While I was away last week I finished reading Ed Conway’s fabulous book, Material World. I have read few books that have so significantly increased my understanding of how we function as a species and how the world works.

Taking as its subject the six ‘materials’ upon which Conway argues humanity has depended in the past and will rely upon in the future – sand, salt, iron, oil, copper and lithium – he explores each in turn.

The book tours the planet, from the Atacama desert to the outback of Australia, via the salt mines of Cheshire and the mid-Atlantic ridge.

‘Spoiler alert’ for those planning to read the book, but here are just a few thought-provoking facts I picked out:
•    By 2020 the total weight of every human-made product on the planet was greater than the weight of every natural living thing.
•    The latest silicon chips can fit roughly 15 million transistors into a dot the size of a single full-stop in a book.
•    The Spruce Pine mine in the US is the only place in the world from which the hyper-pure raw material needed for silicon crucibles used to manufacture silicon chips can be extracted.
•    98% of the UK’s chlorine, used in the purification of the country’s water, comes from a single plant in Runcorn.
•    There is enough steel in the world to build seven highspeed rail tracks between the earth and the sun.
•    The Chuquicamata open copper mine in Chile is so deep you could drop the Burj Khalifa (the world’s tallest building) into it, and it wouldn’t poke out of the top.
•    US oil independence is a myth as the oil it produces needs to be shipped to Europe and Asia to be refined as it is unsuited to domestic refineries, which are used to refine imported oil from elsewhere.
•    The Salar de Atacama salt lake is the world’s single biggest source of lithium, and in some parts is at least three miles deep.

You get the picture and there are plenty more nuggets like this in the book, but beyond the fascinating facts Conway makes a number of important observations.

He argues that as most of us become detached from the basic resources used to make the goods we use in our daily lives, there is a risk we start to underestimate their importance and our dependence upon them.

This complacency can lead to ill-informed and potentially damaging decisions by both politicians seeking to build short-term capital, and also investors attempting to take a long-term view.

Arguably the most important example of this is the transition to ‘net zero’… It may be an irony (or even an iron-y) that to achieve this essential goal we will need more of all of these materials than we have ever needed before.

Starving carbon-emitting or perceived ‘dirty’ industries of capital in the short-term may therefore do more harm that good to the planet and to us in the long-term.

While this might be a cause for despondency, the book is also a homage to human ingenuity. It is, therefore, a book that also carries a message of hope.