The Mining Hop | Book(s) Review

Review of The War Below and Power Metal, two 2024 books that grapple with mining for climate action

Climate technologies require enormous amounts of metal. I’m Ian Morse, and this is Green Rocks, a newsletter that doesn’t want dirty mining to ruin clean energy.

By my count, there have been four books on the demands that certain climate actions put on mining production. There’s Volt Rush, which I reviewed in 2022 alongside a battery and transportation book. There’s Pitfall, the author of which joined me in Green Rocks’ first podcast and in the keynote conference session linked at the bottom. Then there’s the two that came out in 2024: The War Below and Power Metal. At the bottom, I summarize my distinctions between these four. For now, I’ll offer a review of the two most recent.

The War Below is the work of Ernest Scheyder, who in his role as a reporter at Reuters collects and disseminates news of interest to the international mining business community. Power Metal comes from Vince Beiser, a freelance journalist who previously authored a book that traversed countries to grapple with sand mining as a perpetual crisis of modernity.

What interests me in these reads are their frames. What technologies and materials are important? Which places are sought out for their materials? Where do these authors place the root of the tension between climate action and mining? But more important to me: Which sources do these authors elevate to teach readers about these topics? What is new or old about this moment? Who gets to decide the answers to the most confounding questions about diverging and conflicting environmentalisms?

Here’s the outline of the review:

• The War Below

• Power Metal

• Interrogating the approach (more academic thoughts)

• Unanswered Questions

The War Below

Scheyder’s book doesn’t appear to work toward any analysis. Instead, he approaches the topic with Reuters objectivity: facts are presented for the readers to come to their own conclusions. Yet facts and sources must be selected and framed. Without guidance, readers of all sorts may find their own views confirmed. Both mining activists and industry pundits have found support in this book. I might offer that there is a group that hasn’t: those who find trouble with his dichotomous, unquestioning, business-centric approach.

Scheyder takes time to describe places, often emphasizing the remoteness of locations. Characters are found in these places, and they guide the book, making the selection of those sources doubly important. Often it seems they were selected out of ease, which bends his sources toward businesses already with a platform. In his only chapter that ventures outside the US, he focuses on an American company and its outspoken leader’s (Teague Egan) attempts to lead Bolivia’s lithium industry. But what events and people set up the country as a target of corporate climate action? While it was worthwhile to spend a few pages on the transphobia that divides activism at Thacker Pass, the discussion is centered on one activist estranged from a resistance movement. As in many other chapters, I’m left wondering why the numerous people more closely involved in opposition don’t earn the same attention.

Scheyder’s method is roughly replicated in each chapter: some characters against a mine, some characters for, and some description of the recent policies that are enabling the mine. His devotion to company sources grants an unneeded megaphone to already widespread ideas, but at least it is fruitful for some heinous quotes. Consider Teague Egan’s response to seeing Bolivia’s lithium-rich salt flats: “This is what I’m going to fucking conquer.”

For Scheyder, engineers have the solutions, and the private sector is where they are developed. Bureaucracy is antagonized without explanation, mimicking a common argument when the private sector finds its shareholders are not top priority. News on this topic, including these books, often follows marketing that grasps at climate straws for ethical support for a typically harmful industry. MP Materials holds promise for the US energy transition, Scheyder writes, but in the same chapter mentions the use of rare earth materials in military applications. Is the material going to be used to kill or to save [figuratively]?

Scheyder’s chapter on restarting the gold-antimony Stibnite mine in Idaho is an unnerving case of this. The basis for including this in a discussion about the energy transition seems weak. It might be better suited to a book on the military industry. Antimony was most often used in bullets and armor, so when the second world war concluded, business dried up. But business is good in the world of wars. The firm, Perpetua Resources, linked itself to an antimony battery company which has since faltered significantly. Scheyder says antimony also has uses in solar cells, but as far as I can tell, antimony in photovoltaics is nascent and barely approaching market. Perpetua says it aims to extract mostly gold, a little antimony, and clean up the tailings left after the mine’s heyday decades ago. A company official asks rhetorically, “We really should be thinking longer and harder about where do our things come from? And do I want it enough to accept its production in the United States? Or do I need it enough?… If we need it, don’t we have an obligation to produce it here? And I think the answer is yes.” Ironic, then, that the firm wants to produce one material that sits idle to inflate financial assets and another used for weapons. (The US Forest Service issued its final approval to the firm’s plans this week.)

