POWER METAL explores the crucial role that rare metals play in technology and energy and the global race to secure them for the future.

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.

Details

ISBN13: 9780241703960
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 368
Edition:
Publication Date: 17 Jun 2025
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 22.4(H)x14.3(L)x3.3(W)473
Weight (gm): 90

Author Biography

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1888. He was educated at Harvard, at the Sorbonne in Paris, and at Merton College, Oxford. His early poetry was profoundly influenced by the French symbolists, especially Baudelaire and Laforgue. In his academic studies he specialised in philosophy and logic. His doctoral thesis was on F. H. Bradley. He settled in England in 1915, the year in which he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and also met his contemporary Ezra Pound for the first time. After teaching for a year or so he joined Lloyds Bank in the City of London in 1917, the year in which he published his first volume, Prufrock and Other Observations. In 1919 Poems was hand-printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. His first collection of essays, The Sacred Wood, appeared in 1920. His most famous work, The Waste Land, was published in 1922, the same year as James Joyce's Ulysses.

Reviews

With harrowing intimacy, Lijn’s account reveals her experiences in an era when sexism was the norm. Meeting William Burroughs, Man Ray, Méret Oppenheim, and so many others, Lijn cut a path across American, British, and European postwar art scenes, even while her search for self-driven meaning was continually thwarted by this masculine milieu * Los Angeles Review of Books *
A beautifully written memoir by one of the most important and original artists working today. It's not simply a record of the evolution of an artist, but a testament to the strength of spirit and imagination that allowed Lijn to develop her artwork in the face of structural sexism. I found her story utterly gripping, enraging, entertaining – and important. I can't recommend it highly enough -- Jennifer Higgie
Liliane Lijn has been a unique and self-renewing force of creativity for six decades, amounting to an exceptional and unclassifiable career as a visual artist in many media, as well as a poet and a thinker -- Marina Warner