Explainers

Human-made fertilizers have greatly boosted crop production, letting farmers grow more food on less land. But this uptick in fertilizer use has come at a cost: planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

Concrete is among the world’s most consumed materials—second only to water. It also produces large amounts of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

Mining provides us with the building blocks of modern society, but much of the energy used to get minerals out of the ground, and process them, today comes from fossil fuels.

Carbon capture and storage is a technology that captures the carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels before it is released to the atmosphere.