
Power Metal
The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future
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Narrated by:
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Vince Beiser
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By:
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Vince Beiser
About this listen
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.
©2024 Vince Beiser (P)2024 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Unflinching. . .Beiser urges us to rethink our understanding of sustainability." —Scientific American
“Journalist [Vince] Beiser enumerates the precious metals comprising the electronics we consume with near-thoughtless abandon…[but] counters the darkness with bright stories of entrepreneurs salvaging the metals, giving old batteries repurposed afterlives,and repairing electronic devices to extend their lives…[This is] a book that alarms even as it leads us to solutions.”—Booklist
“Power Metal is a necessary, illuminating, and often shocking read. Fast-paced, fascinating, and alive with colorful characters, it’s a whirlwind tour of the epochal energy transition currently underway as we enter what Vince Beiser so aptly calls the ‘electro-digital age.’” —John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather
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Story
Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only the apple tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can’t answer that question here on Earth, how will we know when and if we discover alien life on other worlds? The question hangs over some of society’s most charged conflicts - whether a fertilized egg is a living person, for example, and when we ought to declare a person legally dead.
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What is Life?
- By Shane S Shull on 04-29-21
By: Carl Zimmer
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Fundamentals
- Ten Keys to Reality
- By: Frank Wilczek
- Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins, Frank Wilczek
- Length: 7 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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One of our great contemporary scientists reveals the 10 profound insights that illuminate what everyone should know about the physical world.
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Is this for kindergarteners?
- By James S. on 01-24-21
By: Frank Wilczek
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Sing Like Fish
- How Sound Rules Life Under Water
- By: Amorina Kingdon
- Narrated by: Angelina Rocca
- Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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For centuries, humans ignored sound in the “silent world” of the ocean, assuming that what we couldn’t perceive, didn’t exist. But we couldn’t have been more wrong. Marine scientists now have the technology to record and study the complex interplay of the myriad sounds in the sea. Finally, we can trace how sounds travel with the currents, bounce from the seafloor and surface, bend with the temperature and even saltiness; how sounds help marine life survive; and how human noise can transform entire marine ecosystems.
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Good solid science mixed with storytelling.
- By Hawaiian 54 on 10-04-24
By: Amorina Kingdon
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Galileo's Error
- Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness
- By: Philip Goff
- Narrated by: Maxwell Caulfield
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Understanding how brains produce consciousness is one of the great scientific challenges of our age. Some philosophers argue that consciousness is something "extra", beyond the physical workings of the brain. Others think that if we persist in our standard scientific methods, our questions about consciousness will eventually be answered. And some suggest that the mystery is so deep, it will never be solved.
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Good but basic
- By ginger on 01-23-20
By: Philip Goff
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The Story of More
- How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here
- By: Hope Jahren
- Narrated by: Hope Jahren
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist, a brilliant writer, a passionate teacher, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. In The Story of More, she illuminates the link between human habits and our imperiled planet. In concise chapters, she takes us through the science behind the key inventions—from electric power to large-scale farming to automobiles—that, even as they help us, release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere like never before.
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Like Al Gore, stuck on the problem
- By Eleanor B. Hildreth on 06-04-20
By: Hope Jahren
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"Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself"
- The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans in 1945
- By: Florian Huber
- Narrated by: Sam Peter Jackson
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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By the end of April 1945 in Germany, the Third Reich had fallen and invasion was underway. As the Red Army advanced, horrifying stories spread about the depravity of its soldiers. For many German people, there seemed to be nothing left but disgrace and despair. For tens of thousands of them, the only option was to choose death - for themselves and for their children.
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This book should be required reading for anyone that seeks to understand how ordinary people could be transformed into monsters.
- By Anonymous User on 05-08-20
By: Florian Huber
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Diagnosis
- Solving the Most Baffling Medical Mysteries
- By: Lisa Sanders
- Narrated by: Lisa Sanders
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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As a Yale School of Medicine physician, the New York Times best-selling author of Every Patient Tells a Story, and an inspiration and adviser for the hit Fox TV drama, House, M.D., Lisa Sanders has seen it all. And yet, she is often confounded by the cases she describes in her column: unexpected collections of symptoms that she and other physicians struggle to diagnose. Dr. Sanders shows how making the right diagnosis requires expertise, painstaking procedure, and sometimes a little luck.
