BOOK REVIEW: Power Metal (The Race For The Resources That Will Shape The Future)
By Vince Beiser. Riverhead Books, New York. Hard Cover, 257 pp with bibliography and index. US$32
The sad fact of living an environmentally sensitive life is that it is almost as destructive as being a full-on road warrior in a 5,000-lb Dodge Ram 1500 Laramie. As author Vince Beiser writes in a brief foreword to this bleak and disturbing book: “The electric car I was so proud of, the digital devices I use every day and the renewable energy I was counting on to power them, are together spawning massive environmental damage, political upheaval, mayhem, and murder. To get the raw materials required to build cell phones, electric cars, and wind turbines, rainforests are being cut to the ground. Rivers are being poisoned. Children are being put to work in mines. Warlords and billionaire cronies of Vladimir Putin are getting rich. And untold numbers of people are getting killed.”
This is a hard book to read. Beiser, an award-winning journalist and author, traveled from the Congo to Peru to Southeast Asia to catalog the damage being done to the environment, from the destruction of the rainforest and rivers in Indonesia to get at nickel, to the Atacama desert high in the Andes for lithium, to the Congo for copper to the devastation of the Siberian taiga for nickel, copper, palladium, platinum, cobalt, and other metals by the Russian resources company Norilsk. In fact, as he writes, mining is a tough business. “Metals are natural resources, products of the earth, but the earth doesn't give them up willingly or easily. Digging up metals typically involves destroying the earth in the most literal sense. The whole object is to tear up trees or grasslands or deserts, blast apart the underlying rock and earth with explosives, and rip out the remains. And it doesn't stop there. The metal-bearing ore clawed out of the ground has to be processed, smelted, and refined with enormous energy-guzzling, pollution-spewing industrial equipment and oceans of chemicals.”…