Material World - Ep149: Ed Conway

ML  
Hello, I'm Michael Liebreich and this is Cleaning Up. Now, we may think that we live in a world of data and artificial intelligence, large language models, social media, ideas and concepts, and of course we do. But we also live in a world of physical stuff: buildings, cars, planes, furniture, equipment of all sorts. And all of that is made from a range of materials. My guest this week is Ed Conway, writer and broadcaster, Economics and Data Editor of Sky News, and author of a number of books. His most recent book is called Material World, and looks at those materials that go into all the things that we see around us. Please welcome Ed Conway to Cleaning Up.

Before we start, if you're enjoying Cleaning Up, please make sure that you like, subscribe and leave a review; that really helps other people to find us. To make sure you never miss an episode, subscribe to us on YouTube or your favourite podcast platform, and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram to participate in the discussion. Also, you can visit cleaningup.live to access over 160 hours of conversations with extraordinary climate leaders. And you can subscribe there to our free newsletter: that's cleaningup.live, cleaningup.live. And if you particularly enjoy an episode, please spread the word, tell your friends and colleagues about it. 

Cleaning Up is brought to buy our lead supporter, Capricorn Investment Group, the Liebreich Foundation and the Gilardini Foundation. 

So Ed, thank you very much for joining us here on Cleaning Up.

EC  
Thank you for having me. It's a great honour, it's a great podcast.

ML  
Well, thank you very much. I mean, I think that- I think yours is a great book which we're going to talk about. This is the book; it is a bit of a doorstop but it's fascinating. 

EC  
It's material, it's very large and heavy!

ML  
It is a- it is a material book about the material world. Let's start off by- just tell us what it is and why did you write it? 

EC  
Yeah, well, I'm not - I should say, you know, cards on the table - you, many of your guests, many of your viewers, listeners are experts in their various fields. So that's part of the reason I love your podcast, is you go really deep on a lot of issues which is amazing, you have amazing expertise. I am not an expert. I am a hack, I'm a journalist, but I like- I guess I'm drawn to things where, you know, it seems complex from the outside, and actually, it could be helpfully better-explained, and this felt like one of those areas. I'm drawn to kind of areas where there are various conventional wisdoms that, you know, could be challenged, and to areas, I guess, where they feel important. And I, you know, I cover - and have covered - economics for a long time, so I'm, you know, a tourist in this foreign land, but I've just kind of long looked at the way that we as journalists cover the energy transition, climate change, and thought that, a lot of the time - this is less so these days - but a lot of the time, it's been over-simplistic, you know, or the climate-side has just been about the kind of catastrophism rather than, you know, kind of looking at opportunities as well. And to me, it just seemed like an interesting kind of fertile rich area where there's so many kind of fascinating stories. But, moreso, it was just- there's so much about this world, not just the energy transition but just how the world actually works that I was fascinated by. Right. 

ML  
And so- because what you didn't do is going to climate change and write another book about, you know, how much oil is used, and how much it pollutes, and how much emissions it creates, and therefore there's, you know, 57 different solutions and we must do this. 

EC  
It's a well-served market.

ML  
What you actually did is you went- you took a step back and said, "hang on a second, we need to understand how the world works. This is how the world works." 

EC  
"This is how the world was." And actually, in a way, I didn't set out to make a book about the energy transition. Really, it was only in the course of writing -I mean, this stuff has always been interesting to me - but it was only in the course of writing that I realised, "hang on, if I want to understand about, you know, sand, or I want us to understand about concrete or about steel, really, this is a story of energy. It's a story about materials and energy and the two things are intimately intertwined."

ML  
Which is- there's a lovely parallel that by the way, which is working with Sustainable Energy For All which is now SDG 7, the origins of that was the realisation by Kandeh Yumkella, one of the guests on the show in  the one of the early episodes, that whatever you want to do in terms of development, better health, educating children, women in the workforce, aal of the above, you need energy. So everything ends up in energy. But your starting point was that you chose these sort of six big materials, the material world, you built this story and this narrative around the six big materials. So what are the six? 

EC  
Okay, yeah, so the six are: sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium. And obviously, it's not, this is not an exhaustive list of the stuff that matters. You could- you know, we roam around the periodic table, but this was a pretty good place to start. And just in terms of understanding: what are the things we actually need? And so I'm an economics journalist, and usually when there's some sort of kind of question I don't know the answer to, I find a spreadsheet and it provides me with whatever data I need. So I'm quite firm on that. But this was an area I just tried to understand: what are the things that underlie every other piece of economic activity? And obviously, energy in a kind of broad, you know, abstract and physical term is there. But what are the- what's the stuff we need? You know, like, we need fibre optics, so we must need kind of the glass that you use and sometimes the polymers used to make that, we need concrete because every building stands- so it was kind of that thing. And there was no answer within the GDP statistics or input/output tables, or any of the other data series I was looking at that we said, "okay, it's concrete, it's steel, it's all of these things. So I kind of just- I had to do some journalism. It's a journalistic book, really, of trying to understand that. 

ML  
And of course, in energy, there's this thing called primary energy, which I always mock, because what the economy needs is not primary energy, it's actually energy services, it's the outputs, it's not the inputs. The inputs are only interesting if you're sort of on a colonial grab for resources, then you'd care about.

EC  
Useful energy. 

ML  
Well, useful energy is a sort of the output, is what we need. But in a way, what you've done is gone back to primary sand, primary salt, and a lot of people listening to this will think, "well I don't need that much sand. I mean, you know, it's nice, and the kids play in it and stuff, but I  don't need that much. And, okay, silicon maybe has got some connection. Salt, they're thinking, "well, I mean I put salt on the- what's salt got to do with anything." So let's get through these, and we will end up with oil, which I think is shorthand for oil and gas in your book. And also your last one lithium, which, in a way is more tendentious, because it's much, much smaller, I mean, it's tiny compared to copper, for instance, it's smaller than copper, smaller than sand, salt, iron, copper, and oil and gas. But let's take these in order. Sand: tell us about the sand economy. 

EC  
Well, so sand is the biggest- it's the biggest section by far, partly because it just encompasses quite a lot of quite variant things. So you know, you've got glass- and actually glass was my, it was my very first chapter. I thought I'd be done with it really quickly, I'd kind of zip it off. It's all history, no one cares about glass, you know, it doesn't really matter, we've got glass here, it's very easy to make. But actually, it turned out to be one of the most fascinating things, both for the history, but also kind of, you know, for the for the modern era, because, you know, if it's not for glass, we don't have fibre optics, and let's not forget that's, you know, that's how we're able to kind of communicate these days for the most part. And again, part of the overarching themes here is: I think a lot of us, particularly in my world less so in yours and less so for I'm sure many of the people who are listening, but we all inhabit this world where we kind of think that we've dematerialised, that all you need is a good idea and that's kind of- everything else takes care of itself. But the point is- and we think the internet's this etherial that travels in the air. But actually, it's physical. 

ML  
There's a little sort of hint every so often. So for instance, everybody's desperately excited about ChatGPT and these large language models, and now they're going, "hmm, bigger data centres." What you're doing is you're saying, "well, yeah, but you know what you're going to need? More sand. More sand, more glass, and more of all of these resources." 

EC  
More copper, more various other elements as well. And by the way, we can talk about AI because actually AI is interesting, both from that perspective, but also for what it might be able to allow us to do in the material world. I didn't really kind of cover that in much depth in the book, but I think it's quite exciting. So you've got sand, you've glass and you know, these days, you need glass to make the amazing lenses that we bounce lasers off to make silicon chips. Silicon chips is another part of that kind of constellation. One of the things I wanted to do in the book was not just to understand what happens in the fabrication plants where silicon chips are actually made, of course, as your listeners know, it's not just chips, it's also solar panels, it's the same kind of process. I wanted to go all the way to the quarries where we actually get the stuff out of the ground, the silicon out of the ground. And the weird thing was I spoke to a lot of people in the silicon chip world and kind of said, "okay, you make silicon chips. Where does the silicon come from?" And they were like, "well, who cares?" or they said, "oh, it's just sand." And actually, technically speaking, it's not sand. So the definition of sand is particles of a certain kind of size. But actually, for the most part, when you get the stuff out of the ground, it comes in big chunks. And what struck me in this - and this kind of goes to that point we were talking about a second ago - is you get those chunks out of the ground, you put them into an electric-arc furnace, essentially, alongside woodchips and coal. So coal is there right from the start with make solar panels and silicon chips. And then that's only the beginning of a very long supply chain. You know, you turn it into polysilicons, turn it from polysilicon into a kind of- into a crystal. And each of those processes: a) they're kind of like quite old processes - I was quite struck by that, you know, yes, they're being refined, but these are processes that go back kind of 100 years - the Czochralski processes is incredibly old. 

