October 15, 2024
1 min learn
Ebook Overview: 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 middle
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Energy Metallic: The Race for the Sources That Will Form the Future
by Vince Beiser.
Riverhead, 2024 ($32)
In his unflinching follow-up to The World in a Grain—a e-book that turned sand right into a riveting story—journalist Vince Beiser reveals the prices of extracting the “titanic quantities” of minerals essential to fulfill the rising demand for our “Electro-Digital Age.” Beiser tracks cobalt and lithium from environmentally harmful excavation websites in Chile’s Atacama Desert and the deep-sea ground by a geopolitically fraught provide chain to our electrical vehicles and photo voltaic panels. With beneficial properties in inexperienced vitality 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.
