22:21
Speaker 2: whether it's kind of cast iron or raught iron, it
22:23
Speaker 2: is just so much stronger, it is much more resilient.
22:26
Speaker 2: You can build big buildings out of it. And so
22:29
Speaker 2: the real moment that everything changed and provided us with
22:33
Speaker 2: the materials we need to make skyscrapers, for instance, was
22:37
Speaker 2: the Bessemer process, and that was kind of later on.
22:39
Speaker 2: That was in the kind of mid eighteen hundreds where
22:42
Speaker 2: Henry Bessemer and there was another guy who was kind
22:44
Speaker 2: of working on this as well, I think in the
22:47
Speaker 2: States at the same time, worked out how to use
22:51
Speaker 2: oxygen basically kind of to puff a lot of oxygen
22:53
Speaker 2: into the to the mix of this molten iron, which
22:57
Speaker 2: again is just getting rid of more of the carbon
23:01
Speaker 2: and getting it down to just the right amount of carbon.
23:03
Speaker 2: What was so revolutionary about Bessemer is up until then
23:07
Speaker 2: it was just really hard to make and so just
23:10
Speaker 2: you couldn't really make it in large quantities. After Bessemus,
23:13
Speaker 2: suddenly you're able to make steel in massive quantities, and
23:16
Speaker 2: so something that was incredibly expensive became cheap.
23:20
Speaker 1: It goes from being artisanal to being.
23:22
Speaker 2: In dust exactly. And that's like with all of these technologies.
23:25
Speaker 2: That's the moment the world changes. It's the same, you
23:28
Speaker 2: know with salt, it's the same with with glass. The
23:30
Speaker 2: moment that you can make something, make a process that
23:33
Speaker 2: enables you to turn it out at scale of there's
23:35
Speaker 2: a great economic paper on this, can't remember the author,
23:38
Speaker 2: but I talked about it in the book about the
23:40
Speaker 2: price of nails and how nails used to be one
23:42
Speaker 2: of the most expensive things. We used to spend more
23:44
Speaker 2: as an economy on nails than we do today on computers.
23:47
Speaker 2: And because nails are now so cheap, because you can
23:50
Speaker 2: turn out metal and steel in such great quantities and
23:52
Speaker 2: they're better as well, that the world has changed. If
23:55
Speaker 2: the Titanic had steel nails of the kind that we
23:59
Speaker 2: have today on it rather than the rivets they were
24:03
Speaker 2: using back then, just the quality of the metal that
24:06
Speaker 2: it probably never would have been sunk by the iceberg,
24:09
Speaker 2: history would have been different.
24:11
Speaker 1: A comfort to a comfort to cruisers everywhere exactly. So
24:15
Speaker 1: you also read about how today making steel is this
24:18
Speaker 1: incredibly large share of global carbon emissions. Just talk about that.
24:23
Speaker 3: For a minute.
24:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's the blast furnace stage. I had this
24:27
Speaker 2: kind of striking moment where I stood in front of
24:28
Speaker 2: a blast furnace in the UK and that one of
24:31
Speaker 2: the people working there looked at me and said, you know,
24:34
Speaker 2: actually the main product of this blast furnace is not iron,
24:38
Speaker 2: it's carbon by weight.
24:41
Speaker 3: By weight, that.
24:44
Speaker 1: Figures the carbon is carbon dioxide gas. Just to be clear, right.
24:48
Speaker 2: Exactly, But if you weigh it, which you could, you know,
24:51
Speaker 2: which I think you can do in theory but maybe
24:53
Speaker 2: in practice. But if you weigh it, there is more
24:55
Speaker 2: carbon dioxide gas, more carbon being produced in tons than
24:59
Speaker 2: there is the equivalent amount of iron. And that's because
25:03
Speaker 2: in order to you know, when you chuck this stuff in,
25:06
Speaker 2: you're chucking iron ore inside that furnace, an extraordinary chemic
25:09
Speaker 2: or reaction is happening where the carbon, which is an
25:12
Speaker 2: amazing molecule, is ripping the oxygen off of the iron ore.
25:16
Speaker 1: It's sort of derusting it.
25:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly, because if you see iron ore, it's
25:20
Speaker 2: kind of it looks like rust. And you know, there
25:22
Speaker 2: aren't that many blast furnaces left in the world. There's
25:24
Speaker 2: only I don't know, there's like four left. In the US,
25:27
Speaker 2: We've only got one, or there's a pair of them
25:31
Speaker 2: left going, and they were very nearly shut down recently.
