Nanotechnology and the Resource Fallacy

Dwindling global supplies of conventional energy and materials resources are widely thought to severely constrain, or even render impossible, a "first-world" lifestyle for the bulk of Earth’s inhabitants. This bleak prospect, however, is wrong. Current energy resources are used grotesquely inefficiently as heat ("fuels," after all, are "burned"), so that well over half of the energy is simply dissipated into the environment. In turn, conventional materials resources, particularly of metals, are geologically anomalous deposits that also are typically processed by the prodigious application of raw heat. Simultaneously, rising levels of pollution worldwide are a challenge to remediate as they require the extraction of pollutants at low concentration. Nanotechnology, the structuring of matter .......