Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization

Smil quantifies the material basis of modern civilisation: how much steel, cement, ammonia, plastics, aluminium, wood, glass and paper humanity produces and consumes, how those quantities have changed, and whether economic growth is decoupling from material throughput as is often claimed.

The data work is the substance. Smil assembles long series of production and consumption per capita across countries, traces the material intensity of specific products, and separates relative dematerialisation, where material use per unit of output falls, from absolute dematerialisation, where total use falls. His finding is that relative dematerialisation is real and substantial, that absolute dematerialisation has not occurred at the global level for any major material, and that efficiency gains have been consumed by growth in quantity and size, which is the rebound effect. He gives the specific case of cars becoming more materially efficient per unit while growing larger and more numerous.

He is direct about what this means for energy transition and for claims about a weightless economy. Producing steel, cement and ammonia at current scale requires high-temperature process heat and chemical reduction that renewable electricity does not straightforwardly supply, and the global stock of infrastructure implies decades of continued demand. The book is dense with tables and is written as reference rather than argument, which makes it hard reading and hard to dispute. Smil's scepticism about rapid transition is contested by researchers who think he underweights technological substitution, and the data ends around 2010.

Distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba; writes quantitative histories of energy, food, materials and technical change.

Each book counts the physical inputs an economy consumes - joules, tonnes of steel, ammonia, cement - and establishes the historical rates at which past energy transitions actually moved. Those numbers let an investor size decarbonisation timelines and test claims about how fast an energy system can be rebuilt.

University of Manitoba