25:33
Speaker 3: In the UK.
25:34
Speaker 2: There's not many of these places left in the world.
25:36
Speaker 2: But each of these sites is invariably the single biggest
25:42
Speaker 2: producer of carbon in what whatever country it is the
25:45
Speaker 2: single biggest one. So I was there in this place
25:47
Speaker 2: in Wales is the single biggest producer of carbon dioxide
25:51
Speaker 2: in our country. And now that's been shut down, and
25:53
Speaker 2: so there's the other one over on the other side
25:55
Speaker 2: of the country.
25:56
Speaker 3: It'll be the same in America.
25:58
Speaker 2: And the only way of making still in large quantities
26:02
Speaker 2: at a relatively cheap price that makes this stuff worthwhile
26:05
Speaker 2: is in a blast furnace, and that creates crazy amounts
26:08
Speaker 2: of carbon dioxide. And this is the massive, big black
26:12
Speaker 2: hole at the heart of many of the kind of
26:13
Speaker 2: models you see about how this is how we get
26:15
Speaker 2: to that zero. No one is quite accounted for the
26:18
Speaker 2: fact there's a lot of people who just want to
26:21
Speaker 2: see their living standards increase, and in order to do so,
26:23
Speaker 2: they want to burn some iron ore and turn it
26:25
Speaker 2: into steel.
26:26
Speaker 3: So it's a quandary.
26:27
Speaker 1: Did you look at people working on green steel do
26:30
Speaker 1: you have a view on Yeah, yeah, probability of that
26:35
Speaker 1: working at scale in an economic way.
26:38
Speaker 2: The main truly green steel kind of method people talk
26:42
Speaker 2: about is hydrogen dri so direct reduced iron. Using hydrogen
26:46
Speaker 2: as your kind of adjutant, you kind of add it
26:48
Speaker 2: to the to the mix. It's so expensive, it's so
26:52
Speaker 2: so expensive to make iron that way. So for some
26:54
Speaker 2: of us, you know, it's it's Sweden is big in it.
26:56
Speaker 2: They're trying to make volvos using this stuff. You know,
26:59
Speaker 2: for many of us who want to have green steel
27:01
Speaker 2: and are able to afford a bit more, that's that's fine.
27:04
Speaker 1: But that's not the one we care about, right. We
27:06
Speaker 1: care about green steel that is pray competitive with whatever
27:09
Speaker 1: you call it, round steel.
27:11
Speaker 2: I fear that's a long time coming, maybe never. And
27:16
Speaker 2: there's the electric arc furnaces. So in the US you
27:18
Speaker 2: get eighty percent of your steel from electric arc furnaces,
27:21
Speaker 2: which is recycling steel, which actually is really low carbon.
27:24
Speaker 2: But again, you've got the steel. Think about it. You've
27:27
Speaker 2: got your fifteen tons of steel, and you can keep
27:30
Speaker 2: on recycling that, you know, not forever you need to
27:33
Speaker 2: every so often, you need to add a bed of UI.
27:35
Speaker 3: Into the mix.
27:36
Speaker 2: But we're kind of okay, We've got enough steel around
27:39
Speaker 2: us to keep on recycling it. The issue is like,
27:42
Speaker 2: it's sub Saharan Africa, it's parts of Asia, that it's
27:45
Speaker 2: parts of South America. They want more steel and they
27:48
Speaker 2: want better living standards, so they want to use more
27:50
Speaker 2: energy and why not. And I think there's this clash
27:53
Speaker 2: at the moment between our understandable concern about climate change
27:58
Speaker 2: and other parts of the world which just want to
28:01
Speaker 2: have better standards of living. And in order to get
28:03
Speaker 2: those standards of living, pretty much every process you can
28:06
Speaker 2: do to get there is going to create more carbon.
28:10
Speaker 1: Let's talk about copper.
28:13
Speaker 3: Let's talk about copper.
28:15
Speaker 1: So tell me about copper as the secret story of
28:21
Speaker 1: the Second Industrial Revolution. Tell me about copper as the
28:24
Speaker 1: secret story behind electrification of the world.
