Clean Energy, Dirt on Our Hands

Greg Barnhisel reviews “Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future” by Vince Beiser.

By Greg BarnhiselMay 9, 2025

• Politics

• Science & Technology

ONE CAN’T FAULT the journalist Vince Beiser for burying the lede. “There’s no such thing as clean energy,” he tells us in the title of the introduction to his buzzkill of a new book, Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future (2024). Phasing out carbon-spewing fossil fuels is, he grants, essential, but digital technology, renewable energy, and electric vehicles all depend on metals whose extraction can be polluting, energy-intensive, and expensive. “Renewable” energy sources and the devices and batteries that they power are, Beiser warns, “spawning massive environmental damage, political upheaval, mayhem, and murder.”

The problems are the minerals and so-called “rare earths” that are essential to what he calls our new “Electro-Digital Age.” Solar panels, electric cars, and digital devices of every description rely on these materials. But obtaining them requires mining that is often environmentally catastrophic and that generates by-products that are toxic to humans. On top of that, these raw materials are often controlled by repressive governments or companies that lack motivation to limit the damage. As Beiser pithily puts it, “the spread of digital technology and electric vehicles will ultimately benefit most people in most places, but the heaviest costs of this shift are being paid by only some people and some places.”

While the sobering introduction sets a pretty grim tone for the book, Power Metal isn’t a polemic. Instead, it’s a kind of condensed first-person reporter’s tour of the locations in which our Electro-Digital Age is being mined, assembled, and eventually disassembled and transformed. It moves quickly, doesn’t speak above the heads of the nonscientists, and is stuffed with facts and statistics, worn well and lightly, like the best kind of layperson’s science writing, with the facts driving the argument rather than vice versa.

We’ve all become quite familiar with lithium, if only from being told to remove batteries from our luggage at the airport. But many don’t realize that it is perhaps the key metal for the Electro-Digital Age, “the irreplaceable key ingredient of the batteries that power virtually all digital devices and electric vehicles” because it is the lightest of all the metals. Lithium keeps these batteries from being even heavier than they are. Demand is rapidly growing: in 25 years, the world will need 10 times as much lithium as it produces today.

So far, so good—more lithium means less coal and oil. But today, most of that lithium comes out of Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on earth. And the process of extracting the mineral—allowing evaporation and gravity to precipitate the lithium into a “yellow-green broth” in hundreds of shallow ponds—drains the aquifer under the desert, on which all life in that region, including the Indigenous Atacameño people, depends. SQM, the company conducting all this mining, has released a plan to use less water and become carbon-neutral, but scientists insist that lithium mining simply cannot be sustainable.

The Electro-Digital Age will also rely on dramatically increased quantities of copper and nickel. Until recently, nickel was mostly used in stainless steel products, but today it is essential to lithium-ion batteries: a Tesla battery is about 80 percent nickel by weight. And the largest supplier of nickel is a Stalin-era mine in northern Siberia, Norilsk Nickel, which has made its region one of the “most ecologically ravaged places on Earth.” World hunger for nickel also threatens environments and population health in Indonesia, the Philippines, New Guinea, and New Caledonia.

And then there’s cobalt, 70 percent of which comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), “one of the most chaotic nations on Earth,” where the mineral comes not just from corporate-owned behemoth pits but also from so-called “artisanal mines.” Don’t picture a Portland pickle emporium here. In these wildcat independent operations, up to 200,000 people—including many children—use hand tools to pry ore out of dangerous underground tunnels. The big cobalt operations are arguably worse, in that they prop up the DRC’s astoundingly corrupt government.

Mining new raw materials is the primary way that the world will obtain its cobalt, nickel, lithium, copper, and rare earths, and it is certainly the most destructive and least sustainable option. But Beiser also documents the thriving recycling industry for these metals, much of which takes place in the developing world. Scrappers and waste pickers in places like the Ikeja marketplace of Lagos, Nigeria, aggregate the detritus of consumer-electronic discards—e-waste—and ship it to recyclers in China and Europe.

