Humans today mine, dig and blast more materials from the earth than ever before. Yet, far from exhausting the global supply, we have learned to do more with less.

"Material World

By Ed Conway

Knopf, 512 pages, $35

Elemental

By Stephen Porder

Princeton, 240 pages, $27.95

In 1932, a man named Pat Clayton -- a Irish-born explorer and surveyor -- was walking along the endless dunes of the Great Sand Sea between Libya and Egypt when he felt something crunch under his boots. What he had stepped on was a small patch in what turned out to be a vast sheet of glass -- what the ancient world had called Libyan glass, created by the impact of a meteor 29 million years ago. It was from this material that Egyptian craftsmen made the scarab-beetle necklace for Tutankhamun's tomb 500 miles away in the Valley of the Gods.

The transformation of sand into glass -- sometimes by humans, sometimes by nature itself -- is part of the story that Ed Conway tells in "Material World," an endlessly fascinating account of the discovery, extraction and processing of six key raw materials. In sheer volume today, the extraction of the most scrutinized of those materials -- oil -- is dwarfed by the other five: sand, salt, iron, copper and lithium. Taken together, Mr. Conway writes, "it is hard to imagine modern civilisation without them" -- or to imagine a foreseeable future in which they will not play a critical role.

Sand has been made into glass since ancient times -- when a meteor wasn't helping, the usual method involved the application of intense heat. Mr. Conway, the economics editor at Sky News, calls glass "the world's first manufactured product," a 10,000-year technology. Its newer iterations include fiber glass (for which resin is added in) and, relatedly, the flexible glass to be found in fiber-optic cables. But the most important sand byproduct today is silicon for semiconductors. Grains of quartz, a sand mineral, are heated in a crucible and pulled into shape by a process Mr. Conway compares to pulling candy floss on a stick; a silicon-carbide saw then goes to work, making ultra-thin slices that are "buffed and cleaned with chemicals until they are absolutely flat." At that point the material is ready to be cut into chips tiny enough to hold millions of microscopically small integrated circuits -- the microchip on which our economy depends.

As for salt, Mr. Conway notes how it has been in use for thousands of years as a measure of wealth (our word salary derives from the Latin word for the salt that Roman soldiers received as pay). But it now plays its most critical part in the economy when it is transformed by electrolysis from a briny solution into chlorine and caustic soda -- "among the most important chemicals in the world," Mr. Conway writes. These chemicals, as he shows, make possible the manufacture of paper and aluminum, not to mention soap and detergents. They also provide the chemical basis for drugs like Valium and Librium.

Mr. Conway's account of the importance of iron and copper contains few surprises, although he does remind us that the 20th century's "electrical era was built out of copper," since the metal proved to be amazingly efficient at conducting electricity. The 21st century wants copper, too, not least for cellphones, where it forms the metallic innards of the phones' circuitry.

While the demand for copper continues to soar, the price tends to fall as scientists and engineers find ever more ingenious ways to extract it at less cost -- a dynamic that is often true for the other materials in Mr. Conway's narrative. The more productive use of a particular material can adjust demand in the other direction, too. "In 2019," Mr. Conway writes, "we mined, dug, and blasted more materials from the earth's surface than the sum total of everything we extracted from the dawn of humanity." Yet far from exhausting the global supply, he notes, humanity has learned to do more with less.

Or it has found new sources for the materials it needs. Despite predictions about "peak oil" since the 1960s, today we have a greater supply of oil than ever, not just from Saudi Arabia or, say, Venezuela but also from places like Texas and North Dakota, thanks to the fracking revolution. Oil remains the driving engine of the modern world's modes of transportation, from cars to airplanes. But it is much more than that, as Mr. Conway reminds us: It is a core material in plastics and makes possible a range of goods, including cosmetics, toothpaste and contact lenses.

Though Mr. Conway doesn't say so outright, the possibility of eliminating or reducing this particular fossil fuel is remote. While the sixth material in his chronicle, lithium, seems to hold out the promise of freeing humanity from oil's viscous grip by way of electric batteries, it poses its own problems -- environmentally, in the messy mining process, and geopolitically: Countries like Chile, Argentina and China seek to manipulate their control over the world's lithium inventory in order to enhance their own wealth and power.

