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The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future
by Vince Beiser
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.
"Beiser's research is alarming and his evidence sobering, but his well-informed conclusions are difficult to deny." —Kirkus Reviews
"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." —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
"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
This information about Power Metal was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Vince Beiser is an award-winning journalist and author. His first book, The World in a Grain, was a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and a California Book Award. His work has appeared in Wired, Harper's, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and the New York Times, among other publications. He lives with his family in Vancouver, British Columbia.
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