Murder, mayhem, and minerals: The price of the renewable energy revolution

It’s not as if the human and environmental toll of mining is a particularly well-kept secret. But the full extent of the damage from mining for the rare earth elements and other metals that go into electronic devices, electric vehicles, solar panels, and countless additional components of modern life can be hard to wrap one’s mind around—unless the mountain of evidence is laid out end-to-end, as in Vince Beiser’s new book Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future. The book begins with an overview of what Beiser calls “critical metals,” where they come from, and the history of their discovery and extraction, before moving on to the current state of mining and processing critical metals today.

Demand for these substances has soared in the Information Age and is projected to keep climbing. (One factoid that stood out: “Just one Tesla Model S can contain as much lithium as ten thousand mobile phones.”) The environmental damage caused by the production of critical metals is continuing to mount—and could grow in unexpected ways if, for example, companies begin mining the sea floor.

Still, humans need these substances, especially for the renewable energy technologies needed to stem climate change. There is no Cinderella-shoe solution. There are always trade-offs. As Beiser writes, “When it comes to mining, the choice is never between bad and good but only bad and less bad.”

Beiser’s question is, in the end, how can the world mine better? How can the damage—to people, to places—be minimized? He also examines the various ways to limit mining by increasing recycling (itself a dirty and dangerous business that could stand to be improved) and reducing demand for metals in the first place.

The following interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Jessica McKenzie: I was wondering if you could start by telling me how you arrived at this topic—why critical metals?

Vince Beiser: Back in about 2018, I decided to make the switch, and I bought an electric car. I was like, “Yes, here I am doing my part. I’m saving the world. I’m on the side of the angels.” But I’m also a journalist, and I’ve done a lot of reporting about the things that make our modern lives possible.

So I was curious about where all the materials come from for my car. I knew there was lithium and cobalt and nickel in the battery, and the motors made out of something called rare earths. I started looking into it. And I was horrified to find that to get the metals that we need to build cars just like my Leaf we are cutting down rainforests to the ground in Indonesia, children are being put to work in Congo, rivers are being poisoned all over the world, all kinds of bad things are happening. One of Vladimir Putin’s oligarch buddies is getting rich. It’s this terrible paradox that not only my electric car, but also the machinery of the renewable energy I was counting on to power solar panels, wind turbines, and all of our electronic devices—our phones, laptops, everything—they’re all made with the same basket of metals that’s causing massive environmental damage, mayhem, and murder. And I thought this is an important story, so I wanted to tell it.

But we need these things, too. So I also wanted to really look at how we can do it better. How can we get the metals that we need without trashing the planet in the process?

McKenzie: As you’re hinting at in that intro, the book was kind of a difficult and distressing read. Especially the first maybe two thirds of it, it’s just this litany of environmental disasters, degradation, and other horrors—murder, child labor. It’s pretty bleak. What was that like to report?

Beiser: It is bleak. There’s a lot of really bad news in there, and it’s really disturbing. It’s really upsetting. I mean, I’ve been doing this kind of thing a long time, and I’ve reported on a lot of ugly stories, and I’ve seen a lot of things, and I’ve been to some horrible places. And it’s hard, it’s stressful, but at the same time, that’s really what motivates me. The idea is, if you can shine a light on that, if you can raise people’s awareness about it, hopefully that’ll help lead to change.

I really didn’t want to do the thing that we usually do as journalists. And this goes for me, too. For 90 percent of my career, it’s like, find out about this terrible thing, and then you write the story, and the story is like, “Oh my god, there’s this terrible thing going on. You probably haven’t heard about it, but wow, is it ever bad. Here’s some specific examples of just how bad it is. Here’s the big picture of just how terrible it is. It’s awful. You can’t believe it. The end.” And then we just walk away and leave the poor readers crying. I didn’t want to do that with this one.

These are problems that are being caused by something that we need. We have to shift over to electric cars. We have to shift over to renewable energy. They are better than fossil fuel power and fossil fuel powered cars, but they come with these really serious costs. So I wanted to spend a lot of time, as much time as I could, talking about solutions. There’s really no such thing as a complete solution, but ways we can do it better. There’s going to be some harm from the energy transition, but how can we keep it to a minimum? So really, the whole second half of the book is at least aimed in that direction.

McKenzie: I think you’re anticipating some of my later questions, so I’ll just put a pin in that for a second. From the first person reporting you did—you visited lithium ponds in the Atacama Desert, and you spent time with some freelance recyclers. But what moments from your reporting really sticks with you now? What got into your head while working on the book, that you’re just still thinking over?

Beiser: The thing that was the most eye opening for me was what you just mentioned, really digging into the whole the world of recycling. Because when you talk about solutions, when you ask people, “okay, what are the solutions?’, the first thing everybody wants to say is recycling. It’s everybody’s favorite solution to all kinds of problems. And it is better; I don’t want anybody reading this to think we shouldn’t be recycling. We should. But like everything else, it comes with its own really serious costs that I didn’t know anything about really before I started this. It was fascinating, disturbing, and also really encouraging to kind of delve into that world.