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Repetitive from her previous work
- By anon on 03-08-21
By: Lisa Sanders
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Through Two Doors at Once
- The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality
- By: Anil Ananthaswamy
- Narrated by: René Ruiz
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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The intellectual adventure story of the "double-slit" experiment, showing how a sunbeam split into two paths first challenged our understanding of light and then the nature of reality itself - and continues to almost 200 years later. Through Two Doors at Once celebrates the elegant simplicity of an iconic experiment and its profound reach. With his extraordinarily gifted eloquence, Anil Ananthaswamy travels around the world, through history and down to the smallest scales of physical reality we have yet fathomed. It is the most fantastic voyage you can take.
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Excellent exposition of the conundrum
- By GLYNN A on 08-14-18
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Where the Water Goes
- Life and Death Along the Colorado River
- By: David Owen
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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The Colorado River is an essential resource for a surprisingly large part of the United States, and every gallon that flows down it is owned or claimed by someone. David Owen traces all that water from the Colorado’s headwaters to its parched terminus, once a verdant wetland but now a million-acre desert. He takes listeners on an adventure downriver, along a labyrinth of waterways, reservoirs, power plants, farms, fracking sites, ghost towns, and RV parks, to the spot near the US-Mexico border where the river runs dry.
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Water issues are never about only water.
- By Bonny on 08-20-17
By: David Owen
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Move Like Water
- My Story of the Sea
- By: Hannah Stowe
- Narrated by: Anna Rust
- Length: 6 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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As a young girl, Hannah Stowe was raised at the tide’s edge on the Pembrokeshire coast of Wales, falling asleep to the sweep of the lighthouse beam. Now in her midtwenties, working as a marine biologist and sailor, Stowe draws on her professional experiences sailing tens of thousands of miles in the North Sea, North Atlantic, Mediterranean, Celtic Sea, and the Caribbean to explore the human relationship with wild waters. Why is it, she asks, that she and so many others have been drawn to life at sea—and what might the water around us be able to teach us?
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Every sentence is so beautiful
- By Raleigh on 11-16-23
By: Hannah Stowe
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Masala Lab
- The Science of Indian Cooking
- By: Krish Ashok
- Narrated by: Ashish Bhandari
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Masala Lab by Krish Ashok is a science nerd's exploration of Indian cooking with the ultimate aim of making the listener a better cook and turning the kitchen into a joyful, creative playground for culinary experimentation. Just like memorizing an equation might have helped you pass an exam but not become a chemist, following a recipe without knowing its rationale can be a sub-optimal way of learning how to cook.
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Learned a lot!
- By Sharon S. Dorondo on 12-21-22
By: Krish Ashok
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Survival of the Friendliest
- Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity
- By: Brian Hare, Vanessa Woods
- Narrated by: René Ruiz
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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A powerful new theory of human nature suggests that our secret to success as a species is our unique friendliness. For most of the approximately 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have existed, we have shared the planet with at least four other types of humans. All of these were smart, strong, and inventive. But around 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens made a cognitive leap that gave us an edge over other species. What happened?
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Good but Unfortunate
- By Dee Faram on 09-07-20
By: Brian Hare, and others
The scope and scale of the metal issue
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Fascinating, dire, hopeful
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What makes this book so good is Mr. Beiser's ability to deftly contextualize each level of the process, from the materials themselves to their economic impact to their environmental and human costs.
This is an important addition to the pantheon of contemporary materials science non-fiction, joining the likes of The War Below and Cobalt Red.
Another fantastic feature of this book, one that is far too often lacking in similar publications, is the set of tangible policy recommendations set forth by Mr. Beiser in the last two chapters.
This is also the only area of the book where Mr. Beiser does, in my opinion, become slightly myopic--though, again--with a more panoptic view than most.
Excellent book by Vince Beiser
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Don’t missunderstand. The reader reads well, the content is somewhat interesting, but I don’t know which rock you have lived under if you think the working conditions in a Congolese mine is fine. So not really much new information for those that have paid attention
So the book if fine if you want to dig deeper into the problematic sides of metals. If you on the other hand wants to learn about metals and their use or importance; look elsewhere
Misleading title
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Nice Outline for Dangers and Opportunities
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