The author, a former group chief executive of British Petroleum, has zeroed in on the seven chemical elements that, in his view, "have most powerfully changed the course of human history" - iron, carbon, gold, silver, uranium, titanium and silicon. The book, in John Browne's words, "traces the story of how they have enabled progress as well as destruction, of the power they give humans to do good and evil, and of their capacity to shape our future".
Iron has been chosen because it is "the backbone of all industry since the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution"; carbon, because "[n]o energy source has been more potent"; silver, because of its role in the invention of photography; gold, long popular "as a store of value and medium of trade"; titanium, because of its early use as a metal in supersonic aircraft and deep-diving submarines, but even more because of its usefulness as a whitening agent; uranium, because it unleashed the nuclear bomb as well as a carbon-free source of energy; and silicon, because of its importance in powering computers.
Predictably for a book written by an oil man, the chapter on carbon is the longest, full of dry detail. But the explosion aboard BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the US Gulf of Mexico in April 2010 merits only a dozen lines, though the disaster - the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, with 4.9 million barrels of oil having leaked into the sea - is considered the biggest setback in BP's history.
Mr Browne appears to contradict himself on the future of oil. Early on he says he does not expect the world to run out of oil, arguing that continuous improvement in technologies will keep increasing the percentage of recoverable oil. Yet, later, he concedes that the doomsayers may eventually be right. To cut carbon emissions, Mr Browne stresses the need for "brave and inspirational" leaders who are ready to "move beyond self-interested rationality and to take unilateral action towards the common good". But he despairs of man's ability to take purposeful action on this front.
Yet he ends the book on a hopeful note, pointing out that the US, China and Germany are taking the lead towards a carbon-free future, having "catalysed the growth of domestically generated clean energy at an astonishing rate". Solar energy and shale gas are the way forward, he notes, pointing to the advances that have been made in the exploitation of these two sources of energy.
Mr Browne makes the pertinent point that the two nuclear power plant disasters that have happened so far - at Fukushima in 2011 and Chernobyl in 1986 - had one key fact in common: "the regulator and the regulated were not sufficiently separated." This inevitably led to "poor application of regulation" - a sobering thought, because the blurring of roles is true of India, too. Mr Browne foresees a "bleak future" for nuclear power for commercial as well as public safety reasons, since it is now perceived "as simply too expensive and cumbersome an operation when compared with other forms of energy, including renewable energy sources". (Germany and Japan are cutting back on nuclear power plants, and India has seen agitations against them.)
Mr Browne calls titanium, uranium and silicon the three post-war "wonder elements". Uranium was thought to be an extraordinary source of energy, but once the destructive power of the atom came to be known, it began being regarded with dread. Titanium was used by the US in the Blackbird spy plane that back in the 1960s could fly at a height of 27 km and at a speed of Mach 3, and by the erstwhile Soviet Union in high-performance titanium-hulled submarines; but today it is used more as a whitening agent and in making solar photovoltaic cells. Silicon, however, has enabled "the development of smaller, faster and cheaper computers that have placed immense processing and communication powers into our hands", and, in doing so, has had "the greatest impact of all the post-war 'wonder elements'," writes Mr Browne, who has served on the board of Intel.
The blurb on the back cover describes the book as "a unique mix of science, history and politics…." This isn't hype. The author is probably one of the few top executives in the world with a deep interest in, and understanding of, science. Yet, it is the large chunks of history dredged up by his research staff - how robber barons Carnegie and Rockefeller built their steel and oil empires respectively, how the Spanish conquistadors slaughtered the Incas in their quest for gold and silver, what led Gordon Moore and Andy Grove to set up Intel - that make more interesting reading.
Mr Browne writes that the elements are merely tools that man can use ("We are not slaves of the elements; we are their masters"), but examples throughout history have shown the opposite to be true. "Whether we continue to use these elements for common human progress and prosperity, or for individual greed and iniquity, is up to us," he offers, somewhat philosophically.
SEVEN ELEMENTS THAT HAVE CHANGED THE WORLD
John Browne
Hachette India
xvii + 279 pages; Rs 499