Power Metal

Beiser’s book extends from Scheyder’s character-driven tales into concepts, industries, and stories. There is also a wider breadth of places included, even as he couldn’t visit each of them, which leaves an unfortunate distance between him and some of his subjects.

What makes Beiser’s book unique among similar works is the number of pages spent on exploring alternative sources of materials, such as recycling and repair. He shares with readers experiences similar to the one that started his inquiry into this field: After spending time with recyclers, his eyes open to all the metal that surrounds him: “in rain gutters, bicycle chains, water pipes, trash cans, street- light poles, and the cables inside those poles, fat with precious copper.” And the recycling industry has similar harm: workers are killed using heavy machinery or just making their ways through scrapyards, and re-processing metals can deposit toxicants in land, water, and air.

Beiser travels to Lagos to explore these alternatives with e-waste recyclers at work dismantling hardware and bagging chips for export. His exploration is rich in describing characters and place, but dry in details about the specific barriers recyclers face. He finds: “Ironically, international regulations designed to keep rich countries from dumping hazardous waste in poorer ones are now an obstacle to getting hazardous waste out of those poorer countries.” It doesn’t sound like those international regulations are doing much to prevent that waste dumping in the first place, though. Beiser rounds off the chapter by reiterating that more mining is “needed”, with a list of alternative sources for materials, including tailings and phytomining, displacing perhaps deeper explorations of the nature of material networks.

Beiser relies on proposed solutions to scrutinize demand projections and material needs in his final chapters: one on right to repair and one on transportation options. “Metal is a means to a means: the car. But the end we seek is to be able to get from home to work or school and back safely, quickly, and reliably.” Beiser spends a few too many pages on bicycles, which he says don’t emit an ounce of carbon. But bicycles are not possible everywhere, for everyone, and they rely on carbon-intense materials, like asphalt and concrete. Interlaced are concessions that one might imagine came from an American editor, e.g. “If you want to live in a low-density exurb and get around in an SUV, that’s your right.” Personal transportation is just one part of pollution and social harms. What kind of world can we imagine that doesn’t center on an individual’s choices and lifestyles?

Interrogating the approach (more academic thoughts)

Scheyder outlines his frame in a prologue, in which he tells the story of Jerry Tiehm’s discovery of a rare flower in the Nevada Desert in 1983. Tiehm’s buckwheat has lived in an arid valley for likely tens of thousands of years, but its posterity is threatened by a firm that plans to open a mine in its home. The mine plans to produce lithium, which could be used to build millions of electric vehicle batteries that are expected to make it easier to stop burning fossil fuels. So Scheyder lands on the question: “What matters more, the plant or the lithium beneath it?” The War Below, it seems, tries to answer this question. (Who gets to decide the answer to that question?)

Beiser spends the first several pages of Power Metal illustrating the introspection sparked when he realized his electric car was composed of materials mined by industries harming people and places. His and Scheyder’s approaches to this issue are common in popular writings about mining. In the first, company marketing is funneling atmosphere-wide concerns on top of a place, like a magnifying glass concentrating the sun’s power on an ant as a spectacle of its relative insignificance. In the second, someone experiences consumer whiplash, whereby the solace that tens of thousands of dollars was meant to bring instead brings more discomfort by the discovery of the mining industry.

