Manpreet Kaur’s Reviews > Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization > Status Update

“Were China to shift all its coal-fired power stations on to gas, then the world would immediately be on track to hit its climate targets.”

“…petroleum seemed initially to be a solution rather than a problem. It helped save the sperm whale from potential extinction by providing a superior lamp fuel to substitute for whale oil.”

"Wouldn't that be most fitting end of all: to make the world's biggest hole whole again?"

"Electricity is no longer just the second greatest thing in the world after God; it is the first great hope for addressing climate change.

“Reducing our carbon footprint will mean increasing our copper footprint. The good news is that some of that can come from recycling. The bad news is that even if we recycled pretty much everything we possibly could from old pipes and wires, we would still run desperately short of what we need.”

If steel provides the skeleton of our world and concrete its flesh then copper is civilisation’s nervous system, the circuitry and cables we never see but couldn’t function without.

In a 2021 report American investment bank Goldman Sachs declared that ‘copper is the new oil’.

“This is a small-scale example of what economists sometimes call the Jevons paradox', after the economist William Stanley Jevons, who posited back in the nineteenth century that however much more efficient we would make our engines and machines, we would simply find new excuses to burn just as much (or more) coal.”