Book Review: The Big Costs of Mining the Planet for Electric Power

Vince Beiser’s tour of the “Electro-Digital Age” puts resource extraction at the center

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Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future
by Vince Beiser.
Riverhead, 2024 ($32)

In his unflinching follow-up to The World in a Grain—a book that turned sand into a riveting story—journalist Vince Beiser reveals the costs of extracting the “titanic quantities” of minerals necessary to meet the growing demand for our “Electro-Digital Age.” Beiser tracks cobalt and lithium from environmentally destructive excavation sites in Chile’s Atacama Desert and the deep-sea floor through a geopolitically fraught supply chain to our electric cars and solar panels. With gains in green energy failing to rebalance Mother Nature’s scales (as few as one in 10 solar panels are recycled), Beiser urges us to rethink our understanding of sustainability.

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