ML  
And how do you pronounce that word? [Czochralski]?

EC  
Czochralski 

ML  
Czochralski. That's where you're drawing these silicon crystals off the surface of the molten crystal ingot. 

EC  
Amazing, it's amazing. And what I hadn't realised there; okay, so China's very good at making the kind of, you know, pretty pure monocrystal balls for solar panels. But actually, there's only five companies in the world that can make the incredibly pure, perfect ones. None of them wanted to let me inside to see how it was done, understandably. And so, anyway, long story-short, I go all the way along that supply chain, and it was- it's kind of fascinating, and I think actually quite a useful, like rejoinder to the idea that everything is in Taiwan. It's actually all over the place when it comes to silicon chips. 

ML  
And there's a couple of overarching themes, we'll probably come back to more of them. But you know, one of them is these very long supply chains. And there's a corollary of that, which is very vulnerable supply chains, because if there's only one company that makes the lens for the whatever, then you better know where that is, and make sure that it is robust and resilient. 

EC  
And just understand it. And I think that's the thing, you know, a lot of people when you talk about industrial strategy, a lot of people particularly, you know, on the right, in the government that we- you know, we've had kind of, right-leaning governments in this country for a while, I think they're kind of nervous about talking about industrial strategy. My point is just to say, "okay, leaving aside whether you're going to intervene, let's just start by understanding this stuff, you know, we need to understand it a bit better."

ML  
Absolutely. And again, these sort of issues, they kind of pop out like this kind of, "hmm, machine learning means more data centres, long supply chains mean that when a ship gets stuck in the Suez Canal, that really weird and bad things can happen, or, you know, Russia invades Ukraine", and then we discovered just how many of our railway wheels are made in Ukraine. We don't know-

EC  
Yes, and electric steel, electric steel as well, a lot of that is comes from Ukraine.

ML  
So one of the themes is this kind of interdependence, and that's particularly important I think, now, where people are talking about, "oh, you know, China controls too much of the solar industry," and they don't realise that, "yeah, but they aren't going anywhere without the silicon from these very pure- these few companies that can do it, or the software, or the lenses," or whatever it is. So it's much more complex than import-substitution, or something as a solution. 

EC  
But also, what's interesting is that there are kind of causes for hope. So one of the stories in the glass chapter - and we shouldn't just make it sound all like glass, although, again, like I said, unexpectedly fascinating - is that there was an episode in the First World War where the UK, and I won't kind of go through the whole story, but the UK basically ran out of optical glass, you know, a big crisis, it was a big problem because we were going to war with Germany, we needed to get binoculars, and we needed to be able to see who we were trying to shoot at. We ended up having to kind of go to Germany, secretly, we sent our spies to meet with Germans to try to buy binoculars off them. But the real kind of punchline to that story is we did manage to revive our optical munitions industry. We managed to build the factories to make the binoculars all over again. And so it is possible to reindustrialize having deindustrialized, I mean, you know, it's less - much less - complex than silicon chips. But we can do this stuff, it just goes to show I mean, you need a war, sometimes to do it. But we can actually rebuild the supply chains quite quickly if we want to, but you need the urgency. So that's- so all of that is kind of encompassed within sand. I should say also there's concrete as well, I mean, a massive emitter, incredibly important material, massively kind of under-appreciated, and also, actually, slightly more magical than I think people realise, you know, concrete seems to be very dull and boring, but actually, the chemical reactions happening inside it remain something of a mystery. So hopefully- within the book, I'm kind of like- I'm veering between, you know, wonder and excitement, and then also dread at some of the, you know, the energy related and carbon issues that we'll talk about. 

ML  
And one of the things that's lovely in the book is all these little historical stories. And you know, going back to a glass, the Phoenicians and then - we need to move on to salt, and salt is one of the oldest industries in the world, and, you know, the salt taxation, China, you know, there's a whole book just on that. So you've got these historical anecdotes, but there's also- there's a kind of a meta-level layer as well because every historical anecdote - every link back to the past - also speaks to some of the sort of path dependencies: where do skills lie, who has- obviously is where are these resources, but we've ended up with incredible sort of capability in copper smelting in Wales. Why Wales?  And that's in history, but it sort of rolls forwards and still impacts the fact that Wales is very good at metals processing today, right? 

EC  
Yeah, it's true, yeah. And there's still there's still a nickel refinery which does pretty good nickel which you could potentially kind of use. It's mostly previously been used for kind of alloys but you could end up using that for battery materials. And why is it there is basically because Wales used to be this refining kind of entrepot, not because it had much in the way of metals, it did have some copper kind of up in Anglesey, but mostly because it just had the coal - we're back to energy, you know, it was about energy processing. And the interesting thing here is that model of refining is kind of the same. So we take your metal, your ores from around the world, and we refine them here as kind of, you know, what China does these days, you know, it's what China does these days. And we did it for our industrial revolution in Wales where it led to massive pollution in Swansea, and they do it in China today. But yes, salt is another one of these things. You know, what I like about kind of looking at the world through this prism is you just see echoes constantly. So, you know, we see- you think that salts are irrelevant these days, you think that being able to turn salt into different things is kind of irrelevant, but actually it's massively relevant. 

ML  
And tell us- give us that relevance, some of that relevance, because there's still going to be people are going, "I don't understand - salt?"

EC  
Well, so we take salt and we turn it into a few important compounds. 

ML  
And you should say salts plural shouldn't you? Because it's not just table salt.

EC  
Well most of that most of that section is about, you know, sodium chloride. So it's about table salt. But then I kind of veer and I do this with with the oil chapter - I kind of veer into gas, but with salt, I kind of veer off a little bit into other salts, partly because I wanted to do things like fertilisers, and there's a few types of salts that you know, kind of nitrogen-based salts, which allow me - like saltpetre, you know - which allow me to talk about that, and explosives. Because another strand- I mean, you know, the book, you've got to kind of choose your framework, and the book has a framework of six materials. But running through that there's other things like the importance of fertilisers through the years, but salt - specifically sodium chloride, you know, table salt - is the beginning for how we get things like soda ash, incredibly important material, caustic soda, we can't make stuff without soda ash and caustic soda; they are kind of chemical building blocks for basically, everything else. Chlorine, you know- so much of the world's- about 90% of the world's pharmaceuticals one way or another contain compounds or indeed elements that have come from salt. So salt is this thing that we mine, and we do still mine it, we just mine it using water for the most part. We mine it to help us make chemicals and pharmaceuticals right now. And this is the point: we in the UK used to be the world's biggest producer of salt, we used to send it all over the world. It was terrible in some senses, because we were preventing people like in India and in Sub-Saharan Africa and various colonies from making their own salt. We didn't let them make their salt so then we made it in Cheshire, and sent it off. There's a lot of salt under the ground ins Cheshire. Today, we make more than double the amount of salt we did back in the Victorian heyday and it all goes - the vast majority of that goes - into our chemicals industry, it goes into our pharmaceuticals industry. So the salt economy, salt routes that were used to follow, it's all still happening today except, you know, we don't spend much time thinking about it. 

ML  
Yeah, even the word salary comes from the word salt so the salt- and the salt routes are obviously sort of 

EC  
And there's the salt routes and there's but there's also the fact that you know, if you want to make lithium hydroxide you can't make it without caustic soda. If you want to make lithium carbonate you can't make it without soda ash. So you need these salt-derived ingredients to make the most advanced thing you couldn't do- I think it's the Siemens process, which is what you do to make poly silicon - you couldn't do that without caustic soda as well, I think various forms of sodium hydroxide. 

