POWER METAL

An exploration of the crucial role that rare metals play in technology and energy and the global race to secure them for the future. A compelling and important glimpse into that new, disturbing, and exciting world.

An Australian multimillionaire's plan to mine the ocean floor. Garbage pickers in Ghana salvage e-waste at "the most polluted place on Earth." Tesla's former CTO building a battery-recycling plant in the Nevada desert. These people are at the center of the global competition to locate and mine the metals and minerals essential for two critical technologies: the internet and renewable energy. This race will create new industries, generate enormous wealth, and destabilize the global balance of power. It could either propel us to a more sustainable future or plunge us into an environmental nightmare. Vince Beiser explores the Achilles' heel of the digital age: that the cell phones, electric cars, solar panels, and wind turbines being used around the world every day are made of an array of increasingly rare materials - lithium, cobalt, niobium, and others- whose demand is only increasing. Many of the places they are extracted from will soon run dry, people in all corners of the globe are scrambling for new places and proposing new approaches to finding them. Beiser crisscrossed the world to track down the people who are at the vanguard of this new age to understand how they propose to solve this crisis. He shows us their ambitions and potential dangers. This book is both a gripping read and a sobering account of the constant battle between what civilization needs and what it can withstand. 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.