The End of the World is Just the Beginning

Peter Zeihan

Between 1500 and 1778, France suffered several national famines (and dozens of regional famines). Yes, that France—the country that has been Europe’s largest and most reliable food producer stretching back a millennium, the country that has three SEPARATE agricultural regions, the country that had, bar none, the best internal transport system of the preindustrial world.

Moving things overland sucks.

So we figured out how to move stuff a different way. We figured out how to float.

While a camel could move a quarter ton and ox-drawn carts around a ton, even the earliest bulk ships could move several hundred tons at a fraction of the price per ton. The Romans famously imported most of their capital’s food from Egypt. Remember those better-than-world-class Roman roads? In 300 CE it cost more to move grain 70 miles on those roads than it did to sail it some 1,400 miles from Egypt to Rome. The economics of water transport were so lopsided that some cultures (see: government; Dutch, Aztec, Chinese) would rearrange their entire governing systems around the capacity to mobilize labor to dig canals stretching hundreds of miles through rocky, undulating landscapes with little more than stone picks. All to float what was the pinnacle of human transport technology well into the second millennium CE: the lowly barge.

The Untouchables

Human poo proved to be one of the best fertilizer and growth mediums not just in the pre-civilized world, but right up until the mass introduction of chemical fertilizers in the mid-nineteenth century—and in some parts of the world, even today. Managing poo introduced us to some of our first class- based distinctions. After all, no one really wanted to gather and inventory and distribute and . . . apply the stuff. It is part of why India’s Untouchables were/are so . . . untouchable—they did the messy work of collecting and distributing “night soil.”

Silicon

[T]he absolute lowest grade for silicon as an actual industrial input is 99.95 percent pure. Getting there requires a blast furnace, which typically requires a lot of coal. Overall, the process isn’t all that complicated—you basically just bake the quartz until anything that is not silicon burns away—which means some 90 percent of this firststep processing tends to be done in countries like Russia and China, countries with a lot of surplus industrial capacity that don’t give two shits about environmental issues...

The 99.95 percent purity of “standard” silicon isn’t anywhere enough [for solar panels]. A second round in the blast furnace gets the silicon up to 99.99999 percent pure. * Round two is far more sophisticated than round one’s bake-it-pure. China’s GCL Group is the only Chinese entity that can manage such precision at scale, making it responsible for one-third of global supply. The rest comes from a smattering of developed-world companies. This pure silicon is incorporated into the solar cells that make solar panels do their thing, with the assembly work more often than not done in China.