ML  
And plastics as well- and plastics manufacturing using lots of salts as well. 

EC  
Completely, yeah, I mean, for better or for worse PVC- I mean, there's a story that one of the reasons we have lots of PVC is because you've got these processes where you electrolyze brine - salt water - and turn it into various things. The caustic soda is the useful bit and we turn that into kind of bleach and various things. But then you get all of this chlorine leftover. There's a story within the chemicals industry that part of the reason we made loads of PVC is because we just didn't have anywhere to put the chlorine. And so it was just a helpful way- you've got to put that chlorine into kind of a petrochemical mix. It's a useful way as sopping up all of that leftover chlorine. And you hear these stories- what I love about going to these slightly obscure kind of sectors and talking to people who work there is a lot of- it feels to me as a journalist, there's so many fascinating stories that I'd never kind of read or heard about, partly because this stuff is quite unfashionable. But now with the energy transition, now that we're thinking slightly more in terms of materials, it's all much more relevant than it was before. So I think a few years ago, you know, I might have written this book and people were being like, "oh that's very interesting," but now it's kind of a little bit more relevant because we're in that- we're in this new material world where we need to think about kind of stuff and where we get it from and what we do to it. 

ML  
I couldn't agree more. And, you know, that's sort of why I wanted you to come on the show because I think that without this sort of understanding, that for all that we can digitise and become ethereal beings, sort of, you know, the in H G Wells' The Time Machine there's the eloi who sort of run around on the surface of the planet being ethereal and, and that's the morlocks underground who are actually doing all the work. And by the way, they're also - turns out - eating the eloi. But but we need to understand this stuff because there are all these flows of actual stuff that underlie it. And we think also that you know that some of these things that that sort of used to be important like steel and coal and we don't realise that actually, we are using vastly more of them today, even though we talk about them a lot less. 

EC  
Yeah, we talk about them less but our dependence on them has not diminished one bit. I think it's just, we've forgotten about them, partly because there's fewer and fewer people working in those sectors. You know, it's like agriculture. We don't spend that much time thinking about agriculture these days, even though you know, a couple of 100 years ago, the majority of people were working in the field. It's because of amazing advances in all of these technologies, whether it's steels, whether it's the kind of contraptions we've got, you know, steel plough, fertilisers, diesel, you know, diesel engines, all of these things have enabled us to free ourselves from having to work in the field, and likewise, free ourselves from having to work in steel, or salt, or any of these other products. You go to some of these places like a blast furnace or a steel mill - there's quite a few people working in them but far fewer than they were before, and as a result, I just don't- I just don't think we think about it so much anymore. It's just here. But around us, all of our lives, there is an enormous amount of steel, like the calculation that I talk about in the book a bit is that: for every person in a European or American kind of country, you you have roughly kind of 15 tonnes of steel per capita in your life, in your kind of car, in the public transport system around you and so on.

ML  
Let's try to sort of illustrate that: in your car, you've probably got about a tonne of steel, right? 

EC  
Yeah. 

ML  
And then there's 14 other tonnes which are completely oblivious to, most people - I certainly was, which is in the the rebar - the reinforcement - in the concrete in the basement of the building you're in or it might be in the rails of the railway, or it might be in the airport or in the whatever - it is everywhere. And it's 15 ton, it's 15 cars-worth per human. And then how much is that in the developing- in the Global South? What's the equivalent figure?

EC  
Yeah, I mean, that's good question basically, in places like China, so kind of, you know, middle-income and fast emerging economies, it's maybe kind of 6, 7, 8 - it's rising really fast. I mean, we all know China - a massive amount of steel there so that number is rising faster than people can really document it. But the striking thing is, in Sub-Saharan Africa, it's under 1 tonne of steel per-person. So 15 tonnes here, under 1 tonne. And for me, that's actually a more useful kind of metric than something like GDP per capita, because you know, you're seeing- if you don't have 15 tonnes of steel, you don't have cars, obviously, but you don't have hospitals, you don't have schools, you don't have public transport, you don't have any of the things - you know, the building blocks for living standards as we know it today. And it's that enormous gap. And bear in mind, this is between the more populated parts of the world that don't have steel, and the populated parts that do have steel, that I think is a big issue. And because we don't think in terms of steel per-capita, understandably, we're not- we're kind of I don't think as much about just how much of a gap needs potentially to be made up because you can't make all of that up with things like wood - you know, wood could be a great kind of substitute for some structural materials, but still composites maybe - but you kind of, you still need steel. And by the way, just one other thing: it's not just for structures. Everything in the world, you know, everything you're staring at, everything you touch on a daily basis: if it's not made of steel, and steel is for the most part is there, it's made with steel. So with machinery that makes steel, with machine tools made of steel, with you know, tools: steel is still the ultimate tool. We kind of say that the Iron Age was however many 1000s of years ago, we're still in the Iron Age today because steel consumption, use, dependence is greater than it ever was before. 

ML  
Now, there was a fantastic episode a few weeks back with Alex grant, Magrathea Metals; he's going to try and change a bit of that to magnesium, one from-  by the way, salt. 

EC  
Sea water is it? 

ML  
Well it could be sea water, it could be brines. And he came up with this wonderful thing: "from mining to brining". You talked about how we're mining salt, but we're doing- I think that point about the, you know, you sort of need 15 tonnes of steel to live like us, right. And maybe with composites and this kind of compacted wood, laminate, whatever, we might be able to reduce that to, I don't know 10 tonnes, let's say, but it's still 10 tonnes compared to one tonne that people in Sub-Saharan Africa have got. It's interesting also to relate that back to GDP, because there is a move to say GDP is a whole horrible way to measure stuff. Happiness: it doesn't give happiness, it doesn't do success, it doesn't take into account pollution, and we should move to kind of asset-based measures of success in the economy. So how much, you know, what is our physical infrastructure? How much savings have we got? How many trees have we got? What skills are in our workforce? And these sort of asset-based measures of success: that maps- but most people wouldn't say, "oh, and look, we've got this huge steel deficit in these countries. To be happy and successful as economies and for human progress, we're just going to need to have accumulated more steel, and it's a lot more steel, what's the total sort of amount that we would- if everybody wanted to get to 15 tonnes how much more steel would we have to have made? 

EC  
I don't know off the top of my head but it's billions and billions and billions of tonnes of steel. 

ML  
So the answer- I'm giving the answer from your book. 

EC  
Okay. 

ML  
144 billion. 

EC  
Did I say that? Okay. 

ML  
Well, if not then I calculated based on those figures.

EC  
It's an extraordinary amount. 

ML  
And making that of course, the problem with that, is that it also, if we do get that, which I think we should all say, fundamentally, we're in favour of-

EC  
I mean, it's their right to expect that they could have similar levels of kind of living standards as the rest of the world.

ML  
100%. The solution can't be to say, "well, I'm sorry, but we've done the numbers and you can't have it." We've got to do the numbers and say, "well, we've got to figure out a way for everybody to have that." 

EC  
Yeah, I think that's everything. And I think that is part of the issue with all of, you know, the various kinds of debates at COP and so on, because it's not just steel, you know, the gap in energy, just overall energy consumption is massive, per-capita, per-capita is massive, as well. There's a gap in copper, there's a gap in basically everything. And who are we- obviously, we're fine, we can we can have our bit of degrowth, we can kind of reduce our steel footprint a little bit, we can recycle stuff. And actually, the encouraging thing is that steel per-capita thing does tend to kind of plateau out. So we do- you can get to more of a steady state when it comes to steel, and recycle more of it. But who are we to say to people in developing economies that you can't aspire to the kind of living standards that we have, because it doesn't suit our carbon pathway? And that's what I get nervous about when I look at things like the IEA netzero pathways which is an amazing kind of bit of analysi:, I look at what they're expecting for energy consumption in places like Sub-Saharan Africa, and it's basically flat or even lower than falling, and it's not rising so that living standards can rise. And when you put yourself in their footprint, in their kind of shoes, of course, they're kind of looking and saying "well, why would we sign up to something that essentially consigns us to decades of of energy, poverty, and steel poverty and all of these other things?" So I can I can understand why this is a knottier, trickier issue and tenser issue at the summit.