28:28
Speaker 2: Okay, I think of all of the different kind of
28:31
Speaker 2: materials in our relationships with them, maybe this is kind
28:34
Speaker 2: of like the most intuitive because if you have a
28:37
Speaker 2: power cut, you know you're screwed.
28:39
Speaker 3: And copper is electricity.
28:42
Speaker 2: I think you're conscious of that a bit more, and
28:44
Speaker 2: you're conscious that electricity is of all the life support
28:47
Speaker 2: systems for civilization. You know, we could probably survive without
28:51
Speaker 2: the internet. If we don't have electricity, then we're truly scoppered.
28:55
Speaker 1: Well, and so I mean speaking of electricity, right, part
28:58
Speaker 1: of the reason I wanted to talk about copper. Among
29:01
Speaker 1: the things he wrote about is we need a lot
29:05
Speaker 1: more copper in order to electrify the world, which is
29:07
Speaker 1: like a good thing, right, we want to electrify the world.
29:11
Speaker 1: It's a good thing. Asterisk. Well, we got to get
29:13
Speaker 1: a bunch more. And so there is this recent history
29:19
Speaker 1: of wondering are we going to be able to get
29:21
Speaker 1: more copper?
29:22
Speaker 3: Right?
29:22
Speaker 1: There's this famous bet from the seventies, Right, it was
29:27
Speaker 1: in the seventies between the biologist Paul Erleck and the
29:32
Speaker 1: economist Julian Simon. Tell me about that bet in the
29:35
Speaker 1: history of copper.
29:36
Speaker 2: So, Paul Olik was this incredibly charismatic scientist who, I think,
29:42
Speaker 2: like a lot of people, particularly in the nineteen seventies,
29:44
Speaker 2: was very worried about the rise in global population. He
29:47
Speaker 2: wrote a very famous book called The Population Bomb, which
29:50
Speaker 2: contained a lot of forecasts that turned out to be
29:53
Speaker 2: kind of nonsense.
29:55
Speaker 1: And they were very high conviction right Like in this book,
29:59
Speaker 1: he doesn't say like we should be worried. He says, like,
30:02
Speaker 1: we are screwed already. There are so many people that
30:05
Speaker 1: there are going to be famines. It's a certainty because
30:08
Speaker 1: we won't be able to grow enough food to feed everybody.
30:10
Speaker 2: I think one of one of the predictions was that
30:12
Speaker 2: England wouldn't exist as a country in like two thousand
30:15
Speaker 2: or something.
30:16
Speaker 3: Like that you showed and here we are still not almost.
30:20
Speaker 2: But the point is, yeah, I think people who can
30:23
Speaker 2: can say somewhat outrageous things with great conviction are compelling
30:28
Speaker 2: and they get listened to.
30:30
Speaker 1: Indeed, there is abundant evidence for that fact, for that claim.
30:34
Speaker 2: But it turns out actually when you kind of peel
30:36
Speaker 2: away stuff, I mean, doubt is not super fashionable, but
30:39
Speaker 2: it turns out, you know, it's quite it's kind of
30:40
Speaker 2: important within the scientific you know, the Enlightenment is kind
30:44
Speaker 2: of about doubt. And so all Erlik was basically saying
30:48
Speaker 2: we're going to hell in a handcock to some extent,
30:52
Speaker 2: reprising some of Thomas Malthus's prognostications from the nineteenth century,
30:57
Speaker 2: saying that the population was rising too fast, We're going
30:59
Speaker 2: to run out of stuff, and there's kind of two
31:02
Speaker 2: ways this is going to be manifested.
31:03
Speaker 3: We're going to run out of food, but we're also.
31:05
Speaker 2: Going to run out of the materials we need to
31:07
Speaker 2: make stuff, and so he was very pessimistic. This guy
31:11
Speaker 2: called Julian Simon, who was a slightly obscure economist but
31:14
Speaker 2: you know, kind of somewhat libertarian economists, heard Alic talking.
31:18
Speaker 3: He got absolutely infuriated that this guy was.
31:20
Speaker 2: Getting all the attention, that he'd go on all of
31:21
Speaker 2: the Tonight Show and so on, because he was entertaining,
31:24
Speaker 2: you know, that was the thing he was entertaining, and
31:26
Speaker 2: he had conviction.
31:27
Speaker 3: Simon never went on.
