Power Metal

The powerful ways the metals we need to fuel technology and energy are spawning environmental havoc, political upheaval, and rising violence - and how we can do better.

An Australian millionaire's plan to mine the ocean floor. Nigerian garbage pickers risking their lives to salvage e-waste. A Bill Gates-backed entrepreneur harnessing AI to find metals in the Arctic.

These people and millions more are part of the intensifying competition to find and extract the minerals essential for two crucial technologies: the internet and renewable energy. In Power Metal, Vince Beiser explores the Achilles' heel of "green power" and digital technology - that manufacturing computers, cell phones, electric cars, and other technologies demand skyrocketing amounts of lithium, copper, cobalt, and other materials. Around the world, businesses and governments are scrambling for new places and new ways to get those metals, at enormous cost to people and the planet.

Beiser crisscrossed the world to talk to the people involved and report on the damage this race is inflicting, the ways it could get worse, and how we can minimize the damage. Power Metal is a compelling glimpse into this disturbing yet potentially promising new world.

Beiser takes readers on a globe-trotting journey to the mines and scrapyards that are the unlikely foundation of the age of smartphones and green energy. This eye-opening book challenges us to reckon with the unintended consequences of our choices as consumers and citizens - making it a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of our planet. -- Daniel Pink, author of Drive and The Power of Regret
Power Metal should be the next book you read. If we miraculously solve climate change and eliminate fossil fuel, Beiser gives us a whole box (as in Pandora) of new troubles we are facing. It is a lot to think about. -- Mark Kurlansky, author of Salt and Cod
Electrifying the world is a noble rallying cry in climate activism, but it is at best a lesser evil, as Vince Beiser convincingly illustrates in this bracing tour of how we are destroying the planet in the name of saving it. Taking us along the toxic supply chains of our clean industries, he brings to life today's tug-of-war over minerals, refineries and market share that constitutes the new geopolitics of energy. -- Parag Khanna, author of the New York Times-bestselling Connectography and Move: The Forces Uprooting Us

Vince Beiser is an award-winning journalist based in Los Angeles. He has reported from over 100 countries, states, provinces, emirates, kingdoms, occupied territories, liberated areas, no man's lands and disaster zones. He has exposed conditions in California's harshest prisons, trained with troops bound for Iraq, ridden with the first responders to disasters in Haiti and Nepal and hunted down other stories from around the world for publications including Wired, The Atlantic, Harper's,The Guardian, GQ (UK), The Village Voice, The Nation, Mother Jones, Playboy, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times.

Vince has also been a correspondent for the Emmy-winning news show SoCal Connected. Amazon Studios, in partnership with Ridley Scott's Scott Free Productions and Epic Magazine, is developing a feature film based on one of his articles.

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