ML  
I think on that one, certainly how I, you know - and I've worked on this issue, since before Sustainable Energy for All and help to kind of frame that which became SDG 7, I think, that the word that that is not sufficiently used in that debate is leapfrog, because they have every right - people have every right to consume the same energy services. It's back to this question, they don't have the right to produce primary energy from coal and create the- I mean, don't make the same mistakes or don't have the same impact. But the energy services in terms of light and heat and cooling and transport and the ability to power whatever industry and agriculture and so on, 100%. So you can- you can sort of frame it as leapfrogging. The steel one is so interesting, because what it says is, if you want to be net zero by 2050, or 2060, 2070, or whatever, in between now and then you have to have produced 100 billion tonnes of steel. Otherwise, people will not be going on holiday, having hospitals, living in decent housing with not mud floor but whatever. And it's just - there's no, it's kind of the maths of it is inescapable. 

EC  
I don't know how to solve I mean, do you know how to solve it? because I don't, I don't know. Also, how expensive that would be to try to do that in a more carbon- kind of lower carbon way?

ML  
We have pathways to zero carbon steel, right. But what this says is, it's not enough to start using them in 2050 so that our 2050 flow is zero, what it says is, "we better be using them in between," because if you want to be not just net zero by 2050, or whatever you choose, but you also want to have justice and economic justice, you have to have made this stuff in between. I need to think more about this because this is one of the most powerful things that I took away from the book is these kinds of stocks and flows. It's starting to really shine a light on it.

EC  
Yeah, I think it's- yeah, it makes me very nervous.

ML  
Let's do another one. Let's move- so your next one, which is copper, obviously the Bronze Age, even before the Iron Age, but we're still in the Bronze Age too, aren't we, in a way. 

EC  
Exactly the Bronze Age and the kind of the Copper Age, I think even more so now than we ever were before because, you know, we've got the the age of electricity, the amount of copper that we need, I mean, the various kind of pathways that you're familiar with. But for me copper is- although it's kind of less novel than things like kind of lithium and cobalt to some extent, and nickel, it is so integral to everything that the amount of copper that we have to explore is-

ML  
Now when you say everything, do you mean everything electrical? Or are we missing another, like with salt? You know, we sort of don't- there's this huge other use of copper that we don't think about. Are we talking about mainly in the electric- 

EC  
It's mainly an electric- it's actually more straightforward in a certain sense in that it's primarily as an electrical conductor. And, you know, the thing about copper and the thing, you know, to some extent about all of the materials is: it's not that they're technically the very best thing at doing- I mean, silver, in some ways is kind of, you know, it's kind of better for conductivity. It's just that we're very good at kind of getting it out of the ground very effectively. It's not exactly scarce, I mean, part of the story that I talk about it with copper is: there have been so many times throughout history where people have said, "we're facing peak copper, we're about to run out of copper," and there's, you know, this kind of catastrophism about that. And then as humans we're amazing at kind of coming up with innovations to get ever more copper out of ever less promising ores.

ML  
And is that that we just find more copper or we get more out of worse ores? Which is the sort of- which is the more important thing that we've been doing?

EC  
I think it's- I think it's slightly more the latter than the former. We find more copper, but actually the finds of new high grade stuff are kind of diminishing and-

ML  
There was recently a big one, I think, in Saudi Arabia, from memory, but I think- I don't know whether it kind of increases the reserves by how many percent but-

EC  
Yeah, I think that- so resources and reserves- so it will increase resources to an extent, but our ability- so we used to, you know, the grades of copper that we used to get other ground were kind of like 5, 6%, in the early days of some of these mines that I visited. So there's one in Chile, an enormous mine called Chuquicamata, where they've been mining there for more than 100 years. And the grades used to be kind of, you know, 5, 6%, maybe 8%, and now they're down to kind of below 1%. And that's partly because we've just got much more efficient, it's kind of moving much more rock, it's like boring stuff like enormous trucks turn out to be part of the answer for how we have never run out of copper. But also, newer kind of refining electrolytic techniques. And what's exciting for me about things like AI is: you couldn't really come up with a better way, a better tool for just thinking of various different kind of compounds that might allow you to process rocks. I mean, I know that sounds desperately boring, but actually, that could be amazing because then we could squeeze ever more of that copper out. The issue, of course, is that you're leaving massive holes in the ground and the way that we've mined in the past for copper has been pretty kind of environmentally inconsiderate. 

ML  
It's not the hole that worries me, it's the spoil piles, because the hole is just a hole in a sense, it feels like it's probably inert. But it's the spoil and then how stuff washes out of that. And also the physical danger of that, as you know, because we have these spoil piles that collapse and they are exactly incredibly disruptive, killed enormous numbers of people. 

EC  
That's totally it and often they happen in seismically very active areas. The tailings dam at Chuquicamata is just like one mine in Chile. The tailings dam there is I think bigger than the size of Manhattan, just the toxic waste. It's an extraordinary kind of scale. 

ML  
How much scale copper, by the way, is in those tailings? Because if we were- if we were extracting, you know, it was 5%, and it's less than 1%, I think the number you use a 0.6%; do we go back to tailings and suddenly discover that they're fall of salt, they're full of important minerals, they're still full of copper, or is that a sort of romantic overexaggeration?

EC  
I think it's not impossible and there are people working at that, and they're, also perhaps even more kind of immediately, you've got the tailings dam which is the stuff that has already been processed because it was the ore, and then you also have other piles of rock which they call them tortas, they're tortas: big kind of cake-style mountains of rock outside, and that's where they looked at it and they said, "that's not quite enough grades for us to even process it." Out of those, there are a few companies working at taking that stuff and turning it into making it into legitimate, viable ore which is quite exciting. 

ML  
And just to put this in context of the transition, we are basically going to have to - if we want to get to net zero - electrify probably not everything but almost everything.

EC  
Well pretty much everything. 

ML  
Everything we can. There will be some things like, you know, aviation fuels - aeroplanes are not going to go electric, big ones, but there's- most things are going to go electric

EC  
And copper is just central to all of that. 

ML  
And copper is central and the numbers that are- there's an issue of is there enough copper? where, you know, the answer is almost certainly yes. Or no, it is yes, I mean, you can actually do the numbers, the resources and the reserves and so on. It's yes. But there's an issue of how quickly we can scale up to what needs to be something like, sort of for the energy sector alone, it's going to be six times the rate of extracting copper, and it has to get there quickly, because we need to do this stuff fast, right?

EC  
It's scary when you look at some of those charts of projected supply and protect demand, because there is definitely a shortfall. And it's hard to see how that's kind of reflected in commodity markets because there you're looking at kind of big fluctuate- you know, you're looking at economic activity as well as that. So, but yeah. If we are going to electrify everything, which we need to do, and I think people are gradually kind of realising that's what we need to do, then we need copper, enormous amounts of copper everywhere. I mean, the striking thing I saw was, when you look at the cross section of the cables, taking your kind of power from an offshore wind turbine back to shore, the amount of copper in that, you know, it's kind of a baseball bat-sized kind of diameter. 

ML  
We also had on this show Simon Morrish, who's the CEO of Xlinks, right. I have to declare I'm an investor, as I am by the way in Magrathea in this magnesium innovation, getting magnesium out of salts. But Simon is doing this cable from Morocco to UK, but it's aluminium, we're substituting. So copper may be physically better, I mean, obviously, as you say,

EC  
You need thicker diameter, don't you, if it aluminium.

ML  
You need a thicker diameter. So I mean, the best thing would be silver, probably, as you say, or I don't know what else, but it's going from- we're actually substituting copper. To some extent you can, even in the electrical system, but we're going to need a huge multiplication of what we're doing. With your economist/ historian's hat on, is the increase in copper that's required now and over the next few decades, is it going to- is this materially different than other sort of surges in copper demand? Because I look at it and say, "well, historically, we've had demand and then we've met it with supply and you have demand and you meet it with supply." And now suddenly, you have people out there saying, "this time, it's different." So will we be able to scale up copper fast enough to get to net zero 2050, 2060 or 2070?