31:29
Speaker 2: The Tonight Show, but he certainly got the attention of
31:33
Speaker 2: Paul Erlik because he basically wrote him a few letters
31:35
Speaker 2: in journals saying this is nonsense. You're totally wrong.
31:39
Speaker 1: So why did Simon think Erlic was wrong?
31:42
Speaker 2: He just thought that human ingenuity has throughout history been
31:46
Speaker 2: able to come up with solutions to our problems, and
31:50
Speaker 2: that economics and the market are a profoundly powerful way
31:57
Speaker 2: of resolving issues of shortage. And he thought that listen,
32:01
Speaker 2: if we were to run short of copper, we'd come
32:04
Speaker 2: up with some other material that would enable us to
32:08
Speaker 2: create electrical network. And so as a result of that,
32:12
Speaker 2: he just thought there was something instinctively wrong about what
32:14
Speaker 2: Erleck was saying. But I think there's something instinctively within
32:17
Speaker 2: humanity because we know that the planet is finite, it's there,
32:20
Speaker 2: we can see it. That makes maybe the Erlick view
32:23
Speaker 2: quite compelling.
32:24
Speaker 1: I think zero some thinking is intuitive and positive some
32:28
Speaker 1: thinking is not. Yeah, And I think in this debate,
32:32
Speaker 1: Erlic is very much zero side totally, and Simon is positive.
32:36
Speaker 3: Yeah.
32:37
Speaker 1: So Simon challenges publicly challenges I believe in science and
32:40
Speaker 1: the journal science. Right, he challenges Eric to a bet.
32:44
Speaker 1: What is the bet?
32:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, it's worth saying Erle Erlick was by far
32:48
Speaker 2: and away the more prominent person. Erlik is famous and
32:51
Speaker 2: Simon No one's heard of Simon, and so he punches up.
32:55
Speaker 2: Erlik takes takes notice of him and says, okay, right,
32:57
Speaker 2: we're going to do a bet. Actually I can't I
32:59
Speaker 2: can't remember whether Simon's just bet. I think maybe Simon
33:02
Speaker 2: suggested the bet, and Eerlic says, okay, you're on. And
33:04
Speaker 2: the bet is basically, we're going to pick a date
33:07
Speaker 2: in the future, and we'll look at the price of
33:09
Speaker 2: all of these a selection of different commodities. One of
33:13
Speaker 2: those materials was copper, and to work out whether at
33:18
Speaker 2: the end of a decade or so, whether they went
33:20
Speaker 2: up in price or down in price. And if their
33:23
Speaker 2: price has gone up, then it's a sign that there
33:25
Speaker 2: is scarcity and the people were potentially running out. And
33:30
Speaker 2: if it's gone down, then the opposite. If it gets
33:32
Speaker 2: the price goes up, Erlick wins the bet. If the
33:34
Speaker 2: price goes down or stays the same, Simon wins the bet.
33:38
Speaker 2: And so the years pass and lo and behold Erlck loses.
33:43
Speaker 2: Simon wins. The prices don't go through the roof of
33:46
Speaker 2: this stuff.
33:47
Speaker 1: What does it mean that he won?
33:49
Speaker 2: I think, in hindsight, a powerful reminder that the world
33:53
Speaker 2: is not zero sum, and that we are really good
33:57
Speaker 2: at devising solutions for things that seem like they are
34:00
Speaker 2: runaway problems. And that also, I think there's another deeper
34:05
Speaker 2: thing which I don't think Simon ever, he wasn't thinking
34:07
Speaker 2: as a geologist, and I'm not, but I've come to
34:10
Speaker 2: think a bit more like a geologist. The world of
34:14
Speaker 2: minerals is far more plentiful than we might think. Even
34:17
Speaker 2: though we're down to the kind of you know, the
34:19
Speaker 2: junk stuff, there is still a lot of it out there.
34:22
Speaker 2: And the human ability to devise ever more ingenious ways
34:27
Speaker 2: of squeezing let's say copper, because we're talking about it,
34:31
Speaker 2: copper out of rock that might previously have been seen
34:34
Speaker 2: as junk rock. That ability is amazing, and to me
34:38
Speaker 2: it's one of the great triumphs, totally unsung triumphs of
34:42
Speaker 2: the last kind of fifty years. Is that far from
34:45
Speaker 2: actually running out of copper? Because copper, of all of
34:48
Speaker 2: the materials that I look at and that we use
34:51
Speaker 2: on an industrial scale, copper is perhaps the most scarce.
