The Inconvenient Truth About Reaching Net Zero

not going to talk about that that anymore. I just wanted to know from you if I were arrested, I'd obviously be completely innocent. But if I were arrested, would you send me flowers?

And the resilience has also been so nonder how.

brought us to where we are. Bank of England did not raise rates fast enough at the beginning, kept them low for far too long, totally failed to normalize, and now is caught up in a position where they have to prove that they're like super macho to get to the other side of it. So it's almost inevitable that they will go too far.

of the nature of the backdrop, the economic backdrop. But it would be more accountable, I suppose, if you have to think harder about the elected it, then maybe you would make better decisions.

outright that didn't before. And I think where the real weak point in the market is just now, which is not necessarily, you know, such a bad thing as the buy to let market. I mean, I do actually genuinely feel quite sorry for people who bought properties in good faith and now say you should well, you know, I mean, they can't. I do think that I can see why

George Osbourne changed the tax allowances. By the end of the day, a mortgage interest is a business cost, and it's treated as a kind of cost business cost for any other type of business. And if you decide to make an exception for buy to let landlords because they're suddenly politically unpopular, then that's fundamentally quite unfair to help.

almost never true. But on this occasion, I've had this book for less than twenty four hours and I've read I would say a good half of it already and the rest I'll be reading the second Ed and I stopped talking. It's absolutely brand So before we go any further, it's called Material World, A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future by Ed Conway. Go out by it right now.

You can't get it physically in America until November, but you can get it physically in the UK and Europe now, and of course you can probably get it on a Kendle in the US. Go out and buy it. You will learn a lot.

the world. And that feels like part of the story that we've been told over the last kind of ten twenty years or so, and you know, to a great to it if you extend it further things like finance. You know you and I know a lot of people who work in finance. It is ultimately kind of financial intermediation. It's not necessarily kind of making stuff. And I had this kind of profound expert not that it's not important, I should say, I mean, it's incredibly important, but this

is to make a distinction with this other world. I went out to this gold mine in Nevada a few years ago, and I was filming a piece for Sky News about Brexit. But the thing that really stayed with me staring at this mine was just how much of this mountain. It was, this enormous mountain they were tearing down in order to get a really tiny amount of gold. It took about ten jumbo jets, so ten a three

eighties worth of AWE to get one gold bar. So the scale of exploitation of what you need to do to the earth to get what you need was just kind of way beyond what I kind of expected. It was just staggering, and so from that I kind of found myself thinking, well, hang on, what do we need

to do. If that's what we need to do a bar of gold, what do we need to do to get the stuff that we really need, because obviously, you know, gold we need in certain respects, but you know, we're not going to literally kind of drop down dead if we don't have gold, Whereas if we don't get you know, fertilizer, if you don't have steel, if you don't have concrete, if you don't have copper to electrify the world, then

that's a different story. And so that kind of set me off down this this other road of trying to explore what the materials are that we really really need and what does it take to kind of get them out of the ground convert them into the things that we use. And as I kind of delve deeper into it, it just, yeah, it struck me that there is this entirely different world where engineering is key, where physics is key, where science is genuinely not just an abstract term, but

it's actually being applied every day. You know, you look at kind of what's happening with the manufacturer of semiconductors, and this felt like, you know, I called it the material world. It felt like a different universe, and it felt like an inspiring and exciting place, but most of all, it just felt unfamiliar. And I think that's partly because, particularly in the UK, but also to some extent the US, to some extent some parts of Europe, we've increasingly outsourced

the production of stuff. We've outsourced the getting of things from the ground, and everything pretty much that we're touching on a daily basis is either growing, but for the most part it is mind It comes out of the ground, but we just don't do as much of it in this country, and as a result, we don't think about it that much. We don't think about the pragmatic realities of how the world around us actually came to be.