EC  
Yeah, my hunch is yes. Yeah. I mean, like, every time- every time there's been a moment like this, there have been people who have got panicky and said, "we're going to run out." And you know, it appeals to human instinct, I think - you know, of course, because we are living on a finite planet. I mean, there's no getting away from that. But the scale of it is greater than most people can kind of compute. And so yeah, there have been so many times: there were times back in the 1920s when people said, we were going to run out of copper, there were times in the very early, you know, in the Edison era, you know. Part of his ability to try and expand electricity networks was curtailed by the availability of copper. And then along came amazing kind of electrolytic refining techniques which made the copper even purer, and meant that you could, you know, have more of it. And so I do think that there will be technological leaps, and I think that there is a kind of techno optimist prism through which you can look at this book and a lot of the world we're facing at the moment, and I think it's compelling. I think the issue- the issue that I don't know about how to adjust for is, you know, our willingness as kind of societies to do more of this stuff, to do more mining, to make those big holes in the ground, to have those big tailings dams. Is that changing? And is that a new thing? Because, you know, look at what's happening in Chile and in Peru, you know, people are more resistant than they have been for quite some time to the side products of copper mining, you know, people are unhappy about the pollution, you're having protests. So is that a kind of new thing which needs to be reckoned with and may actually kind of resist it? I think that's what is slightly different, but I don't know if it necessarily means we're not gonna be able to- I think that we were good at finding a way of doing it.

ML  
Well it also- at some point, it also becomes an economic question as well, in that you have people who are completely convinced that wind turbines cause all sorts of illnesses. The amazing thing is: all the illnesses caused by wind turbines are solved by money. As soon as those people share in the benefits of the wind farm, economically, then we don't have those symptoms.

EC  
Extraordinary remedy! There were people who said that in the early days of the of the railway industry, I think that the trains would cause all the cows to drop dead when they passed by them and so far, the cows seem to be okay.

ML  
You know, one shouldn't trivialise these very real issues around pollution and social justice. I'm just saying that, you know, what has happened is that there tends to be a kind of a new economic settlement where more of the benefits of these technologies gets shared with the people who suffer the negatives. It's not a perfect process by any means. And we also have technologies to mitigate some of the pollution and some of the bad if we choose to use them. And that's actually, in a way, the biggest concern.

EC  
But I think also there's this, you know, so I've just been very recently making a piece of Sky News about grids, and talking to people who are in the line of where these pylons are going to be in the UK, you know, in East Anglia, between the North Sea and London. And, you know, they're very sincere, they- it's unfair to call them NIMBYs, they're just concerned about this and they don't feel they've been spoken to and collaborated with enough. I think that's the issue is that: are we going to kind of ride roughshod over a lot of people's concerns? You need to try to take people with you and, at the moment, whenever these things happen with urgency, then a lot of people kind of feel that they get left behind. And we don't need that either because in the end, this is going to happen or not happen, depending on whether there is kind of enough public support for the energy transition. I think one of the issues, you know, in the UK and elsewhere, is that we kind of maybe deluded ourselves to some extent, but also kind of told people that it was going to be kind of consequence-free. I mean, there is an amazing promised land in the future that's better for all of us and it's really exciting to look through to that, but getting there is going to be bumpy and it's going to potentially be kind of expensive in the short run and maybe less expensive in the future. And working that out and actually being open with people is something I think we need to do more of, and also trying to explain the excitement of this stuff as well, I don't think that's been kind of well enough done. And part of the point of the book is just to say that, you know, we, as a species, you know, what we do is we get stuff out of the ground, we turn it into amazing products that we use to make our lives better. We're just doing the next version of that this time, it's not like there's a kind of dramatic difference between last time around. But I just don't think people have been brought along with this enough so far. And that's why I think you're seeing backlashes in here and elsewhere around the world as well.

ML  
I think one of the- when you say it's not- one of the real differences from the last time round, or any time historically is, of course, that we've now got the internet. So, you know, if there are some, you know, desperate consequences for Papua New Guinea or Bolivia or, you know- I've been working with Redcar on the Hydrogen Trial Village where, you know, some very- not the wealthiest people in the UK, let's put it that way, having this trial imposed on them, essentially, against their will. But the difference is that now they're all connected, and they can actually organise, and we have things like, you know, we have WhatsApp groups, and we have Facebook. So that makes this, you know, that makes this- the sort of the justice imperative, perhaps raises it up in an important way. I'd like to hope so because, you know, it's one thing to say you know we haven't communicated the excitement. Well how much excitement can you feel if you're in Papua New Guinea and your village is going to be consumed by some colossal new copper mine.  And we've not been good, either in the less well-off people in Redcar or the people in the Global South and in Papua New Guinea. We've not been- we've been very good at- I'm sort of struggling to articulate it in the correct way, being very good at doing, as you say, ripping things out of the ground and turning it into marvellous products, but we really have not had justice very high up the agenda. Let me put it that way.

EC  
Justice but also, I think, thinking through the possible consequences, long term consequences. I mean, one of the striking things- like environmental consequences. One of the striking things when you look through this kind of transition is, you know, we went from wood to coal, from coal to oil, all of these different things. Going from wood to coal, you know, helped us avert an ecological catastrophe, because in the UK, we were running out of trees, you know, we were going to deforest the entire country. And then along comes coal and kind of saves us from that crisis. 

ML  
Can I jump in there because you didn't do wood in one of your big seven. But the interesting thing is that is actually - it turns out - a trope that what you've just said, because if you actually go to the Oliver Rackham, the History of the English Countryside, and what he actually says: the locations where they were making iron, using charcoal actually looked after their trees. It was agriculture that wrecked the trees. It wasn't the steel industry. 

EC  
Okay, well, yeah, no, that's true. Although it's worth saying there's- so I did: one of the one of the chapters that got away or one of the sections that got away was wood and so I spent quite a long time like reading, and I read Rackham actually, he's amazing, isn't he. And and then you've got him on one side, and then you've got the economic historians on the other and the economic historians convinced that there was a kind of like a mass shortage or potential shortage. Either way, though, there was paranoia that we were heading for that kind of situation. And so there was a lot of pressure. 

ML  
The iron and steel industry would have been limited by the space, but they were curating the woodland well.

EC  
Yeah, no, it's true. But I suppose the point is that, in each of these things, what looks like you saving the world from a particular ecological catastrophe then turns into the fruit of the next ecological catastrophe because you know, coal was saving us from that, oil was saving us from, you know, kind of sperm whales going extinct. And perhaps what's interesting about this moment is it's the first- one of the first transitions where not only can we think more about the justice of it, but also we can perhaps be a little bit more kind of clear-sighted and hopefully think about what the consequences of, you know, the ecological consequences of what we're doing now might be, may be. I don't know, that might be a kind of panglossian.

ML  
That might be because we're just not very- we're very good at sort of forecasting certain things to seven decimal places, using spreadsheets, but ignoring other things. But let's move on to oil because that's the next one, it's the fifth of your six materials in the Material World. And that also- the point you've just made, that oil has been- oil and gas has been behind our enormous increases in welfare and human progress. So it's a fantastic thing. And there's- I'm struggling for- there's the "moral case for fossil fuels" being made by Alex- ghastly, tendentious argument, frankly, and very ignorant about the realities of the energy sector. But nevertheless, historically, oil and gas has done a tonne of good.

EC  
Historically and also today. I think that this is what makes this like an awkward topic, because I think part of- because oil and gas are still incredibly good at doing what they do, there's just no getting away from it. And that's part of what makes the energy transition difficult is they are still really good at doing what they do, whether it's in terms of you know, energy, or in terms of petrochemicals. And so, I think we do ourselves a disservice by kind of, you know, saying that they are a thing of the past, because they are still, you know, whatever it is kind of like 80% as fossil fuels of our kind of energy demand right now. And, as you know, trying to find replacements, in particular for things like kind of plastics, is quite- it's just quite tricky you know, we're still working on that, and there's still a very long way to go. I mean, the interesting kind of example recently was Lego struggling to try to replace it's bricks, it's ABS bricks, acrylic - what is it acrylonitrile butene, something or other styrene, to replace that with something that's not made from oil. And they couldn't really do it just because it just is really good at what, from a chemical standpoint, at doing what it does. So I just, I wanted to kind of just do a bit of the history of oil, but a bit of also the fact - the extent to which we rely on it today. And so I also, I kind of leaned as well into gas as well because I think fertiliser - where does the world's fertiliser come from? It comes from gas. And until we find a way of making that in a green way on a mass scale, that being the key thing, I think it's going to be very tricky.

