“The energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables is a crucial part of the cure for climate change. But it’s a cure with brutal side effects.”
The world, journalist Vince Beiser says, is moving into the “Electro-Digital Age” and at the heart of this new era is a set of ancient, naturally occurring minerals: metals. The critical metals necessary to run the modern world and, importantly, required to power the energy transition away from fossil fuels also produce extraordinary consequences for humanity and the planet.
In “Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future,” Beiser charts a court across the world to understand how these metals are moved from the earth to our technology, and the competition that has arisen around them.
Just think about how you are reading this interview: Either on a computer or your phone, powered by an electric grid and batteries. Your phone alone is packed with minute amounts of dozens of different metals ripped from the earth from places as distant as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, and Chile; though much of it, Beiser notes, eventually travels through China.
For the rest of this article: https://thediplomat.com/2024/11/vince-beiser-on-the-race-for-the-resources-that-will-shape-the-future/