34:54
Speaker 2: You know, there's lots of iron in the Earth's cross,
34:56
Speaker 2: there's lots of you know, alumino, which we use to
34:59
Speaker 2: make aluminium. There's loads of these things. There's not that
35:03
Speaker 2: much copper. And yet over that period we have produced
35:08
Speaker 2: an incredible amount of copper. You know, I felt tall
35:10
Speaker 2: about this because, on the one hand, this period in
35:12
Speaker 2: the nineteen seventies, you know, when the bet was kind
35:14
Speaker 2: of happening, was this dawning moment, this dawning realization, you know,
35:18
Speaker 2: Earth Day and all of these things were happening.
35:20
Speaker 1: And real legislation, right the key environmental legislation in the
35:23
Speaker 1: United States was passed around this time.
35:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, like all the EPA stuff.
35:26
Speaker 2: So there are many kind of positives that have come
35:28
Speaker 2: out of this, and our water courses much better, the
35:30
Speaker 2: air quality is so much better in most of our
35:33
Speaker 2: countries as a result of I think that dawning consciousness
35:36
Speaker 2: that we needed to do something. But at the same time,
35:39
Speaker 2: because there was so much catastrophism about it, I think
35:42
Speaker 2: a lot of people got kind of overly freaked out
35:44
Speaker 2: by it. And there were certain things like copper that
35:47
Speaker 2: we never came close to running out of. And like
35:51
Speaker 2: I say, one of the greatest unsung achievements is we
35:54
Speaker 2: have not run out of this stuff. Far from running out,
35:56
Speaker 2: we have got more than ever before. Yes, there are
35:59
Speaker 2: big environmental questions about how much of the ground we're
36:02
Speaker 2: churning up to get it. But China was able to urbanize.
36:05
Speaker 2: China wouldn't have been able to urbanize. You wouldn't have
36:07
Speaker 2: been able to have as many, you know, eight billion people,
36:11
Speaker 2: you know, getting toward nine billion people in the world
36:13
Speaker 2: were it not for the discovery of clever ways to
36:16
Speaker 2: get copper out of the ground.
36:17
Speaker 1: So there is the environmental question right of we've dug
36:21
Speaker 1: giant holes in the ground to get copper out. And
36:23
Speaker 1: there is a particularly i don't know, fraught environmental question now,
36:28
Speaker 1: which is in order to do the energy transition, in
36:31
Speaker 1: order to shift from fossil fuel to electrification, which is
36:34
Speaker 1: good and I think good on net, we need a
36:37
Speaker 1: lot more copper. Like you have gone and looked at
36:40
Speaker 1: giant copper minds, seen the cost of it, Like how
36:44
Speaker 1: do you think about copper and the energy transition?
36:48
Speaker 2: When standing on the lip of one of these big
36:52
Speaker 2: mines in Chile, I went to this mine called Chicki Kamata,
36:55
Speaker 2: which is this This is one that's been going since,
36:59
Speaker 2: you know, for one hundred and twenty years or so.
37:02
Speaker 2: This is like one of the minds, the big minds
37:04
Speaker 2: that we got the copper for the early Edison electrical age,
37:09
Speaker 2: and we're still getting copper out of it. Is a
37:12
Speaker 2: hole that is the biggest man made hole on the
37:16
Speaker 2: planet in terms of it's just the amount of earth
37:19
Speaker 2: that's been displaced from it. You stand on the edge,
37:21
Speaker 2: you look down, it's like looking at the Grand Canyon.
37:24
Speaker 2: You know, it's one of those moments of like whoa,
37:26
Speaker 2: because this is this is so deep, and yet we
37:29
Speaker 2: made that. We made that hole in order to get
37:32
Speaker 2: the copper out. You need, in order to fulfill all
37:35
Speaker 2: the promises that we have made for the energy transition,
37:38
Speaker 2: you need another three or four of these mines to
37:41
Speaker 2: be built every year between now and twenty fifty, and
37:47
Speaker 2: right now we're basically not really building any And on
37:51
Speaker 2: the contrary, you know, there are minds that the famous
37:53
Speaker 2: example is a mine in Panama, copper mine which has
37:56
Speaker 2: basically been shut down because the government is you know,
37:59
Speaker 2: concerned about the environmental impacts and the impacts on the
38:02
Speaker 2: local community.
