Power Metal Book Now on Sale!; Save the Forests or Save the Climate?
And more about the human and environmental costs of renewable energy and digital technology —and how we can do better.
Power Metal (The Book) Now On Sale!
Well, the biggest news in my little world is that my book, Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future, is now officially out in the world and available wherever books are sold!
Power Metal is about the terrible paradox of electric cars, renewable energy and digital tech: we need those things to stave off the catastrophes of climate change, but they are spawning catastrophes of their own. It’s also about solutions, about the many ways we can do better. In short, it’s the big picture, deep dive basis for this newsletter. Researching and writing it took me three and a half years, including reporting trips to a shipyard in Belgium, a desert in Chile, a junkyard in Canada, and the biggest garbage dump in West Africa, among many other places.
Yeah, you could say I’m a little bit excited. The book is already a bestseller on Amazon, which named it one of the Best Books of 2024. It has also been featured in the Washington Post, NPR, BBC, Canada’s Globe & Mail, Scientific American, New Scientist, Popular Science, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Mother Jones, and Wired.
Of course, I’d be grateful, not to mention flattered, if you’d consider buying a copy—print (Bookshop.org is currently offering a 10% discount!), e-book, or author-narrated audio. (Italian, British, Polish and Korean versions are also available.) You'd be helping to raise awareness about an important issue, as well as supporting independent journalism, and this independent journalist.
If you do read it, it would be an enormous help if you could leave a review—even just a few words—on Amazon or Goodreads. That kind of feedback makes a big difference in how the book gets displayed. And of course spreading the word via your social media of choice is also very helpful.
I'm grateful for the support this book received from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Dave Greber Freelance Writers' Award, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Even moreso, for yours. Some of you have been following my work for many years by now; quite a few of you have just signed up for the newsletter in the last couple of weeks. I’ll do my best to make it worth everyone’s time.
Save the Forests or Save the Climate?
Meanwhile, getting back to that aforementioned terrible paradox…science writer Ben Crair has a great piece in The New Yorker about one particularly stark example: New Caledonia, a tiny French territory in the Pacific that is home to both one of the world’s biggest nickel deposits and an astonishing number of unique plant species.
“The ecological richness of New Caledonia is one of the lasting mysteries of natural history,” writes Crair. “A 2009 study, which measured the number of unique vascular plants growing in different regions of the globe, gave New Caledonia ‘by far the highest value,’ with thousands of species found nowhere else. Scientists still discover, on average, a new plant species there every month.”
But the world is ravenous for more and more nickel, a key ingredient in the batteries that power most electric cars and almost all our digital devices. New Caledonia is already heavily pocked with nickel mines, and more seem certain to come. The result is that “two strands of environmentalism are coming into conflict,” writes Crain. “In New Caledonia, the quest to save species is at odds with the mission of protecting the climate. Mining companies extract the nickel from New Caledonia’s soil by razing the forests that evolved on it; the engines of the so-called green transition could leave Earth’s most verdant corner in tatters.”
Nickel mining doesn’t only threaten New Caledonia’s plants. As attentive Power Metal readers will recall, decades-long conflict between Indigenous Kanaks and the descendants of French settlers over control of the industry also sparked deadly violence earlier this year.
More News Worth Knowing
🍳 Are You Cooking With E-waste?
👎🏽 US Bars Imports of Chinese Metal Allegedly Made With Forced Labor
⚡️ Trump (Probably) Can’t Stop the Energy Transition. And he might make things easier for American critical metal miners. But his pick for Treasury Secretary wants to kill tax credits for renewable energy.
I usually crank out this newsletter on Thursdays, but I’m sending this one early to get ahead of American Thanksgiving (not to be confused with the Canadian version). May your Meleagris gallopavo domesticus be as delicious as it sounds!