October 15, 2024
1 min learn
Guide Evaluation: The Large Prices of Mining the Planet for Electrical Energy
Vince Beiser’s tour of the “Electro-Digital Age” places useful resource extraction on the heart
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Energy Metallic: The Race for the Assets That Will Form the Future
by Vince Beiser.
Riverhead, 2024 ($32)
In his unflinching follow-up to The World in a Grain—a guide that turned sand right into a riveting story—journalist Vince Beiser reveals the prices of extracting the “titanic quantities” of minerals mandatory to satisfy the rising demand for our “Electro-Digital Age.” Beiser tracks cobalt and lithium from environmentally damaging excavation websites in Chile’s Atacama Desert and the deep-sea ground by means of a geopolitically fraught provide chain to our electrical vehicles and photo voltaic panels. With good points in inexperienced power failing to rebalance Mom Nature’s scales (as few as one in 10 photo voltaic panels are recycled), Beiser urges us to rethink our understanding of sustainability.