ML  
And so you know, your section on oil, just cycle back, it is oil - we said this - oil and gas, but it is also plastics, and then fertilisers.

EC  
It's plastics and petrochemicals and fertilisers, yeah. 

ML  
And so, it's not, you know, I've sort of framed this section by saying, you know, it used to be good, but now it's bad. But of course, it's not as simple as that, is it? It's- burning the stuff is clearly, you know, I mean it's bad and it's dumb and it's going to stop, you know, basically because of thermodynamics, just a question of when. But that will still leave us with the need for plastics. And I just did recorded an episode with Hannah from Our World In Data, Hannah Ritchie, and absolutely extraordinary, you know, sort of clarity of thought and talks about how, well you know, if you don't have plastics, you're probably going to have more food waste. But if we don't have fertiliser, we don't have food. So how do you navigate that? I mean, you just sort of communicate it in terms of put it into perspective. But does that sort of show a path forwards?

EC

We- I think the path forwards needs to be kind of less absolutist and more pragmatic, and we're going to need refineries. How we operate those refineries and how we work out the economics of those refineries, I don't know, I just don't understand it. Because at the moment, like refineries, no one spends much time thinking about them. And I kind of went to try to find what's the book on refineries so I can understand them and there aren't many books on it. But when you see what's happening there, and in a way, the kind of the efficiency, taking one barrel of oil and turning it into so many different things, and the extent to which some of this stuff is undoubtedly a part of how we solve the energy transition, I mean, like, the stuff at the bottom of the barrel, for instance, is often turned into a type of needle coke which is then turned into graphite, which then becomes the anode in your battery. And so- and likewise, you know, we need plastics, it is a part of the future, like it or not, and we can't just get all of that I don't think from kind of bio plastics. So, like, I just- I find that in a sense, I find that substance kind of one of the most fascinating because it's awkward, and it's awkward because, you know, if you believe as I do that we need to kind of get to the energy transition, then oil is the bit where you need to kind of start scratching your chin and saying, "well god this is really, really tricky, because a lot of this stuff we still haven't worked out to produce from other things." However, like, you know, at least with those batteries, at least with the kind of needle coke there, you're not burning it. That's the point, you're building, not burning. And I think that's the distinction that really matters here.

ML

I love the word you use: awkward. It is awkward, and it's very poorly sort of represented in the public discourse. So we're recording this during COP 28, and huge debates going on about phasing out fossil fuels. But if you do that, there's no discussion about, "well, what does that do to the economics of making the plastics that we need for in the food system all throughout?" I mean, plastics are also just used everywhere. So that discussion doesn't happen. And even the discussion about singl- use plastics, I mean a single use plastic going into a landfill, well managed landfill, you know, you ought to get carbon credits for that. 

EC  
You're putting carbon away aren't you.

ML  
You're putting carbon away forever. But no way you can have that discussion.

EC  
I think when something kind of becomes unfashionable, maybe I just have a natural instinct to kind of be like, "oh, well maybe it's not quite as unfashionable as that." When the zeitgeist says that something is simple, like the fossil fuels thing at COP, "it's simple, it's so simple. How could you not understand? It's just simple." 

ML  
Leave all the oil underground. That's it, simple. 

EC  
Yeah, my instinct would just be well, it's probably not simple. While I completely kind of respect, you know, the passion that many people are expressing about that, and I totally agree with the direction of travel, it's not quite as simple as that. It's really, it's bloody tricky. It's bloody tricky. And it's bloody tricky, because oil and gas are incredibly good at doing what they do. And so much of everything around us, you know, from your phone to your car to everything else, still kind of relies on oil, at least in terms of the substances that are going into it. So the plastics or indeed you know, everything we eat, you know, every second bite of food is thanks to gas. 

ML  
And the one that's always sort of thrown in the face of the protesters is: look at the clothes that you wear, look at the shoes, look at everything you- look at how did you get here and so on and so on. So it is all-

EC  
But it's so depressing that it becomes a kind of- that it becomes that kind of, you know, like a combative engagement, sort of gotcha, because we should have a grown up conversation about this. I knowt hat's always, you know, a difficult thing to do, but we need to have a grown up conversation about this, otherwise we're just gonna end up with more people alienated, with more people shouting at each other, Twitter doesn't help, of course, on this, or X, and social media doesn't really help because it's all about gotchas, as well as interesting stuff, like, you know, like stuff that you tweet. So you see what I mean? Like, I just hope for this conversation to become slightly more kind of grown up. And again, that's the point of this book. I didn't really understand a lot of the kind of nuances here until I just looked at it from a slightly different prism and I found this was a helpful way of looking at so hopefully other people will read it, and be like, you know, your viewers, your listeners, they understand what of this stuff already, but hopefully a wider audience will just start thinking in terms of energy and materials.

ML  
By the way, I think the way that process works is not that - you know, for all this is a fantastic book and a contribution to kind of enlightening the discourse. I don't think that the answer is that everybody sort of suddenly goes, "ah wait, here is the one path that we can all glom on to whether we are, you know, sort of fossil producers from Saudi Arabia or whether we are, you know, protesters on climate." What happens is that the extremes get a little bit more marginalised because the facts are more clear, there's more people- and the centre gets empowered to say, "look, this is the kind of direction of travel," that's my hope. And I see it as well, I do see extremes on social media becoming- sort of spiralling off into sort of irrelevance if they don't take this stuff into account. 

EC  
But I think the issue is that thus far, that debate has- because so far, for a lot of the existence of COP, it's been its own kind of not echo chamber, but its own silo, and people it just hasn't been a mass market story. Now that it's become mass market, I think one has to wrestle with those things. So the debate could be happening within a kind of a sphere of lots of smart people who understand about climate and a few kind of interested, engaged people engaging on the outside. Now, everyone is talking about this, and I think that changes the nature of how one manages that conversation.

ML  
I think that's right. And also, these kind of, you know, the phrase "net zero": it's sort of- it's very easy to use. It's now actually, at this COP, it's starting to come home that it means that these fossil fuel producers are going to have to actually stop. Now there's a big debate about "abated", the word "abated" and, you know- 

EC  
And CCS- 

ML  
- CCS, carbon capture and storage - and so on. But fundamentally, it's actually getting, in a way serious, because you can't just sort of do some extra nice things and put a picture of your wind farm on your annual report, you've actually got to stop. And that's very uncomfortable for a lot of very wealthy and entrenched interests. I want to move on to how you're going to stop. We've talked mostly electrification, and the last of your big six is lithium, which I think is shorthand for a number of-

EC  
It's battery materials really. And it could it- I did um and ah when I was kind of researching the book. As I say, there was no spreadsheet saying, "it's got to be this one and this one andthis one." But I ummed and ahhed about whether it should be lithium, whether it should be cobalt, maybe even nickel, just because I needed a material to get me into the, you know, batteries and things.

ML  
Cobalt, turns out, is relatively easy to remove.

EC  
I think I was going to- cobalt I was quite drawn to just because, you know, there's some terrible things happening in the DRC when it comes to- so as a journalist, one kind of thinks, "oh well there's a lot going on there." 

ML  
Drawn to it because it is such an extreme with artisanal mines and children, child labour and so on.

EC  
Exactly and terrible conditions. And also just the fact of concentration of so much kind of a resource in one place. That's quite unusual. But like you say, kind of almost in the course of my researching, the amazing rise in LFP batteries, the kind of batteries where you don't have cobalt in them, which mostly are coming from China.

ML  
Lithium, iron and phosphate, right?

