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Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future

Vince Beiser

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Jan 12, 2025 CatReader rated it really liked it

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Vince Beiser is a Canadian-American journalist who I'm familiar with from his 2018 book, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization. I would describe his book Power Metal as a fascinating intersection between two 2023 books: Ed Conway's Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization and Oliver Franklin-Wallis' Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future.

Beiser explores how dependent our increasingly "elec Vince Beiser is a Canadian-American journalist who I'm familiar with from his 2018 book, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization. I would describe his book Power Metal as a fascinating intersection between two 2023 books: Ed Conway's Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization and Oliver Franklin-Wallis' Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future.

Beiser explores how dependent our increasingly "electro-digital" age is on certain metals including lithium, nickel and copper, and how in our quest for green energy we in fact keep burning fossil fuels to extract the raw ingredients needed to create more sustainable energy sources. The extraction of these raw metals is much more dangerous than we realize -- he cites this 2023 Vice News article about fatalities at an Indonesian nickel smelting company whose victims included a local TikTok personality, and also exposes the dangerous working conditions and labor practices (including child labor) in the developing world where metal extraction takes place. And of course, refinement of these raw materials for the West largely takes place in China, which remains a geopolitical risk. (This part reminded me of Rachel Slade's Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A., where she uses a much simpler example - a hoodie - to demonstrate how hard it is to manufacture completely in the US.)

The next part of the book discusses the feasibility of recycling metal from used and discarded electronics and spent batteries -- while in wealthy countries we often chuck these in the trash, there is a large industry in some countries aimed at reuse.

In the last section of the book, Beiser attempts to offer solutions to this impending crisis -- these had a similar tone as Franklin-Wallis in Wasteland -- basically, reuse, recycle, and take better care of our things, and hope that infrastructure improvements will make it easier for society as a whole to follow suit.

Overall, an interesting read.

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Book 1938 cumulatively ...more

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