Power Metal
The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The powerful ways the metals we need to fuel technology and energy are spawning environmental havoc, political upheaval, and rising violence — and how we can do better.
An Australian millionaire’s plan to mine the ocean floor. Nigerian garbage pickers risking their lives to salvage e-waste. A Bill Gates-backed entrepreneur harnessing AI to find metals in the Arctic.
These people and millions more are part of the intensifying competition to find and extract the minerals essential for two crucial technologies: the internet and renewable energy. In Power Metal, Vince Beiser explores the Achilles’ heel of “green power” and digital technology – that manufacturing computers, cell phones, electric cars, and other technologies demand skyrocketing amounts of lithium, copper, cobalt, and other materials. Around the world, businesses and governments are scrambling for new places and new ways to get those metals, at enormous cost to people and the planet.
Beiser crisscrossed the world to talk to the people involved and report on the damage this race is inflicting, the ways it could get worse, and how we can minimize the damage. Power Metal is a compelling glimpse into this disturbing yet potentially promising new world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The insatiable demand for metals used in digital technology, electric vehicles, and renewable energy infrastructure is harming the environment and destroying lives, according to this striking report. Journalist Beiser (The World in a Grain) explains that toxic byproducts from rare earth metal mines in Baotou, China, have "sown skeletal deformities and cancers" among the region's residents, and that Western countries are so desperate for Russia's nickel reserves they've exempted the material from sanctions, effectively helping to fund Russia's war in Ukraine. Recycling metal is more environmentally friendly than mining, but "also far more difficult, dirty, and dangerous than most people realize," Beiser contends, describing the horrific conditions in a Lagos dump where thousands of workers earning only a few dollars per day toil amid "highly toxic dioxins" without safety gear while harvesting valuable metal from discarded electronics. Beiser's main solution is to reduce the need for cars—both gas and electric—by reconfiguring American cities around bicycle lanes and public transport lines, a proposal that feels at once ambitious and yet too narrowly focused to address the role countless other products play in driving the metal market. Still, he does an impressive job of showing how going electric isn't a silver bullet for stopping climate change. This is sure to spark debate.