This is, theoretically, great—less to mine, less to dump in a landfill. But Beiser shows that it’s also nearly as toxic. Minerals are removed through burning, melting, and shredding e-waste, as well as treating it with corrosive acid. These processes then release harmful substances into the air, ground, water, and bodies of the people doing the labor. And this doesn’t even take into consideration the fossil fuels that are burned to get these recyclable materials from the United States to Nigeria to China.

Beiser’s reporting, involving travel to everywhere from Patagonia to West Africa to a Canadian recycling center in his hometown of Vancouver, is admirable and responsible and balances anecdotes with statistics deftly and appealingly. Consumers rarely think about the intricate global networks necessary for producing (and, eventually, dismantling) their latest gadgets, so his first-person perspective provides a vivid lens on how stuff gets out of the ground and where that stuff travels once buyers are done with it. Beiser has been a finalist for several major awards in science writing, and his prose is confident and clear while being deeply informed, comparable to Elizabeth Kolbert’s brilliant work on similar topics for The New Yorker.

So is the idea that the Electro-Digital Age is cleaner than the fossil-fuel age just a lie perpetuated by tech companies? No, certainly not, Beiser insists. The new era can be orders of magnitude better for the environment. But consumers must be aware that it still requires the extraction of new raw materials and the reuse of existing metals on a massive scale, both of which will inevitably victimize particular places in the world and the people who live there. This perpetuates, rather than ameliorates, environmental racism. Our new, “clean” digital age will not stop it—nothing, Beiser concludes, will end the disproportionate harm done to poor communities in the developing world or the general environmental harm resultant from humans’ desire for gadgets.

The steps we can take as consumers to minimize and mitigate the damage are really the most commonsensical ones: use our stuff for longer and, when possible, make different choices.

There are some encouraging trends. Beiser points to the creeping success, in some US states, of the “right to repair” movement, which requires manufacturers to make service information, parts, and tools available for the public. (This will almost certainly remain limited to the state level for the next few years, given the current administration’s anti-consumer bent.) And while Americans and Europeans want the newest, coolest, and best, consumers in developing nations are often happy to use refurbished electronics. The used cell phone market is estimated at $25 billion, Beiser reports. And eventually, when these refurbished iPhones or solar panels or Tesla batteries reach the end of their lives, the recyclers can have at them.

This is all much better than tossing our devices into a landfill, but these steps “still keep us enmeshed in a cycle of energy- and material-intensive production and consumption.” Sounding like a Fox News caricature of a progressive, Beiser calls for “reducing our consumption of everything. Above all, of private automobiles.” Buy clothes that last, keep your devices longer, but more than anything, “don’t buy a car. Not even an electric one.”

This obviously isn’t an argument that will go over well with Americans, who have heard far too much about the transportation utopia that is Holland, where bicycle highways and pervasive train service make private cars largely superfluous. Beiser gamely rehashes these familiar (and eminently sensible) arguments nonetheless. He points to some (to him) encouraging trends, such as the “plummeting” number of young Americans with driver’s licenses, and the fact that even several major North American cities are assiduously boosting their bicycling infrastructure.

Well, for the moment. In November 2024, the American people chose to go precisely the opposite direction and elected a president who has pledged to return us to the era of smokestacks and eight-cylinder engines, and who has already threatened to block transportation funding for cities that are promoting cycling. Although it’ll certainly use its muscle to extract and obtain as much copper, nickel, and rare earths as possible—indeed, within the first month of his term, the president was already trying to extort Greenland, Canada, and Ukraine for their minerals—the current administration isn’t likely to expand electric car and solar panel production, so long as there is a drop of oil or flake of coal left to burn. Beiser’s reasoned, carefully reported, judicious, and persuasive book trenchantly warns us about the costs and dangers of blithe techno-optimism. Unfortunately, since January 20, concerns about the US government putting too much faith in a renewable technology–driven society seem a lot less pressing.