EC  
Yeah, lithium, iron phosphate, ferophosphate. And that's kind of changed the game to some extent. If you buy a car these days, like a Tesla Model 3, the chances are probably it's got an LFP battery in it. 

ML

And now, of course, you've got got sodium, sodium batteries, enormously exciting-

EC

Although I think there's a bit of hype that- I think there's no fighting lithium's place in the periodic table.

ML  
Ed, hype in the energy sector? In the clean energy transition? Hype? Come on.

EC  
This is the- back to kind of like why I'm attracted to this as an issue. There's so much hype and there's so many people just banging their own single drum for whatever- there's lobbying, you know. And actually, I found it quite hard to navigate as a journalist, you know, to find who are the disinterested, you know, parties in this, who is genuinely neutral on this. It's really hard to tell you from the outside, because, you know, I'm brilliant at nuclear, I've got my SMRs, and I'm gonna- the answer to everything is nuclear, or the answer to everything is CCS or the answer to everything is hydrogen or whatever, like, trying to find your way through that is really, is really tricky. And I don't know if I've kind of managed it or mastered it. But we need some honest kind of, you know, parties who are able to actually help us navigate that if we're going to take this seriously in the future.

ML  
So on batteries, the way that works is that the current stock of batteries in the whole world would power the global economy for about 10 minutes or some small number. And therefore, batteries are irrelevant, useless and not part of the future. And then other people- and it's hydrogen, or it's don't do anything, and actually CO2 is plant food, right. But then the other side of it is, "no, no, we've seen what happened with solar, it gets really cheap and batteries will be everything and everywhere." And obviously the truth is somewhere between, right?

EC  
Yeah, but also, again, in the course of writing this- and your work on hydrogen has been really interesting on this. You've seen the case for batteries kind of shift as those learning curves have improved. And, again, an amazing thing that you see everywhere is that as we make more of something, we just get better at making it more efficient and making it - it gets cheaper, kind of comparatively speaking. And that's obviously the case for batteries. That's the case for solar. So they've gone from being kind of prohibitively expensive to being, you know, a really plausible option for many kind of cases. It's shifted that- your ladder really hasn't it, it's shifted, kind of some of those cases. But also, you know, it happens everywhere. Like it doesn't just happen for batteries, it happens for fertiliser, it happens for the manufacture of plastic, it happens for everything, our ability to refine copper. Every single thing pretty much in this book, we get better at over time, and it's amazing. So yeah, batteries have become a much more plausible answer to so many kinds of use cases than might have seen the case a few years ago.

ML  
I've just been in Japan where you know, they got a real shock in the 1970s, the oil shock and they, you know, sort of grasp for hydrogen cars because it seemed the only way to maintain their lifestyle and their economy. And batteries were not a viable solution back then. Now they are, but Japan is finding it hard to let go of the hydrogen sort of dreams.

EC  
Path dependency almost, again, isn't it.

ML  
There's some lock in there. But you're right. So batteries, the lithium-ion battery has just been such a game changer. But where does the lithium come from? And how much do we need to scale it up?Let's go back to the material side material of it.

EC  
So a lot of it comes, in terms of reserves that we know about, is in the lithium triangle in Chile, this is thus far in Chile, Bolivia, Argentina. Actually, in terms of stuff that's coming out of the ground, more of it these days is coming out of Australia. 

ML  
Spodumene

EC  
Spodumene, hard rock, that's lithos -  that's kind of where the name lithium came from. But the issue there is, then it's sent off to China and it's refined in a far more carbon intensive way. So, you know, lithium from Australia is much more carbon intensive than lithium, for instance, from Chile. But if you're buying an electric car, it's very- it's impossible right now to know where it's coming from. And so that- those kinds of nuances matter. Fascinatingly with- back to salt as ever, with lithium in South America, the way that that's refined is very similar to the way that the Phoenicians used to make their salt, because it's just taken into pools, the brine comes out of- it's in a great- under under the salt flats, there's enormous underground reservoirs, it's drained out of there, it goes into these big ponds where it's evaporated in the sun over the course of kind of a year, and gradually, you kind of precipitate away the various different salts. It's the same way we've been making salts for 1000s of years, quite literally. That's how we make the- one of the most important elements that we're using in batteries today. So, but that's just right now. The interesting thing about lithium is, unlike copper, you know, with copper, we have 1000s of years of experience of mining it and refining it and learning, you know how to do that. With lithium, it's new. We had a little bit of lithium mining in the past, but we are right now only just extrapolating and kind of expanding the way that we, you know, mine it and explore it. So I just don't think - I think some people fretting right now about whether we're going to be able to get enough of it, but we're going to discover loads of lithium in the coming years, we already are kind of discovering bits and pieces. There was that one in the US-

ML  
Norway,.

EC  
In Norway as well, there's going to be loads of it. So I don't think it's going to be a problem. But again, we just have to work out how to do it in a kind of sustainable way. And it's about- it's about pipelines really isn't it and supply chains, and ensuring there's enough to get into the batteries that we're going to need. Because we're going into so many batteries, and the exciting thing is, with batteries, again it's like you're building it, you're not burning it, you're making something that can be kind of, you know, recycled.

ML  
Right, and you talk a little bit about recycling. And recycling, again, in the sort of culture wars, at one end, you have people say, "we don't recycle everything, I throw everything away and I'm very proud of it," and the other side, they say, "no, we're gonna-

EC  
Are people proud of it? 

ML  
Oh yes, I've- people on my- I just tweeted a few days ago about battery recycling, and people are proud to say, "I throw every battery in the garbage." On the other hand, you have other people saying, "we're going to end up- batteries is a fantastic example and lithium of how we're headed for a circular economy." What's the reality? 

EC  
Well, I mean,  you probably know this better than I do. I mean, like, right now, our recycling rates on lithium are kind of basically next to nothing, but it's really early. In future where we'll be able to-

ML  
I've got to have a trope alarm again here. 

EC  
Okay, all right. 

ML  
It turns out that the figure of 5% recycling on lithium comes from a Greenpeace report from 2010. Nobody knows what the source was then and they don't know what the source was now, but there's a fantastic expert that I have to get on this show called Hans Eric Melin, who, in 2019 investigated and wrote a report saying 50% of lithium batteries are recycled, mainly in China and Korea. 

EC  
Ah that's interesting.

ML  
We're already at about 50%. But of course, that's not circular. 50% and a couple of generations, and you're down to zero anyway, so we need to get-

EC  
But that's encouraging.

ML  
It is encouraging, but we need to get to the 95, 97 99%, right?

EC  
We do and I think- I think there are- you know, the difficulty with recycling is that it's kind of- a lot of that is the processing, you know, just how do you actually kind of process the stuff? And steel is the thing that we recycle the most of, we're amazing at recycling steel.

ML  
Copper, as well. Copper and lead, and then steel.

EC  
Yeah, but apparently the reason that still is easy to recycle is as simple as the fact that it's magnetic. 

ML  
Easy to separate.

EC  
And it's crazy, isn't it? I mean, it's those things matter, don't they.

ML  
Easy to separate in the scrap, you just put a magnet over it and you get your steel.

EC  
Yeah, but I love that, you know, these pragmatic answers to why some- you know why this big global phenomenon's happening: it's magnetic. Whereas the same with like, you know, the reason you don't make silicon chips out of sand, you make them out of big chunks of quartz: it's not because it's any kind of chemical composition, it's because the quartz, in big chunks, if it was sand then it would kind of float up in convection flows when it was being burned and just gum up your machinery, whereas if it's chunks, it's just heavier, I you know-

ML  
So I'm an engineer, so I love to hear you talk like this, because there is something- one of the themes in this book is this sheer physicality that, you know, this world is not just full of, you know, bros in California writing lines of code and doing machine learning, it's actually- you've got to worry about things like viscosity and density and the conductivity and these physical characteristics, or you get nowhere. 

