Power Metal
The Race for Resources that Will Shape the Future
Buy the Book (Hardcover, eBook or audio):Penguin Random House
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Bookshop
Published by: Riverhead Books
Release Date: November 19, 2024
Overview
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.
Praise
“Power Metal is a necessary, illuminating, and often shocking read. Fast-paced, fascinating, and alive with colorful characters, it’s a whirlwind tour of the epochal energy transition currently underway as we enter what Vince Beiser so aptly calls the ‘electro-digital age.’”
–John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather
“In Power Metal, Vince Beiser explores the dirty underside of the clean energy transition. The result is at once fascinating and eye-opening – an essential read for anyone concerned about the future.”
–Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction
“Vince Beiser’s Power Metal should be the next book you read. If we miraculously solve climate change and illuminate fossil fuel, Beiser gives us a whole box (as in pandora) of new troubles we are facing. It is a lot to think about.”
–Mark Kurlansky, author of Salt and Cod
"Beiser takes readers on a globe-trotting journey to the mines and scrap yards that are the unlikely foundation of the age of smartphones and green energy. This eye-opening book challenges us to reckon with the unintended consequences of our choices as consumers and citizens – making it a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of our planet.”
–Daniel Pink, author of Drive and The Power of Regret
“Electrifying the world is a noble rallying cry in climate activism, but it is at best a lesser evil, as Vince Beiser convincingly illustrates in this bracing tour of how we are destroying the planet in the name of saving it. Taking us along the toxic supply chains of our clean industries, he brings to life today’s tug-of-war over minerals, refineries and market share that constitutes the new geopolitics of energy.”
– Dr. Parag Khanna, author of Connectography and MOVE
Reviews
“Unflinching. . .Beiser urges us to rethink our understanding of sustainability.”
—Scientific American
“Beiser’s research is alarming and his evidence sobering, but his well-informed conclusions are difficult to deny.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Striking…impressive…sure to spark debate.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Journalist [Vince] Beiser enumerates the precious metals comprising the electronics we consume with near-thoughtless abandon…[but] counters the darkness with bright stories of entrepreneurs salvaging the metals, giving old batteries repurposed afterlives,and repairing electronic devices to extend their lives…[This is] a book that alarms even as it leads us to solutions.”
—Booklist
“Beiser has performed a vital service by alerting both policymakers and ordinary citizens to some of the critical choices facing us.”
—BookPage
“Beiser uses shocking forecasts and first-hand experience …to serve as a wake-up call for what to expect moving forward.”
—Popular Science
Mining and the clean energy paradox | NPR Marketplace
The minerals tech can't do without | BBC Tech Life
The toxic tradeoffs of a fully electric future | NPR Think
Excerpts & Op-Eds
The Green Economy Is Hungry for Copper—and People Are Stealing, Fighting, and Dying to Feed It, Wired
A $60 Billion-a-Year Climate Solution Is Sitting in Our Junk Drawers, Mother Jones
The True Cost of Black Friday, TIME
The problem with recycling: no silver bullet to the critical-metal supply conundrum, The Globe and Mail
These Algorithms Are Hunting for an EV Battery Mother Lode, Wired
Clean Power at a Steep Price, Sierra
Thanks
I’m very grateful for the support given to this project by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Dave Greber Freelance Writers’ Awards, and the Access Copyright Foundation.
Pages: 272
ISBN13: 978-0593541708
