Vaclav Smil. Making the modern world: materials and dematerialization
Preface. I can’t believe I read this book, it is just a long litany of the gigantic amounts of materials we exploit, with no analysis, implications, or the meaning of what impact this will have on the planet.
I certainly don’t expect anyone to read even this shortened version of his book, but it might be worthwhile to skim for an idea of how much material we’re consuming.
As I point out in my review of the United Nations 2016 report Global material flows and resources productivity” here, in order to accommodate an additional 2 billion people in 2050, material consumption will need to nearly triple to 180 billion tonnes of materials, almost three times today’s amount. If 180 billion tonnes grows in the future at a 5% compound rate, in 497 years the entire earth will be consumed, all 5.972 x 1021 tonnes of it, and we’ll be floating in outer space.
After reading this book, it’s hard to believe there’s anything left to exploit, though here it is 5 years later and the earth is still being pillaged. But from Smil’s gargantuan numbers and the exponential exploitation of just about everything, clearly this will end badly. The issue of peak sand has been in the news more frequently lately, which is essential for civilization to make concrete, computer chips, solar PV, and fracking.
Smil covers a wide range of materials that are essential to civilization that you may not have thought much about, and all the myriad uses of silicon, plastics, nitrogen, aluminum, steel, hydrogen, ammonia, cement, and more. All of them made possible by oil. All of them essential for civilization, so if one fails….(Liebig’s law of the minimum).
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