EC  
But I think there's something- there's something primal in, you know, this is maybe a deeper thing, but there's something that appeals I think, to our humanity. We are- as creatures, what do we do? We get stuff out of the ground and we make it into tools.  That's the earliest things that humans ever did it, we use our hands, and we turn it into tools. And I think we need to reconnect with that a little bit. I think a lot of people are reconnecting. I think a lot of people get frustrated with the fact they don't understand how anything's made, so they're going back- that you've got a maker movement of people who are going and trying to kind of like make their own guitars and all of their contraptions at home. And I think that appeals to what is-

ML  
You get this polarisation between some people who say, "absolutely, and we need to go into sort of the maker society and we need to repair everything" and you get other people say, "oh, we can do the Czochralski process." We are making things but it's in sort of clean rooms. 

EC  
Well that's true, I know, but I just feel like we need to reconnect-  it's a self help thing. 

ML  
So we're getting we're getting philosophical here, which is fine, because I just want to finish with: you have a conclusions chapter to the Material World. And I was trying to extract from it whether you are fundamentally optimistic or fundamentally pessimistic, what is the message? Because we always want the messages, I want clarity, simplicity, are you optimistic or pessimistic? Or is it just more complicated than that? 

EC  
It's more complicated than that, Michael, it is. I mean, like, it ends, I veer in a lot of the book and in that conclusion, between being a bit terrified about the scale of what we've committed ourselves to, and the extent to which people understand that, and just how difficult it is going to be. And I've veered between that and  an optimism. And I kind of - I finish on a note of optimism, which is to say that we have shown ourselves throughout history to be incredibly good at confounding the conventional wisdom that things are just too difficult, you know, things like: for a long time, no one thought that we'd be able to do solid-state semiconductors, you know, it was just seen as one of those challenges that was too difficult. For a long time, people thought that we'd never rediscover the recipe to concrete and to make it kind of work.

ML  
Another example is blue LEDs. Because without the blue LED, you don't have white light, or you can't do- you can't do an LED light bulb. And they just thought- and there was one guy who said, "I'm gonna keep going," a Japanese scientist who later got a Nobel Prize, and that's why we have not just a solar revolution, but it's actually a lighting revolution as well.

EC  
That's a really good example. Yeah. And that's been so consequential because, you know, energy, cost of lighting is a massive thing. And so- although, by the way, reason to get depressed, despite that incredible improvement in energy costs, we still- our total energy demand from lighting is still going up, because we're doing so much more lighting. So you've got the Sphere in Las Vegas. 

ML  
Globally: possible, because I think so many people in the Global South are starting to use lighting, but in any-

EC  
In developed economies too-

ML  
Absolutely, trope alarm: in any developed economy we're using- and that's why- interesting fact: UK, retail electricity demand was 37% higher 20 years ago than it is now. And lighting is a big piece of that.

EC  
That is true. That is true, but globally.

ML  
Sorry. I interrupted. 

EC  
So, but that's the Jevons paradox, isn't it? So this guy, William Stanley Jevons, economist back in 18 something rater, noted that as we kind of started to become more efficient at using coal actually, our total kind of demand, energy demand actually kind of went up. And it's that point - do your efficiency gains get outweighed by the fact that we just become more keen to consume more stuff, and that might just be a human trait?

ML  
I want to do an episode on the Jevons Paradox with somebody.

EC  
Is that a trope as well? 

ML  
No, it's- correlation is not causation. So we got more efficient and we also increased our footprints of everything and our use of everything, but in fact, what you find when you really try and dig- the data is very difficult to work with. When you drill in what you find is that of the efficiency gains, generally something like 20% goes back into using more of that specific thing. The rest just goes back into wealth, which means that we go on holiday and use lots more of everything.

EC  
So it's better for the better for the society. 

ML  
And it's better for society. Exactly. We're reinvesting in wellbeing more than we reinvest in just more lighting, or more of this stuff. 

EC  
How about like cars? So the average weight of a typical chassis has gone down because the steel has gotten better and we've got better at making it, but the weight of the average car has gone up because we like SUVs and we like contraptions in the cars and all of these things.

ML  
So with cars, we've become enormously more efficient, enormously more- but we've reinvested a large part of that in driving vast SUVs rather than having efficient smaller cars.

EC  
So that's different, isn't it?

ML  
Maybe we do it- I'll think about that one and come back on it because it's- the answer is - on that one - is very much- it's complicated, because- the reason it's a sensitive subject is that, again, within the kind of social media, within the polarisation, that gets used as an excuse to do nothing, as opposed to - I tend to look for excuses to do stuff. So we need to become more efficient, even if it doesn't reduce our use of anything, if it translates into wellbeing, if it translates into progress, if it translates into people in the Global South having better living standards. And, you know, that's a good thing anyway. So why don't we do it anyway?

EC  
I think that's a really good way of looking. And I think we need to we need to look at it in that these things being used as gotchas rather than as kind of a better way of clarifying our understanding of the world is the problem. But so yeah, no, so So I ended ions, I just say I am kind of on a mostly optimistic note, because we have just under I think we are just so good at coming up with amazing innovations. We have been over time. And I so I'm kind of slightly techno optimist, I guess about this. I think that we're and I think that's already happening when you look at the latest IEA netzero reports. Were below the pathway they previously expected, partly because of solar, partly because of batteries, you know, wind better technologies have already delivered something of an improvement compared with previous pathways. So like, I'm hopeful for that reason. And I'm I'm probably slightly more on the hopeful. But But I think it's I think one does oneself a disservice if one is just purely optimistic, because then you risk, you know, veering into delusion, because there are it's just, it's really hard. It's really hard. And it's really tricky. And I think that, you know, we shouldn't pretend the reason that that is not. 

ML  
Yeah, the correct answer is not to be passively-optimistic. There's this lovely description of a child being optimistic that you know, that they will get a great Christmas present, but that's passive optimism. Active optimism is to say, 'look at that tree, look at this word, I can build a fantastic tree house!" That's sort of active optimism is what's really needed- and I think you could have finished the book saying, "okay, given the scale, given the complexity, given the interrelatedness, given the capital intensity, this is how the world works and you're not going to be able to change it, "when you could have finished by saying, aren't we innovative, and... productive and it's all going to be fine, Panglossian." But actually, what you're saying is, essentially that we have agency. 

Yes, that we have agency, and it's up to us. 

EC  
Yes, I think that's it. And I think, where things are a slightly kind of grey area, where they're knotty, where they're tricky, where they're challenging, that's also the most interesting and exciting places to be. And I think that's where we are right now. And I think this is one of the most exciting times for humankind in history, because we've set ourselves a challenge that is one of the greatest challenges, industrial/economic, that we have ever set ourselves. I think the energy transition is of that order. Its massive. That's partly why, as an economic journalist, I'm attracted to this: it is a massive deal. I'm surprised that my fellow economics journalists aren't all on this as well. We need to spend the next- we're going to spend the next 50 years witnessing amazing discoveries, there are going to be setbacks, it's going to be more difficult in certain circumstances, but there's going to be extraordinary things that we can do as humans to make the world a better place, and how amazing a period that is to be living through it.

ML  
I could not have said it better, you are the master communicator. And I'm just going to turn to the camera because I can tell you, you know, if you have not read this book you need to do so if these are the issues you're interested in. This is absolutely one of the primers that you should be reading. So thank you very much for joining me here today. 

So that was Ed Conway, writer, broadcaster, Economics and Data Editor of Sky News, and author of Material World. And as always, we'll put links into the show notes for the episodes that were mentioned during the conversation. So that's Simon Morrish -Episode 92: "650 leagues of HVDC Under the Sea", Episode 142 -Alex Grant: "From Mining to Brining", and episode 16 Dr. Kandeh Yumkella: "Sustainable Energy for All". We'll also put links into the show notes to Oliver Rackham's great book: History of the Countryside, and to coverage of Hans Eric Melins' breakthrough research on the real rates of lithium recycling. 

If you've enjoyed today's conversation, please remember to like, share, and subscribe to Cleaning Up or leave us a review on your chosen podcast platform. And do please spread the word on social media or by telling your friends and colleagues. And if you want more from Cleaning Up, sign up for our free newsletter at cleaningup.live where you'll find our archive of over 160 hours of conversations with extraordinary climate leaders. 

Cleaning up is brought to you by our lead supporter, Capricorn Investment Group, the Liebreich Foundation and the Gilardini Foundation.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai