The year is 1915, war is raging on the Western Front and a spy has been despatched from London to Switzerland to hatch a secret deal with the enemy.
The spy-in-question has been sent to procure a vital weapon of war: optical glass.
“We’re very complacent about [glass] these days”, says Ed Conway, author of Material World, “but it’s an amazing technology.”
Conway is setting the historical scene for the audience at London Defence Conference’s Investment Forum, which took place this week in the heart of the City of London.
Glass is still a vital material but, back in 1915, even more so. One’s ability to get hold of it could mean the difference between life or death. Alarmingly, Britain’s “glass famine” meant men were being sent out to the trenches without any binoculars to identify their enemy, with potentially deadly consequences.
At the time, Britain had the misfortune of relying heavily on Germany for this vital material which led to an extraordinary attempt to buy glass off the enemy. In order to defeat the enemy…
Even more amazingly, the Germans agreed. Because, as Conway explains, they were in desperate need of rubber – of which Britain controlled much of the global supply via the colonies – so the warring countries decided to hatch a deal.
This overlooked historical episode sheds light on the way in which geology and the struggle to procure raw materials shape global politics. This is the overarching theme of Conway’s book.
While it may be a historical anecdote, there are relevant lessons for modern society, says Conway. Interestingly, a century prior to the First World War, Britain had a world-leading glass industry. Yet as soon as it became cheaper to import this material, it let its domestic industry slip away, to the point where it was heavily dependent on a soon-to-be-hostile foreign state.
In many ways this is also an optimistic story: after 1915, once the fatal consequences of doing so became fully apparent, Britain managed – within just a few years – to rebuild its glass industry. “So you can re-industrialise after having de-industrialised,” says Conway.
Nonetheless, he adds, it also demonstrates that Brits are not very good at thinking through these questions of dependence. Every time it becomes cheaper to get things overseas, we jump at the opportunity. “We lean into globalisation and most of the time it works out for us.
Until all of a sudden it doesn’t..”
The same cannot be said for every nation. “The material world is something that China has been thinking about for some time – a lot longer than the US and UK.”
And with the green energy transition afoot, this disparity is set to become ever more troubling. When it comes to its net zero ambitions, the UK – like much of the world – is heavily dependent on Beijing for raw materials, especially batteries for electric vehicles. “Particularly with LFB batteries, which are the most important ones, China completely dominates the market,” says Conway.
Another major net zero challenge in the coming years will be looking for “greener” ways to manufacture these supposedly green products. At the moment, industrial processes required to make any “net zero” equipment – such as solar panels – require a lot of carbon. “I don’t think anyone who signed up to net zero understood the scale of this challenge,” says Conway.
By the same token, there’s enormous opportunity here, he adds. “ If, for instance, someone can find a way to make polysilicon through processes that don’t emit carbon, that’s a massive opportunity. And AI could be a very useful tool here too.”
Nevertheless, finding non-environmentally destructive ways of scaling up green energy is, according to Conway, one of the biggest challenges facing humankind.
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