MNE201

The availability and use of metals, petroleum, coal, industrial minerals, and other nonrenewable resources has shaped the history of world societies from the Stone Age to the present, and will continue to be a core part of future human development. This course covers how nonrenewable resources form and how they are extracted; the diverse ways that global civilizations have extracted and used nonrenewable resources over time, and how resource use shaped their history; and how the distribution of resources and the development of resource technology around the world created our modern global sociopolitical and economic framework. Other topics covered include nonrenewable resource exhaustion, space mining, resource substitution and associated energy costs, and unintended social and environmental consequences of nonrenewable resource extraction and use.