The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron

The Rare Metals War

The Dark Side of Clean Energy and Digital Technologies

Guillaume Pitron, Bianca Jacobsohn, Guillame Pitron

Scribe Publications · Print & ebook · October 16, 2020

Is the shift to renewable energy and digital devices going to free us from severe pollution, material shortages, and military tensions?

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Who it’s for
Trace how rare metals complicate the promise of a cleaner, more connected world.
Genres
Geopolitics, Mining & Extraction Business, Energy Industry
Published
Scribe Publications, October 16, 2020

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About this book

Is the shift to renewable energy and digital devices going to free us from severe pollution, material shortages, and military tensions? Rare metals are essential to electric vehicles, fighter jets, wind turbines, and solar panels, and also to our smartphones, computers, tablets, and other everyday connected objects. But consumers know very little about how they are mined and traded, or the environmental, economic, and geopolitical costs of this dependence.

Continue reading

This book reveals the dark side of the world that awaits us. It is an undercover tale of a technological odyssey that has promised much, and a look behind the scenes. Behind it all lurks China, which has captured the lion’s share of the ownership and processing of rare metals we now can’t do without. Drawing on six years of research across a dozen countries, this book shows that by breaking free of fossil fuels, we are in fact setting ourselves up for a new dependence—on rare metals that have become vital to our new ecological and digital society.

The Hidden Trade-offs

Trace how rare metals complicate the promise of a cleaner, more connected world.

Come here for

  • The uneasy overlap between clean energy, digital life, and resource politics
  • A closer look at the costs behind rare metals

Expect

  • Environmental, economic, and geopolitical stakes
  • A critical view of dependence on metals essential to modern technology

Where it sits

Geopolitics46%
Mining & Extraction Business32%
Energy Industry21%

Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.

Publisher categories

  • Ecology
  • Geopolitics
  • Technology
Authors
Guillaume Pitron, Bianca Jacobsohn, Guillame Pitron
Publisher
Scribe Publications
Published
October 16, 2020
Format
Print & ebook
Reading lane
Ecology