Energy, climate and the Earth

How Haber and Bosch's ammonia synthesis transformed world food production.

A short primer on energy: its forms, units and role in nature and economies.

How much steel, cement and plastic the world uses, and whether growth needs less.

How organisms, populations, machines, economies and civilisations grow, and stop.

Seventy-one short pieces that correct common impressions with plain arithmetic.

The physical basics of modern life: energy, food, materials and globalisation.

A computer model of world growth that overshoots its limits and then declines.

How a few scientists with ties to industry ran campaigns to deny settled science.

The costs and benefits of a shrinking world population.

Six materials the world runs on, sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium, traced.

A sceptic's conversion to nuclear power, and how public fear of it formed.

Uranium: its mining, its boom towns and the geopolitics of its supply.

The economics of cheap water and what happens when it stops being cheap.

Nuclear accidents, what went wrong in each, and what each taught about the atom.

Data-driven look at emissions and what actually reduces them

The species the world is about to lose, and how conservation can pay economically.

The career of Norman Borlaug, the plant scientist who won the Nobel Peace Prize.

How people will get energy two centuries from now, once fossil carbon is gone.

Rare metals such as tantalum and rhodium, and why phones and weapons need them.

Data showing progress on environmental problems, enough to reach true sustainability.

The history and technology of the Integral Fast Reactor built at Argonne, 1984-94.