And it's partly something about, you know, our lack of awareness in the real world, and that lack of awareness I think is quite important because it's partly because we didn't have to think about this stuff. It's partly because we outsourced a lot of it to China that I think we're not as aware of both the challenges, so the particular challenges of carbon emission. You know, where where

does that carbon frooc come from? It comes from everything, It comes from pretty much every process you can care to imagine, but also the challenges. You know, there is no single switch we'll ever be able to flick which can suddenly turn out those those carbon emissions. And the book is a bit of an exploration into both of those sides. You know, how we're actually making staff, you know,

how does a semiconductor get made? And you know plenty is being written about semiconductors, by the way, but I think, I am this is the first book which actually goes tells the story of how you make a semiconductor from the quarry all the way through to the fab Okay, lots has been written about fabs, but not so much has been written about how you make polysilicon, or how you make silicon metal, or how you make the actual

kind of wafer itself. That stuff is that's fascinating, and that's half of the journey of the supply chain before it gets to TSMC or indeed any of those other fabrication plants. So partly is a story of wonder, but partly is also like, let's just think about the world pragmatically for a change.

most investors live in. I mean, you just said that the mine you went to see, the gold mine tacked every box but was still a bloody great hole in the ground, destroying a real environmental whatever around it, right say nothing of the impact it might have on local communities, et cetera. And I'm guessing I've seen pictures of minds like that that anyone standing next to a mind like that would be amazed to think that it took to any ESG box at all, or certainly any e box.

Although obviously all these things are going to take s boxes and that's very important as well. So well, if we have time, we'll come back to ESG. Although actually it's all about ESG, isn't it. So let's talk about because this really is a book. It's a book about energy in lots of ways, isn't it. Because one of the things that you were saying, it's about turning sand into this AsSalt, into this and iron into this, etc.

But that turning is a story of energy. So one of the things that I think you touched on in pretty much every chapter along the way in the book is how we are doing something or attempting to do

something extraordinary. I suspect will fail. What we are attempting to do something extraordinary, which is go through the first ever energy transition that does not involve transitioning to a better and more intense fuel for the first time, we're trying to transition to a fuel that is effectively in terms of intensity, worse than the one we're leaving behind.

So one of the things that you talk about is that there are a lot of inconvenient truths in here that our attempt to switch to net zero is much more difficult than most people even begin to imagine it will be, and possibly impossible.

or less settled. What hasn't really been settled is the solution and how we get there and how much of a compromise there's going to be in order for us to fulfill these goals. A lot of governments, you know, the UK was the first, have signed into law acts that say we must get to net zero by a certain time, mostly twenty fifty, without really thinking about what that actually involves.

a good way of growing. And I think, you know, I think, and I kind of touched on this a little bit towards the end of the book, because again it's a bit of a journey for me, and you say, you know, as you say, a lot of it's about energy. I didn't really expect at the start of it that there would be so much about energy. But yes, if you're looking at the conversion of anything, any raw material into something else, then a lot of energy is spent there.

That's straightforward thermodynamics. And as a result, then you need to think about how you're going to do it differently, because right now, carbon emissions are everywhere. I mean a good example of this is to make a to make a silicon chip or a solar panel, you need to take silicon out of the ground, but you need to then turn that into a form of metal. In order to do that, you smelt it, so you're smelting it, not unlike how you would smelt iron in an electric

arc furnace. And in order to smelt it you need coal. So in order to make the silicon metal that we make our solar panels out of and our silicon chips out of, you need coal, coking coal right now at least, And that is one tiny example of a way in which carbon is kind of integral to pretty much every

product you touch on a daily basis. And while there's been plenty of imagination and thought given into how we are going to deal with certain processes where we're going to change our power generation, for instance, but you know, as you've said many times before, even that hasn't really been thought through as deeply as it really ought to be. That the industrial side of it, you know, how you're going to make I mean, people talk a little bit

about cement, but cement is just absolutely enormous. How are you going to do that? How you're going to get your copper without creating cobbon? How are you going to get your lithium without carbon emissions along the way?

