Volt Rush
The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
'A remarkably hopeful and useful book...The climate crisis leaves us no choice but to build a new world and as Sanderson makes clear, we are capable of making it a better one than the dirty and dangerous planet we’ve come to take for granted.' Bill McKibben, Observer book of the week
We depend on a handful of metals and rare earths to power our phones and computers. Increasingly, we rely on them to power our cars and our homes. Whoever controls these finite commodities will become rich beyond imagining.
Sanderson journeys to meet the characters, companies, and nations scrambling for the new resources, linking remote mines in the Congo and Chile’s Atacama Desert to giant Chinese battery factories, shadowy commodity traders, secretive billionaires, a new generation of scientists attempting to solve the dilemma of a ‘greener’ world.
Customer Reviews
Power trip
4.5 stars
The author is a British, a Financial Times journalist.
The great German physicist Max Planck once observed: ‘Mining is not everything, but without mining everything is nothing.”
Mr Sanderson provides a concise and eminently readable tour of the various forms of mining required to drive a post-fossil fuel future of electric vehicles in particular, with some observations about renewable power in other areas.
He delves into Chinese industry and how it’s state supported activities have come to dominate EV and other renewable manufacturing, lays bare the complicity of Western, chiefly American, companies in facilitating this domination, and explores the many problems associated with mining cobalt, nickel, lithium and others metals in poor thread world countries.
The most impressive thing about Sanderson’s treatise is how non-partisan it is. While never resiling from the magnitude of the problems, extant and potential, that face us, he remains cautiously optimistic.