Book Review: Power Metal

Rare metals are a misnomer says Mr. Beiser; they are found in many places. It’s just that mining them, or “ripping them out of the earth”, generates a lot of waste, toxins, and harm. Throughout the book, Power Metal, Mr. Beiser returns to the common thread: cost. At what cost? It is the inverse of the idiomatic cui bono - who benefits? In an excellent, expository style that lays plain the complicated science of energy, the book tracks the growing importance of rare earth elements in what Mr. Beiser terms the Electro-Digital Age. Powered by metals that have embedded themselves into digital devices that we take for granted, the world has experienced a technological revolution unlike any previous century. But at what cost? Mr. Beiser goes deep underground, into the mines of the Atacama in Chile, the waste markets of Nigeria, and the factories of America to track the flow of materials from cradle to grave; and back again, in the reverse supply chain. He follows the tripartite “Reuse, Reduce, and Recycle” to show us how each of these processes can reduce strain on our environment and damage to human beings in descending order.

Power Metals is a book that begins small, exploring the rare earths industry and the growing strategic concerns that the West has against competing nations such as China and Russia. Mr. Beiser also illustrates how these elements, which were viewed as scientific backwater without use in the past century, have come to the fore, powering much of our modern-day infrastructure. He lays apart the logistics and supply chain that goes into combining these disparate minerals, often sourced from the ends of the earth, into the everyday electronics, including the laptop that we currently typing on. But Power Metal is not just a dispassionate dive into materials engineering. It is a hard look on the costs (often local and civic) and benefits (often global and corporate) that such large-scale industrialization of minerals has wrought upon the environment. From toxic pools in Inner Mongolia, China and poisoned livestock in Chile to exploding nickel factories in Indonesia, our modern day supply chain, as Mr. Beiser shows, is often built on the backs of the poor, developing nations of the South.

The book fans out, developing on the rare earths supply chain into a look into all that has gone wrong with consumerism. Planned obsolescence, abusing human rights, and ignoring environmental damage have all coalesced into a modern-day dystopia of neverending consumerism. This, Mr. Beiser, argues, will eventually lead the world down the unfortunate path that Nauru had taken. Nauru, a small tropical paradise in the Pacific, was once the richest nation in the region, with an economy driven by phosphate mining. But once the resource was depleted, its economy failed to move past the “resource curse” and it remains poor till this day.

While painting a dystopian picture with a surprisingly balanced and neutral perspective, Mr. Beiser suggests the alternatives. He is realistic, contending that humans will never be able to relinquish some forms of luxury that have catapaulted us into modernity, like the car. But he suggests reliable alternatives that have been shown to “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle” - propping up the repair industry and implementing urban design that favors bicycling around. Underlying all of this, however, is the wry recognition that the purported “Green” Revolution is actually driven in large part by mining of rare earth minerals that has been and will continue to be highly destructive and environmentally damaging to ecosystems. Existing native cultures, the original proprietors of the land, have been displaced by mining companies in droves, ignored by politicians, and finally poisoned by said mining companies. A more equitable future for them, however, may only be sparked by the developed nations’ willingness to reduce their consumerism and embrace reusability. What is eye-opening is that the recycling movement itself is highly energy-intensive, and the best way to reduce our never-ending consumerist tendencies is to reduce and reuse tools, extending the lifespan of our existing products by repairing them.

In all, Power Metal was a very good read. Mr. Beiser stitches together the disparate narratives of suffering, modernity, and technology and invites the reader to contemplate the central question: at what cost?