● The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives
Ernest Scheyder
Review via Sierra
Transitioning away from fossil fuels is going to take a lot of metals. Global production of lithium and graphite—essential components of EV batteries—will have to ramp up by 4,000 percent by 2040 to meet the Paris Agreement climate goals. Renewable technologies such as wind turbines and solar panels could not exist without heavy doses of metals we know, like copper, and metals we may have never heard of, like neodymium, promethium, samarium, and europium.
To get those metals, we have to mine them. And there’s the rub. “The mines opposed by the environmental lobby in the near term are, paradoxically, necessary to battle climate change in the long term,” Ernest Scheyder writes in The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives (One Signal/Atria, 2024). “Recycling alone cannot provide the materials needed to fuel the global green energy transition.”