The Rare Metals War
the dark side of clean energy and digital technologies
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
The resources race is on. Powering our digital lives and green technologies are some of the Earth’s most precious metals — but they are running out. And what will happen when they do?
The green-tech revolution has been lauded as the silver bullet to a new world. One that is at last free of oil, pollution, shortages, and cross-border tensions. Drawing on six years of research across a dozen countries, this book cuts across conventional green thinking to probe the hidden, dark side of green technology.
By breaking free of fossil fuels, we are in fact setting ourselves up for a new dependence — on rare metals such as cobalt, gold, and palladium. They are essential to electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels, our smartphones, computers, tablets, and other everyday connected objects. China has captured the lion’s share of the rare metals industry, but consumers know very little about how they are mined and traded, or their environmental, economic, and geopolitical costs.
The Rare Metals War is a vital exposé of the ticking time-bomb that lies beneath our new technological order. It uncovers the reality of our lavish and ambitious environmental quest that involves risks as formidable as those it seeks to resolve.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
French investigative journalist Pitron exposes the dirty underpinnings of clean technologies in a debut that raises valid questions about energy extraction but suffers from clumsy execution. Rare metals enable less polluting technologies, Pitron explains, but mining them can be even more harmful to the environment than the mining required to obtain other minerals. As most developed countries have tightened environmental standards, China has taken charge of rare-metal extraction and production, thus supplying the raw materials for the clean-energy and digital revolutions. As such, he concludes, "instead of addressing the challenge of humanity's impact on ecosystems, we are displacing it" to metal-rich nations such as China, Bolivia, and the Congo. Pitron's arguments, though, culminate in a dubious screed, calling for the return of mines to the West because, he insists with no evidence, once faced with the resultant environmental degradations, rather than "live like the Chinese," Western societies would protest en masse and "demand that billions be spent on research into making rare metals fully recyclable." Nonetheless, green advocates who have put their faith in clean energy may find Pitron's reporting on this technology's environmental downside to be valuable, even if his conclusion leaves much to be desired.