They can take that power, turn it into hydrogen that you can then store under the ground by the way, in salt caverns, which comes back to salt anyway, in order to make this hydrogen okay, which is going to be the solution to everything, because it means you can just burn that hydrogen when the wind's not blowing, when the sun's not shining. It is your backup. It solves everything. You can put it into trucks theoretically and run them

around instead of using diesel. In order to create that hydrogen okay, the amount of energy you need is stupendous to run through those electrolyzers. And I'll give you an example. We at the moment in the UK, we've got a couple of fertilizer plants. Actually neither of them are running right now because gas is so expensive to run one of those fertilizer plants. It's a kind of a medium sized plant doesn't create enough ammonia for the UK at

the moment. It takes natural gas in and fertilizer comes out, So it uses the natural gas as the process that creates that ammonia fertilizer. It's one of the most important processes in the modern world. Without these plants, we are all dead, or at least fifty percent of us are dead, because fifty percent of the world is alive today thanks to nitrogen fertilizer we get from natural gas. Almost entirely

from natural gas, although in China they use coal. Still, if you wanted to replace that fertilizer plant, as I say, pretty medium sized fertilizer plant with green hydrogen, which which you could then turn into ammonia. Because you can take that green hydrogen turn it into ammonia, you would need the entire output of the biggest offshore wind farm in the world. So there's one off the UK called Dogger Bank.

There's another called Hornsey too. You would need their entire output, which was enough for about a million homes, just to power that plant and get green hydrogen and thense green ammonia.

energy density thing. You know, natural gas is incredibly energy dence compared with you know, trying to get the energy out of a wind turbine and electeralize it and waste a lot of energy along the way and turn that into hydrogen. It is a very different world. It's a very different challenge we're facing. It's far greater than you possibly could have imagined. But by the same token, there is hope here because there's opportunities. You know, we need

so many more innovations. It's not just innovations, you know, to try and crack all of those different little kind of things that we've heard about, whether it's kind of improving lithiumon batteries. It's all along the industrial chain, all the way from the mind through to the products that we're using today. It's through to petrochemicals, it's through to ammonia. Like I say, there are so many different opportunities here,

all of them pretty damn difficult. But that to me spells an interesting, exciting time.

from fossil fuels just doesn't go down. I mean a reflects the fact that we're becoming more efficient at using all the fossil fuels that we do, but also that demand is constantly rising, so getting it below eighty eighty percent, so it fields like whatever we do, we're not really moving very fast in the end, and possibly if policy makers made more effort come to terms with that, they'd find it easier to make policy going forward.

of the villains. I mean coal obviously as well. But even so, when you listen to protesters like just stop Oil, for instance in the UK, and similar protesters around the world, one of the things they frequently point to is that the International Energy Agency has said that we don't necessarily need any new licenses for oil exploration in the future. Even that same i EA framework, even that same forecast, still presumes that we're going to be consuming a lot

of oil come twenty twenty fifty. We're still going to be consuming a lot of oil come twenty sixty as well. We still rely on a lot of oil and a lot of gas because right now there are still things that we can't really do very well without them, you know, fertilizers being another being a pretty good example.

Everyone is after silver bullets and the way. One of the reasons that I've been, you know, kind of focused on this, and my background is slightly more in economics and you know, other kind of reporting, but one of the reasons I've been drawn into this is that it felt like an area where too few people talking about the nuance of complexity and the gray areas. It's too easy to just do kind of coverage of the green you know, the energy transition and climate just in terms

of villains and in terms of you know, heroes. But that's not the way the world works. And you know, I wanted to try to explain a little bit more about the basics of how the world works. I should say it wasn't the reason I started writing book. The reason I started writing book was I just wanted I wanted to get I wanted to understand how the products that I was using every day actually got into my hand.