These books, like Pitfall and Volt Rush, regurgitate a paradox that has persisted since mining firms realized the opportunity that climate action offers. Mining causes environmental harm, certainly, but people don’t have their priorities straight. Emissions need to be reduced. In the words of Michael Lodge, the former regulator of deep sea mining, “Everybody in Brooklyn can say, ‘I don’t want to harm the ocean.’ But they sure want their Teslas.”

Paradoxes freeze conversation and they are spoken into existence. This one depends on sterilizing the nature of mining and its context. Mining in this conception is a polished essence: It has its products and its harms. Its products are not only demanded, they are needed — if they won’t save humanity, at least they will advance it. The harms are activities relegated to a fix. Stem pollution, mine in the right areas, distribute benefits, be kind to workers. These metals, materials, particular elements lie trapped in the ground, distributed around Earth’s surface. It’s then a matter of choosing a deposit where those problems can be minimized according to imagined thresholds that avoid those who are difficult to ignore: places where people don’t live, the deep sea, space. Because — and here readers feel a weak shrug — we need the minerals.

These authors have it tough. Since at least 2016, civil society groups and news reporters have drawn the link between particular locations where mining has harmed people and the benefits of those mined materials. Shortly after, the World Bank, IEA, automakers, and others groups that direct international capital brought these stories together: mining must be done sustainably so that its products can guide consumers out of climate crisis. Thus a global narrative was born, adding climate to the list of motivations to mine (which include economic development and the advancement of humanity) that help steer financing toward particular projects and places. Many players have spoken since, and these journalists are tasked with balancing perspectives while selling a book for popular audience. They are crafting an earth-wide rendering of the necessity of climate action and the opposition to mining. But their starting point was never under question. And the great irony is that despite lofty visions of global unity, the transition they imagine is the one they only see in their own neighborhoods: cars, commutes, consumption.

This is the unfortunate realm that these journalists step into: they grapple with a problem that stretches as widely as the atmosphere, but they attend to the context in which businesses are created in very particular places. And they cannot, because there is not enough time, not enough space in a book for popular press, but most vitally because the scale of the climate crisis is so great that it seems there is nothing outside it. As Beiser’s penultimate sentence describes: “We need a lot of [metal] to stave off climate change, the most dangerous threat of all.” So mining writers have jumped between places, zooming in to a conflict, taking the pieces they think are relevant, leaving others. It feels like a dance — the mining hop.

Unanswered questions

Tracing a single material across multiple places and times is cool. It feels like unlocking secrets to the world, to imagine how places are connected, how a single material that could be in your hand right now traveled and interacted with so many different people. Something binds humans together, and this feels a worthy agent.

Is nickel in Indonesia the same as nickel in Russia? Is copper in Kolwezi the same at copper in the Atacama? How can it be? Metallurgically, they are dramatically distinct. Different process must be used to extract them. Some processes are tied to the market for entirely different materials. Cobalt in Indonesia is a byproduct of nickel ore, the predominant component of which is iron. Yet in the Congo, cobalt is the byproduct of a copper-bearing ore, tying it to different market prices and technologies.

And then there are the social conditions that turn rock into ore. How was the land acquired? Where do the workers come from and for what reason do they participate in the supply chain? Maybe at each link, it’s manipulated into products for income. Where, then, does the cross-scale idea that it has an ethical use come from?

Is it possible to craft a forum to find a way out of the environmental tensions of mining for the climate that is attentive to justice along supply chains and that lives up to the world-uniting promise of climate action?

So, if you’re looking to read a popular book about this collision of mining and climate, I’ve summarized how I think about the distinctions between these books below.

• Volt Rush: Closest view of the role that Chinese producers have played

• Pitfall: Considers the possibility of leaving gold in the ground

• The War Below: US-focused, character-based hop between projects

• Power Metal: Most thorough engagement with alternatives

• Oak Flat: a starkly different approach that reveals new ways of understanding global and local tensions.

For your curiosity, here is a keynote talk I gave at the recent Geology Society of America meeting, on the interactions between lithium-ion battery research and mining.