38:03
Speaker 1: Which is reasonable, right, Like, that's why this is such
38:05
Speaker 1: a hard It's ablutely reasonable. I don't want to live
38:08
Speaker 1: next to a copper mind.
38:09
Speaker 2: And to be honest with you, what happens. I'll tell
38:10
Speaker 2: you what happens if you live next to a copper mine.
38:12
Speaker 2: Eventually the copper mine gets so big that your house
38:14
Speaker 2: gets covered in the waste rock for the copper mine,
38:17
Speaker 2: and you know, you're you're covered and you're covered in rock.
38:19
Speaker 2: Because that's what happens at this place. There was a
38:22
Speaker 2: there was a town next door. It was like a
38:23
Speaker 2: pretty advanced town. It had the most advanced hospital in
38:26
Speaker 2: Latin America. It is now abandoned and half covered in
38:32
Speaker 2: the waste rock from the mine. They had to they
38:34
Speaker 2: had to move everyone out because the mine just got
38:37
Speaker 2: so big. But this is the point that there aren't
38:40
Speaker 2: many of these places, but where there are, they are big,
38:43
Speaker 2: and there's environmental implications and all around that particular mine
38:47
Speaker 2: in Chile, the copper mine. You know, you've got more
38:50
Speaker 2: arsenic in the air than in most other places, partly
38:52
Speaker 2: just because there's arsenic in the earth and it's being displaced,
38:55
Speaker 2: and the particular the nature of that Andean soil is
38:59
Speaker 2: is it's got more arsenic than you would normally find.
39:01
Speaker 2: The tailings down Okay, so where the toxic waste is put.
39:04
Speaker 2: And bear in mind they used to just chuck this
39:06
Speaker 2: stuff into the rivers and into the sea. Now it
39:08
Speaker 2: goes in this damn system. So you've got all of
39:11
Speaker 2: this quite nasty stuff in a damn system. It's basically
39:14
Speaker 2: a big block of earth, and I drove alongside it
39:16
Speaker 2: with damn walls all around it. This total size of
39:20
Speaker 2: the tailings down at this single mind chew Kikumata in
39:23
Speaker 2: Chile is bigger than Manhattan just for one mind, and
39:27
Speaker 2: so the amount of impact that these places have is enormous.
39:31
Speaker 2: But now a lot of these places, including Chile, are
39:34
Speaker 2: starting to ask, well, hang on, is this actually what
39:36
Speaker 2: we want?
39:36
Speaker 3: And you've got a lot of governments.
39:38
Speaker 2: Like I say, including in Santiago, who are saying, okay, now,
39:41
Speaker 2: actually we want to shut down some of these places
39:42
Speaker 2: because local communities have been affected by pollution and it's unacceptable.
39:46
Speaker 2: So for me, one of the biggest challenges for the
39:49
Speaker 2: energy transition it's not necessarily the technology, it's not necessarily
39:53
Speaker 2: the kind of enthusiasm that it's a lot of politics
39:55
Speaker 2: going on, But actually it's are we actually going to
40:00
Speaker 2: manage to persuade people who live where all of these
40:02
Speaker 2: resources are that it is right to get this stuff
40:05
Speaker 2: out of the ground. It's it's human willingness rather than
40:09
Speaker 2: techle logical or geological constraints.
40:14
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round,
40:17
Speaker 1: of course, m m okay, we're going to finish with
40:28
Speaker 1: the lightning round. If you were to add a seventh
40:31
Speaker 1: material to the book, what would it be?
40:35
Speaker 2: I was actually going to have a seventh material, which
40:38
Speaker 2: was going to be wood. I would wood is great,
40:41
Speaker 2: like we can use word as an amazing construction material
40:45
Speaker 2: these days. Obviously there's all the history about woods, you know, fire, humanity, fire, charcoal,
40:51
Speaker 2: all that stuff.
40:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean the first energy transition arguably was fine, right.
40:55
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, the first and the greatest in a way.
40:57
Speaker 1: Yeah.
40:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, So wood, it was gonna be.