I wanted to understand the journey that a semiconductor or the steel frame of my phone had been in before it arrived in my hands. But then along that way, You're like, well, there is this whole world and populated by amazing people, you know, engineers, scientists, physicists, manufacturers making this stuff that we rely on every day, whereas this you know, commentorati are living in this entirely separate universe and they're.

than people making spreadsheets and typing blogs. It's, you know, entry into that world if you're not in it, not necessarily the easiest thing.

to get the stuff out of the ground. And this is part of the explanation. I kind of think of it as people are really sniffy about things like resource exploitation. They're sniffy about it because it's not like semiconductors. You don't have Moore's law when it comes to copper or iron,

do you? But actually you do. You do because if you look at the price of copper, not just in terms of it's kind of real value of inflation adjusted value, but if you look at it in terms of the labor hours that are needed to go into it, you've had an extraordinary rise in productivity in the mining sector. We've got so much better at getting stuff out of

the ground thanks to you know, big trucks. Those they've allowed us to get so much of this stuff out of the ground and keep the price low to allow countries like China and India to start to industrialize. If it wasn't for this amazing productivity miracle, this undertold miracle, then you wouldn't have had the kind of progress we've had. You wouldn't have had the sheer number of people rising

out of the poverty numbers that we had. So there was an amazing story here, But the corollary of that story is that there are fewer people than ever before working in the material world. It's not just economics, obviously, is it. It's also then they've got the kind of national security question. You've got do we want to be so reliant on China? Because in a sense that kind of the shadow hero protagonist of this book is also China, because in every single one of these materials, it's basically

pretty dominant. And so do you still want to be kind of so reliant? What do you want to do about that? We're all kind of aware of how reliant we are on China for stuff, perhaps we're not even aware of just how great that is. And so again, whether it's green tech, whether it's plastics, whether it's copper. You know, almost half of all of the world's copper is refined in China. You're a lot of people talk about rare earth materials and how look, it's terrible. China

has a massive stranglehold, which they do copper. You know, the majority of the world's copper concentrate, which comes out of the mind. So there's two types of that. You get the kind of some refined copper, but you also get copper concentrate, which is less refined. The majority of that gets shipped over to China from all over the world.

So it's you know, in and Easier, It's it's Chili, it's it's pappened in the Guinea, it's all of these places, and then it gets sent to China, and China is right at the heart of that supply chain now and without an incredible increase in the amount of copper that we have, we are not going to fulfill anything. We're not going to be able to build enough wind turbines, we're not gonna be able to make enough solar panels, we're not gonna be able to make enough electric cars and so, and.

of the most important things in the world. And for them, like you say, we need we need a lot of copper. We need a lot of copper for that. And we need to upgrade all our grids in the UK massively, in the US as well across much of Europe. And there you run into another issue, okay, which is that the UK is a really good example of that. We need to we need to build a lot more pylons to get us the power that we need for all these electric cars and stuff, but also to get it

from the places where we're generating that power right now. Yeah, what's fascinating about this material world filled with companies you've never heard of, you know, companies making polysilicon, and companies making kind of random products that turn out to be the basis for Apple's entire business, and you know Tela's entire business. Anyway, one company that's kind of interesting to me. It's called prismium and they make I'm not this this is I have no idea about what's going on the core.

inspiring about this. There was that that was it Peter Teel who said, you know where's my flying car? You know, you gave me one hundred and sixty character or two hundred and forty characters. But where's my flying car?

all over again again. You know, imagine if we did have a global electricity grid, so you could have power from Morocco sent through to Europe, solar power from there, you kind of win power from elsewhere. That's quite an exciting story. But in order for it to happen, you need a lot more infrastructure, You need a lot more copper, you need a lot more of these cables to go

down under sea. And again, right now, it's quite hard to persuade anyone to open new mine and new copper mine, and so the question is whether whether people are going to be willing enough to actually do the mine that we need to do in order to get to net zero.

incredibly difficult. Across the developed world, it's difficult in Chile. I've been reading a lot about that. There's a lot of concern there about the lithium in particular in Chili red So you know, as prices go up, who's going

to be the one who approves the new minds. It's a very difficult argument to make, as you say, because there isn't enough nuance in the debate, Whereas the argument really should be, if you want to move to an environmentally superior world, you've got to dig the minds first.

You know, we in this country and elsewhere could certainly consume a bit less. You know, we could seem a lot could maybe consume a lot less. But even if we did that, it still wouldn't kind of make the difference.

