Without electricity, drinking water in all cities—as well as liquid and gaseous fossil fuels everywhere—would be unavailable. Powerful electric pumps feed water into the municipal supply, and they have an especially demanding task in cities with high commercial and residential densities where water must be lifted to a great height.

Food and energy supply, the two existential necessities covered in the preceding chapters, would be impossible without mass-scale mobilization of many man-made materials—metals, alloys, non-metallic and synthetic compounds—and the same is true about all our buildings and infrastructures and about all modes of transportation and communication.