That silicon stuff. Sand, right? Right. It takes coal and charcoal, multiple metals and materials, and over 400 toxic chemicals, to make a silicon chip—the foundation of everything that happens in clean tech. “The environmental impact of chip making is huge,” Ian Williams, professor of applied environmental science at the University of Southampton, told Mongabay. “Large quantities of natural resources and energy are used to make chips. And each new generation requires more energy and water and generates more greenhouse gases than the previous generation.”

A computer chip is composed of silicon, copper, plastics, aluminum, silver, gold, arsenic, boron, phosphorus, and other metals and materials. Silicon is the primary component. Mining silicon is hazardous. Silicon dust irritates the skin and eyes, and miners are known to get lung cancer. Making one ton of silicon causes five tons of CO2, as it takes tremendous heat to take the raw ore and turn it into pure silicon—up to 3,000 degrees Celsius (5,400 Fahrenheit). It’s like “working in a volcano,” one worker said. Achieving such intense heat requires petroleum coke, coal, and high-grade charcoal.

Making charcoal is an inefficient and wasteful process, with up to 75% of the original wood being lost as CO2, smoke and wasted heat. Its production is a key driver of deforestation, particularly in African and Amazonian tropical areas. It’s an accelerator of wildfires. In the Amazon, large areas of forest have been cut down to produce it, particularly for the steel industry, and there is a long history of illegality, environmental and worker abuse. In Myanmar, an investigation by Emmanuel Freudenthal for Mongabay found that, every year, 14,000 football fields’ worth of forests were being cut down to produce charcoal for the Chinese silicon smelting industries. Charcoal made from tropical hardwood is preferred because of its burning intensity.

Charcoal burns with a greater constancy, intensity than wood. It is a great example of the efficiency paradox. To achieve efficiency in one area, waste and inefficiency occurs in another. Charcoal is much lighter than wood and takes up much less volume because the excess weight of the wood has been burned off. Its lightness means you can more efficiently transport it over longer distances and still make a nice profit. So, measured economically, it is efficient. You are robbing Peter’s forest to pay Paul’s oven. Paul gets a benefit of 20 and the forest and our environment loses 80. Because, to an economist, the only good tree is a dead tree, and they therefore only measure the benefit to Paul’s oven, our environment takes on another burdensome debt as it edges closer to bankruptcy and collapse. Big Tech says that using charcoal will help it create “carbon neutral silicon,” which will support it in reaching “zero carbon dioxide emissions in silicon production.” Figure that one out.

Down through the rough road of civilization, as James Scott explained in his groundbreaking book on early states, Against The Grain, the way charcoal was used became a sign of impending state collapse. When it started being used for heating—instead of its more typical use as a fuel for cooking—that was a key sign the end was coming. To a dying state that had cut down all the forests close by, whose rivers were silting up because its emaciated soil was flooding into them, desperate charcoal had one last efficiency. Since its heat-to-weight ratio was much higher than that of wood, it still made some economic sense to transport it over long distances and use it for heating, as well as cooking. Such pillaging of distant forests couldn’t go on indefinitely, as the people at the periphery either fled or rebelled, rather than be unwilling witnesses as all around them was sucked into the dying fires of a voracious state.