But having been to a copper mine, actually a few copper mines, you need to create some pretty enormous holes in the ground in order to do it, and so our you know, willingness to do that does start to diminish when it's in nice, pretty places.

about how we were going to run out of materials. Remember, you know, this is not the first time that there's been this dialogue. The Club of Rome Limits to Growth the nineteen seventies was all about how we were going to run out of stuff, and we were going to

destroy the world. That didn't happen. It didn't happen because we became so much better at getting ever more copper out of ever less promising all so the grades of the rock that we get out of the ground have become less promising, and the stuff that we previously would have said as junk now turns out to be legitimate copper or And the upshot is these holes have got even deeper. The question is whether we can have another

one of those leaps again. If we can, then maybe we can do kind of get a bit squeeze a bit more out of the existing minds. But I think even if you make all the most optimistic assumptions about that, you still need a shed load nor more copper minds. And right now the pipeline isn't promising enough on copper.

we need manganese cobos in some places. But our ability to get enough lithium out of the ground is going to be one of the most telling questions in whether we can achieve the other part of net zero, which is electrifying road transport and also you know, providing the lithium that we're using for talking on devices like this, and the process of getting that lithium out of the ground, well,

it's kind of fascinating. So I went out to Chile to go to the lithium ponds where it is where it has got from under the ground, so that the Saladieta camera is this kind of crazy place in the dry one of the dryest does it's where's the dryest desert in the world where you can stand on this salt flat? And I did, and a few meat beneath

your feet. It's slightly terrifying because I was told later I shouldn't have said on the salt flat, because a few meters beneath your feet there is this gigantic underground reservoir of brine and it's just been sitting there. It's this strange kind of spooky thing. You think about water have been constantly in motion, but there's this underground well where lithium has been there for millions of years, and then we pump up the brine and then gradually precipitate

away the other different salts in it. It's funny thing is when you know, if you read the book in sequence, there's there's a large section on salt, and it turns out that the way the way we make lithium, at least from these from these brine deposits, is basically the same as the way that we make salt. So you're evaporating away in those large ponds over a long period.

And again, the interesting thing in future is going to be whether we can get enough of it right now there's far more lithium coming out of the ground in Australia because you can mine as a hard rock and then ship it off to China to get refined and then you can just get more out of the ground that way, whereas in Chile you're basically having to wait for the sun to do its work so evaporate it over the course of a year or so, and so again we fall back on our reliance on on China.

And you know it is there's there's all of the same issues here, the environmental question. You know, we're using the deploying water in one of the driest regions of the world, getting it's a totally pristine ecosystem. We have no idea what we're doing to it, yet we're doing it. And then the locals, the locals really don't like it at all. But they don't and that's happened. And that's that's We're only at the start of this for lithium. So you know, that's that's that's pretty kind of profound.

I think I don't think we're going to have it. I think we're going to be able to get enough of this stuff. But what's interesting with lithium as opposed to the other kind of materials. I look at the book. Is it's just that it's new. You know, we've got hundreds of years of about thousands of years of experience of mining copper. We only, you know, very recently decided that we like lithium for good reason. It's it's about

the best thing you can put in a battery. But we don't have much experience of mining it and how we do that, and how we deal with the world which is less into mining. Now for this grand new beginning of exploitation is going to be a kind of an interesting one. I'm not sure where that's going to kind of end up.

its kind of metals. I think the interesting one interesting thing. Okay, so when when we were in those early days of crossing the world with those cables, so the copper cables that were our first telecommunications network, the boats that the ships that were doing that discovered when they were dragging their kind of their sounders across the across the bottom of the Atlantic, they discovered these things called polymetallic nodules.

are going to start mining under the sea. And so I have a whole chapter on this because actually it turns out there might be a whole lot more copper in those deposits under the sea than anyone who has accounted for at the moment, even in the official numbers. And if we don't want to mine on land, are we going to be any more likely to want to mine under the sea. Probably not, because that's another that's an even more pristine ecosystem.

