‘Power Metal’ Review: The Dirty Work of Clean Energy
The scale of global mining required as part of the ‘energy transition’ has staggering environmental implications.
Mining is having a moment. Pundits and politicians have rediscovered the reality that extracting minerals from the earth is both critical for a modern economy and an inherently dirty business. Journalists writing about the industry often invoke both its strategic importance and William Blake’s “dark satanic mills.”
Rhenium, for instance—the last of all naturally occurring stable elements to be discovered, some 100 years ago—is what makes possible today’s superconductors and high-temperature alloys for jet engines. We use minerals to create all sorts of magical devices, from lasers and MRI machines to computer chips and, of course, lithium batteries, which power everything from our smartphones to our electric vehicles.
In “Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future,” Vince Beiser, a journalist and author whose previous book explored the role of sand in our economy, now turns to the mining implications of an “energy transition”—the push to replace conventional fuels and cars with batteries energized by wind and solar machinery.
Civilization as we know it would not exist without the earth’s minerals. Anthropologists use the terms Bronze Age and Iron Age for a reason. Meanwhile, observers have long raised concerns about mining’s effects on our health and the environment. Writing about land that has been polluted from mining in “On Airs, Waters and Places” more than 2,500 years ago, the Greek physician Hippocrates warned that “good waters cannot proceed from such a soil.”
Our modern strategic worries began shortly after World War I, when military planners realized that the nation and its war machinery were dependent upon imports for many essential minerals. In 1922 Congress established a military board to stockpile 42 strategic metals, including tungsten, vanadium and chromium. The 1939 Strategic and Critical Materials Stock Piling Act, updated in 1979, 1987, 1994 and 2023, was intended to encourage domestic mining and reduce import dependencies.
The past century has seen countless government studies about America’s reliance on imported minerals. In 1980 President Jimmy Carter signed the bipartisan National Materials and Minerals Policy, Research and Development Act calling for the coequal pursuit of mineral production and environmental protection. In the years since, the latter has crushed the former, stifling the American mining industry. Today the world mines more stuff than ever before—just not in the U.S.
As I’ve written before on these pages, “global mining today involves excavating and moving a quantity of rock each year equivalent to the tonnage of 7,000 Great Pyramids. Transition aspirations would require a tonnage north of 50,000 pyramids annually.” Clearly such scale isn’t only difficult—it’s near impossible. The mere attempt has staggering environmental implications. Mr. Beiser wastes no time uncovering that truth. The title to his introduction: “There’s No Such Thing as Clean Energy.”
Mr. Beiser tells us he wants “to make clear the extent of the damage” that mining inflicts. He concludes his introduction by teasing that “we need a whole new approach.” Spoiler alert: It’s about all of us using far less stuff and especially having far fewer cars of any kind.
The book mostly chronicles the author’s fascinating visits to people at myriad global mine sites. We learn about urban mining and the complex choreography of metal scavengers. On the subject of recycling, the author correctly concludes: “Recycling helps. But as a solution, utterly inadequate.”
He discovers the reality that people who make a living “dealing only with dematerialized abstractions, intellectual ‘products’ that exist mainly on computers” in fact depend on all manner of machines “made with metals.” Echoing the poet Blake, Mr. Beiser calls this a “Faustian bargain.” Here I disagree. Humans are, to use the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s term, homo faber—makers of tools and machines that create near magical productivity and value. It’s a great bargain.
The book’s dénouement and final chapter is devoted to the Netherlands’ love of the bicycle, which Mr. Beiser holds as “the single best way we can reduce the damage done by our consumption of both minerals and energy.” That conviction is shared by many transitionists and the International Energy Agency, which hopes the share of global households without a car will nearly double by 2050. California has similar aspirations.
Mr. Beiser marches through the car prohibitionists’ standard fare, from accidents to land use, offering the usual palliatives for taking away your car, such as the benefits of exercise. “We need, in short, to redesign our cities, to orient them around human beings rather than automobiles.” Never mind those humans who want or need cars.
The author revisits a widely repeated trope that there’s a generational shift away from cars to “micromobility,” the techie term for peddled and battery-propelled bicycles, but he ignores the recent data that shows otherwise. One MIT study found that millennials exhibit “little difference in preferences for vehicle ownership” and “in contrast to anecdotes, we find higher usage in terms of vehicle miles traveled.” Meanwhile, a 14-country survey released last year found that people under 30 “love cars and are neither ready nor willing to live without them.” In the U.S., 75% of respondents expressed an attachment to their cars; across Europe the average was 83% of respondents, while in China the proportion ballooned to 97%.
It’s true, as Mr. Beiser notes, that many cities are embracing the means for making cycling convenient and driving inconvenient. New York City has added nearly 600 miles of bicycle lanes to its roadways in the past decade. And now it has introduced a congestion toll, to further raise the cost of driving in Manhattan. Who benefits? In the U.S. we have data on that too: 0.5% of all commuters use a bicycle. The average age of those who commute by bike is 20 to 30, 70% male, 70% white and 80% with a college degree. Universal and diverse this is not.
One can conclude from Mr. Beiser’s chronicle that we face serious challenges in meeting humanity’s minerals needs. The single best way to help that? Don’t subsidize and mandate energy machines that exponentially increase the demand for minerals. If you’re already in a hole, stop digging.