"Material World," while never triumphalist and at times pausing to recognize the challenges that confront any attempt to extract human value from the planet's riches, is on the whole an upbeat account. Stephen Porder's "Elemental" tells a similar story of material transformation, but the human element comes in only toward the end, after two billion years or so, and when it does arrive it presents a danger.

Mr. Porder, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University, looks at the constituents of matter itself. He singles out five elements -- hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus: "the building blocks of all living matter." He notes along the way that evolution has managed to produce "an organism" -- that is to say, us -- "that can pull unprecedented amounts . . . of these elements from the environment." The result is a "concentration of heat-trapping gases in the air." He adds, in case we have missed the point: "The more outsized the success an organism has in gathering the ingredients of life, the more dramatic climate change."

Leaving aside, for the moment, the climate message, the story that Mr. Porder tells has its own fascination, beginning with the primordial emergence of cyanobacteria drawing in carbon and nitrogen and releasing oxygen. Then comes the emergence of plant life, gathering in hydrogen and oxygen to sustain itself and plunging "the then-tropical planet, with bath-tub temperature oceans at the North Pole, into an ice age that froze many of the world's first forests out of existence." (The first, Huronian, ice age was caused by the elimination of atmospheric methane, a greenhouse gas, during the Great Oxygenation Event.) From there would come first animals using oxygen; then, alas, human beings, whose unprecedented ability to unlock the carbon buried by dead plant life for millions of years has wound up "inadvertently pushing us inadvertently toward environmental catastrophe."

Perhaps the biggest surprise of "Elemental" is the importance of phosphorus, essential to the life of microorganisms and the backbone of DNA. Along with nitrogen, it is also a key ingredient in modern fertilizer, as Mr. Porder observes -- the means by which the world's richest nations have enabled the poorest to feed themselves. And the alchemist who made it all possible is the surprise hero of the book, the German chemist Fritz Haber.

It was Haber who, just before World War I, discovered how to combine another of Mr. Porder's essential elements, hydrogen, with nitrogen to create ammonia. "The synthesis of ammonia is the first step toward the industrial production of nitrogen fertilizer," he writes, "which has changed the world on a scale, and at a pace, every bit as dramatic as the human exploitation of fossil carbon." Haber (who won the Nobel Prize in 1918) makes an appearance in Mr. Conway's book as well. In addition to creating the ammonia for fertilizer, Haber's breakthrough, as Mr. Conway observes, helped to spawn the plastics revolution, since the same chemical process led to polythene -- the grandfather of today's plastics.

Although Mr. Porder predicts environmental catastrophe, he looks for ways to avert it. "The richest 10 percent of people on this planet are responsible for over half of all greenhouse gas emissions," he writes. Thus these people "can go first" in assuming the cost burden of transitioning to a zero-emissions future, a shift that, in Mr. Porder's view, must include electric cars. By 2030, he assumes, electric cars will "be so much better than their gas-burning counterparts that consumers will simply want them" -- all current evidence to the contrary. Mr. Conway doesn't ignore the climate effects of modern life, but he tends to be more realistic, recognizing that an effort to transition away from fossil fuels means, at least at the current moment, replacing the convenient and productive with the more expensive and less efficient.

Although the focus of both authors is on elements and materials, they do touch on the importance of political systems -- though each might have said more on the subject. The Western democracies have tried to respond to the climate threat, however imperfectly or hysterically, while China does not, despite its serial promises to clean up its act. As Mr. Conway warns, the struggle for the Earth's core materials will define the geopolitical fault lines of the future: "The control of these materials and processes matters more than ever."

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Mr. Herman is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the author of "Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II."" [1]

1. REVIEW --- Books: Why Matter Matters --- Humans today mine, dig and blast more materials from the earth than ever before. Yet, far from exhausting the global supply, we have learned to do more with less. Herman, Arthur.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 16 Dec 2023: C.7.