40:59
Speaker 2: Wood, and wood is great because also, like I say,
41:02
Speaker 2: you can you can build skyscrapers out of wood. You
41:04
Speaker 2: still need a bit of steal, to be honest with you,
41:05
Speaker 2: but you can build skyscrapers out of wood. You can
41:08
Speaker 2: use word as a kind of ingreen for making chemicals
41:10
Speaker 2: as well. So it was going to be words. But
41:14
Speaker 2: the book you've read the book, it's long. It's too
41:17
Speaker 2: long already, And so it was going to be seven.
41:19
Speaker 2: Like seven is a great number, isn't it.
41:21
Speaker 1: Seven's a better number than six. Let's be honest. You
41:24
Speaker 1: could have gone down to five.
41:25
Speaker 3: It's the fault of like glass.
41:27
Speaker 2: Glass was too interesting, and you know, so I just
41:29
Speaker 2: I overdid it, basically, I overcooked it.
41:32
Speaker 1: Well done. What's your least favorite material?
41:35
Speaker 3: Do you mean in the book or do you mean
41:37
Speaker 3: and no, in the world. Oh my god.
41:41
Speaker 2: I mean, like, I'm not an enormous fan of polyester.
41:46
Speaker 1: I don't know if you have any like running shirts
41:48
Speaker 1: or workout shirts. Like, they don't call them polyester, they
41:52
Speaker 1: call them whatever, Capeline or whatever brand name, but they're
41:55
Speaker 1: basically polyester. Polyester is amazing.
41:57
Speaker 3: Now, that's the thing. That's why I have states saying this.
42:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean plastic, polyester is plastic.
42:03
Speaker 3: Blast is plastic. It's a petrochemical.
42:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is a petrochemical, and.
42:07
Speaker 2: I think we, the English, we invented it. We basically
42:10
Speaker 2: we invented a lot of the bad stuff we invented,
42:12
Speaker 2: you know, the using fossil fuels. But that's also kind
42:15
Speaker 2: of there's been many benefits from that.
42:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Industrial Revolution. I'm unbalance grateful for the Industrial Revolution.
42:22
Speaker 1: It's a complicated legacy, but I appreciate it.
42:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, but we invented polyethylene, which is like the plastic
42:29
Speaker 2: that you make plastic bags out of. Again, I don't
42:31
Speaker 2: think we should be ashamed of it in the slightest,
42:32
Speaker 2: but we are. You go to the place where they
42:34
Speaker 2: invented polyethylene and there's a little plaque they've kind of
42:38
Speaker 2: hidden on a building.
42:40
Speaker 1: I mean plastic bags I feel more ambivalent about than
42:43
Speaker 1: the Industrial Revolution.
42:44
Speaker 2: Weirdly, polyethylene is not just plastic bags. It's basically, you know,
42:48
Speaker 2: it's kind of everything. It's also you can make like
42:50
Speaker 2: bulletproof fests out of it. You can make it is
42:52
Speaker 2: the most adaptable of all of the plastics. It is
42:54
Speaker 2: by far and away the most the biggest. I'm used
42:58
Speaker 2: to kind of shitty old polyester, like you know, the
43:01
Speaker 2: old kind of shirts like yeah, that make you sweat,
43:04
Speaker 2: that make you sweat. These days, I think, particularly the Chinese,
43:08
Speaker 2: this is kind of a thing. The Chinese have become
43:10
Speaker 2: incredible at making really good fabrics out of polyester. And
43:14
Speaker 2: so actually the polyester, like you saying of twenty twenty five,
43:17
Speaker 2: is such a different thing, and that's I think largely
43:20
Speaker 2: thanks to the Chinese being really clever about weaving it,
43:23
Speaker 2: and also just particular types of glens. So I would
43:26
Speaker 2: say polyesta, but then then I'd go back on myself,
43:29
Speaker 2: just like I am now.
43:36
Speaker 1: Ed Conway is the author of Material World, the six
43:40
Speaker 1: raw materials that shape of modern civilization. Please email us
43:44
Speaker 1: at problem at Pushkin dot FM. We are always looking
43:47
Speaker 1: for new guests for the show. Today's show was produced
43:51
Speaker 1: by Trinamnino and Gabriel Hunter Chang, who was edited by
43:55
Speaker 1: Alexander Garriton and engineered by Sarah Bruguier. I'm Jacob Goldstein
43:59
Speaker 1: and we'll be back next week with another episode of
44:01
Speaker 1: What's Your Pop