There’s a lot of downsides to it: It’s very energy intensive, very polluting. It’s often done on the backs of the poorest people on the earth. That said, I spent some time with some of those folks, those e-waste recyclers in Lagos, Nigeria. And just the ingenuity of these folks, the cleverness, the resourcefulness that they have, coming up with ways to pull out a little bit of value off of garbage, of what the rest of us are throwing away. I just thought that was amazing to see, and also really inspiring, because it sort of points at what can be a solution. The developing world in general is way better at recycling than we are here in the developed world, so there’s a lot of lessons we can learn from them, and hopefully there’s a lot of ways in which conditions can be improved for those folks.

But you take it all together, and you can see how recycling of metals and everything else—it’s never going to be a complete solution. But we really can raise it up a lot, lot higher, and it will have a lot of benefits for everybody.

McKenzie: While reading, it was very quickly apparent that electric vehicles are not the perfect solution that many people want them to be, or that they’ve been marketed as. Just the sheer volume of materials needed for car batteries and everything else that goes into them. Even so, I think I was a little surprised at how strongly you pivoted at the end from talking about the metals themselves—what they are, where they come from, how we mine them or process them or recycle them—to a very serious call for rethinking transportation systems and increasing the number of bike lanes and pedestrian corridors and investing in public transportation. Probably your biggest solution or policy recommendation was rethinking transportation. How did that come to be where you ended?

Beiser: The idea is that the book should be accessible and readable to just about anybody, right? It’s not for specialists. It’s not for policy wonks. I hope it’s accessible to just the average person who’s concerned about the world. And people always ask me, when I’m doing talks and stuff, “What can I do?” And you can tell them, “Well, you can write to your congressman, and lobby for this and that.” Most people are not going to do that stuff, right? So while I was working on this whole solutions piece, I was thinking a lot about, what can we do? There should be more recycling, for sure, but that is not something that is in most people’s personal power. That takes your city setting up a recycling system. There are other things we can do. You can fix your electronic gadgets, you can hang on to them longer, stuff like that. Those things all help.

But at the end of the day, if what we’re really concerned about is lowering our energy use and lowering the impact that we have on the planet, especially lowering demand for these metals that we need, then the best thing, the most impact you can have as an individual, is to not buy a car.

Out of all these things that we use these critical metals for, electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels, electronics—electric cars are the number one. They are the biggest consumer of all the metals that I’m talking about in the book. If we can reduce the demand from electric vehicles, that’ll do more than anything else to reduce the harm that’s being caused by our need for critical metals.

It’ll also reduce the amount of energy that we need, which again reduces critical metal use, and is just better in general. The less energy we use, the better. So it seems like it’s sort of a couple of steps removed, but in fact, they’re very directly connected. Why do we need all these metals? Primarily because we want to build a billion electric cars. Well, if we do end up building a billion electric cars, we are really going to swap one set of problems for another. There’s already about 1.2 billion cars on the roads worldwide. Rather than trying to swap them for 1.2 billion electric cars, if we can turn that into half a billion electric cars, plus a whole lot of bicycles and subways and walkable neighborhoods, we’ll all be way better off. That’ll do much more than any number of regulations on lithium mining or anything else we can think of, really.

McKenzie: You also have this sort of extended hypothetical or fantasy sequence where you sort of imagine a woman in the future who made the shift from personal vehicle to using this whole wide-ranging transportation network. Why did you do it that way?

Beiser: To be perfectly honest, it was my editor’s idea. I had the whole book written without that. And I had a paragraph or two saying, it’ll be great. We’ll have repair shops everywhere, and we’ll reuse gas stations to build housing—it’s going to be great. And he said, why don’t you tell us a little story about how that’s going to look. I thought that was a pretty good idea. It was kind of a weird area to venture into because I’m a journalist. I write facts. I write about true things that I’ve found out, or that I’ve seen or whatever. And this is like two pages of fiction tucked into my nonfiction book. So it was a little strange as a writer. But I thought it was a pretty good idea, just to really give a sense of how this world could look.

I really do believe that we can shift, that we can get to a much more sustainable world without seriously compromising our quality of life. That’s always one of the arguments that people lob at you, like, “oh, you want to take us back. You want us to all to be living in caves. You want us to give up our houses.” And no, I don’t think that’s necessary. I really don’t. It’s going to require some changes, but by and large, we can imagine a much more sustainable world that looks a lot like the world we have here.

McKenzie: And it’s not wholesale fiction. You’re mostly picking and choosing things that other cities have already done in terms of building out public transportation or bike networks and fusing them into a sort of fictional scenario.

Beiser: That’s a good point. There’s nothing in there that I made up. We know how to do every single one of those things, and we’re doing them in lots of places already.

McKenzie: One detail that stood out to me while reading this going into the election, and then finishing after the election, was the explanation of how China came to dominate the rare earth and permanent magnet industry. So you report that in the 1990s virtually all of the permanent magnets that are used in wind turbines, electric vehicles, and personal electronics were made in the United States, Japan, and Europe. But 10 years later, the industry had moved to China, in part because the United States had signed off on this big deal to sell an American company to two different Chinese companies, and they only made them keep manufacturing in the United States for five years, which really isn’t very long. The day after the five-year agreement was up, the industry moved to China, and that was that.

And what I was thinking about, because of the election, was that vintage Donald Trump complaint that global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing noncompetitive. So obviously, I don’t think climate change is a hoax. But do you think that Trump’s paranoia about climate change and the energy transition, and China’s role in it, could be based in at least this partial reality, where China is dominating the sector and has a lot to earn from it?

Beiser: That’s a really interesting question. Trying to pin down what Trump really thinks or what he really believes is—that just seems like a fool’s game. And he changes his mind all the time. But we know a few things, or at least it seems like a few things are going to happen. He’s definitely not sold on the idea of the energy transition, to put it mildly. The thing that he’s bashed the most is offshore wind turbines, for some odd reason.

McKenzie: Whales.

Beiser: As if Trump is concerned about whales. I’ve read a couple of people speculating that he was mad about these offshore wind turbines near his golf course in Scotland, that he said wrecked the view. And so that feels right, but anyway—he has really been critical of electric cars, but now he’s got Elon Musk, standing right behind him, whispering in his ear. So I bet he’s going to change his tune on those.

That said, he’s also super protectionist. That’s one thing he’s been really consistent about, right? High trade barriers, and he’s said he’s going to double the tariffs on Chinese goods. So that’s all bad news for the energy transition. It’s bad news for getting the United States into renewables, because all that stuff comes from China. They make practically all the solar panels, all the wind turbines, and they make, by far, the most electric vehicles in the world. We’re already blocking out Chinese-made electric vehicles, basically because they would just completely take over. You can buy a Chinese electric car for like, $10,000 – 15,000.

McKenzie: You also report that the mining industry is starting to move back to the United States, in part so that the country has its own supply of critical metals. But one possible benefit of that is better environmental protections around mining. Do you think it’s possible that his sort of protectionist instincts will help the US mining industry?

Beiser: It’s possible. It fits with the whole America First idea, let’s build up domestic industries. But he doesn’t care about the environment at all. So he’s going to be more amenable to opening up mines.

There’s a real national security component to this, too. It’s a real danger to have China have such leverage over so many important metals. More specifically, a lot of these metals are also super important for military technology. Rare earths, you need them for all kinds of military technologies— permanent magnets, all this stuff figures into the F-35, the most advanced jet fighter, all this kind of stuff. The Pentagon is really concerned about this stuff.

McKenzie: It won’t help the energy transition much if it’s all going to weapons…

Beiser: True. But that said, it sounds really counterintuitive, if you’re concerned about the environment at all, but I really do think we’re going to need to accept more mining back here in the United States. We used to do tons of it. Now we do much less of it. We really need more of it. If you take a global point of view, the way that mines operate in the United States, there’s much higher environmental standards. There’s much higher labor standards.

McKenzie: You also write about how these materials are so important that it really hindered the ability to impose sanctions on Russia when they invaded Ukraine, and how geopolitics and the flow of these materials just don’t mix.

Beiser: Russia is the world’s number one supplier of high-grade nickel, the best nickel for electric car batteries. And also [a top supplier] of copper, which is another one of the critical metals we need lots of. The world just quietly kept buying that stuff from Russia until quite recently, and they still are, to some extent. The US, finally banned the import of Russian nickel, but they didn’t actually sanction the companies involved. So it’s still still pretty murky.

Basically, Russian metal is still getting out there into the world, again, because we need it, right? I mean, it’s like Saudi Arabia. They’re a loathsome regime with one of the worst human rights records in the world, but we constantly turn a blind eye because we need their oil, or at least we used to really need their oil. And these are the kinds of devil’s bargains that we’re forced to strike because we absolutely need these metals. We need lots of them, and we’re not producing barely any of them here in North America. So it forces us to rely on, or stop relying on, places like Russia and Indonesia and Democratic Republic of Congo, and, more than anywhere else, China. It’s a horrible moral debt that we’re incurring, and also, again, the environmental costs in those countries… And finally, it has a major geopolitical impact. It makes us pull our punches a little bit when it comes to Russia.

McKenzie: If there’s one message that you would hope people reading—whether average Joes or a policy maker or government official—would walk away from this book with, what would it be?

Beiser: I think the big, broad message is that we have to make this transition. We have to switch over to renewables. We have to switch over to electric cars, but that inevitably comes with costs. We have to recognize those costs, which a lot of people don’t, or don’t want to, right? We want to think like, “Hey, I bought my electric car,” or, “I put solar panels on my roof. Now I’m a good guy.”

All those things come with costs. That said, there’s a lot that we can do to minimize those costs, to bring those costs down. And I really think we really truly can make our way to a sustainable future that is cleaner and safer and really better for everybody. But we’ve got to be very thoughtful and very careful about how we’re how we’re getting there.