think it's probably less likely. I think what's much more likely is that we just get better at mining the stuff from terrestrial minds. But even so, the hunger for minerals is so great now that people are looking in all sorts of places to find this stuff. And the reluctance amongst many people on land to have mining near them is such that you know, if you're not going to let them mine on land, then maybe you're going

to find the path of lease resistance. And right now that is actually a part of least resistance, because you know, you've got places like the International Seabird Authority which are in the process of laying down the rules to allow deep sea mining. We don't know. That's an ongoing conversation right now, but it's within a kind of regulatory body which no one's ever heard of, Frank, and there's very little oversight. I went there. I went to Jamaica where

the International Seabed Authority is based. They're the guys, you know, who decide who is allowed to mine on the seabed, and it's this sleepy place on the on the seafront in Kingston. It's rather delightful, but it feels like a kind of you're going into a time capsule. It's an old nineteen seventies bond set for like the Roger Moore era. But they've still got the kind of phone booths with the nineteen seventies era of phones that you could kind

of pick up and still work functioning. That is the front line for deep sea mining right now, and no one is quite sure what they're going to come up with right now. So we are in a really interesting moment where we're testing our kind of limits of reluctance or willingness as to how much exploitation we're going to be doing.

The thing I definitely kind of learned in the process of kind of under you know, exploring more about mining and not just mining, but the transformations we do to turn one thing into another is that you know, in the end, you do need to be able to do it in a way that isn't going to bankrupt everyone, because part of human progress is about making these things cheaper, you know, making copper cheaper, making concrete cheaper so that you can concrete in places, and you know, lives are

saved thanks to concrete because concrete floors in a house rather than mud floors are just far better for the inhabitants. So our ability to get this stuff at scale and at reasonable is everything. Right now, we in the developed world have about a lot of people kind of look at development statistics and they focus on GDP per capita. My favorite is steel per capita. So if you look at the amount of steel that we have per head in most developed economies like the UK and the US,

it's kind of about fifteen tons per capita. In China it's about seven eight tons per capita. And bear in mind that when we're talking about the steel per capita, what does that mean. That means the steel around you in your life. It means your car, most of your car is still made from stel, even though bits and pieces are made from aluminium. Still steel. It's the building

that you're you know, you're probably in right now. It's the infrastructure, the high speed rail, the rails themselves, the trains, it's the machines that make the things that you use. Because everything, if it's not made of steel, it's made with steel. So you need a hell of a lot of steel to have a developed economy, to have hospitals, to have infrastructure, to have the trappings that we all feel we deserve. You need those fifteen tons of steel per capita, okay, And we're more or less flat at

fifteen tons. It's not going up, so that's kind of something we're not increasing our consumption per capita of still. But in the developing world and in the emerging economies, you know, that amount of steel per capita is more like, well I said, in middle income it's more like kind of seven six six tons. In parts of Africa, sub

Saharan Africa, it's one ton or less. And if those economies are going to develop and become middle and then developing develops economies mid income and then high income economies, they will need more steel. Yeah, and infrastrate. If you're gonna build out kind of highways you need stell, you need still reinforcement for them. If you're gonna build out kind of rail, if you're gonna build hospitals, you need still.

If you're gonna build schools, you need steel. And making steel is massively carbon intensive, but it's also something we do at scale, so you know that's your question. Yeah, maybe at the margin, there might be some mining of asteroids for certain rare materials, but what really matters fundamentally is being able to get this supposedly basic stuff and turn it into the life saving and life sustaining apparatus that has around all of us all the time. And we need to do more of it. And right now

that's massively carbon intensive. But who, you know, who are we to say to people in sub Saharan Africa that you need to be constraining your natural demand for extra things, you know, for.

with no straightforward answer, which is why it's interesting. But unfortunately, you know a lot of people would much rather think in just terms of easy questions, easy answers, black and white, heroes and villains. It's not the way the world works, certainly not the kind of pragmatic material world that I'm trying to describe that.

show notes, and do not forget my Ed's book. It's really very good.