Occasionally Random

Title: The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth

Author: Nicolas Niarchos

Genre/s: nonfiction; history; science; technology; politics; colonialism

Content/Trigger Warning/s: frank discussion of European colonialism and its effects; frank discussion of the current ongoing effects of political corruption and mining; frank discussion of the effects of the aforementioned conditions on the world at large if change does not happen; illegal detention; implied torture

Synopsis (from publisher's website): Epic, shocking, and deeply reported, The Elements of Power tells the story of the war for the global supply of battery metals—essential for the decarbonization of our economies—and the terrible, bloody human cost of this badly misunderstood industry

Congo is rich. Swaths of the war-torn African country lack basic infrastructure, and, after many decades of colonial occupation, its people are officially among the poorest in the world. But hidden beneath the soil are vast quantities of cobalt, lithium, copper, tin, tantalum, tungsten, and other treasures. Recently, this veritable periodic table of resources has become extremely valuable because these metals are essential for the global “energy transition”—the plan for wealthy nations to wean themselves off fossil fuels by shifting to sustainable forms of energy, such as solar and wind. The race to electrify the world’s economy has begun, and China has a considerable head start. From Indonesia to South America to Central Africa, Beijing has invested in mines and infrastructure for decades. But the U.S. has begun fighting back with massive investments of its own, as well as sanctions and disruptive tariffs.

In this rush for green energy, the world has become utterly reliant on resources unearthed far away and willfully blind to the terrible political, environmental, and social consequences of their extraction. If the Democratic Republic of the Congo possesses such riches, why are its children routinely descending deep into treacherous mines to dig with the most rudimentary of tools, or in some cases their bare hands? Why are Indonesia’s seas and skies being polluted in a rush for battery metals? Why is the Western Sahara, a source for phosphates, still being treated like a colony? Who must pay the price for progress?

With unparalleled, original reporting, Nicolas Niarchos reveals how the scramble to control these metals and their production is overturning the world order, just as the global race to drill for oil shaped the twentieth century. Exploring the advent of the lithium-ion battery and tracing the supply chain for its production, Niarchos tells the story both of the people driving these tectonic changes and those whose lives are being upended. He reveals the true, devastating consequences of our best intentions and helps us prepare for an uncertain future. If you have ever used a smartphone or driven an electric vehicle, you are implicated.

Buy Here: The Elements of Power a book by Nicolas Niarchos - Bookshop.org US

My Review: So this was what I would call an invaluable read, given the times we live in, but it was also a very INFURIATING read - not because it’s badly written (though ngl this book does have its weaknesses in some places), but because of what it shows the reader about what goes into making batteries.

In the Introduction, Niarchos says that he set out to write a book about a boring topic: batteries. And sure, on the surface of it, it might seem boring - until Niarchos points out that batteries run almost every piece of technology we use today. Without batteries, we wouldn’t have cellphones, or laptops, or portable gaming devices - and we wouldn’t be able to move towards clean energy like solar, because batteries are needed to store electricity for use when the sun isn’t shining. They’re also vital for electric cars, since they take the place of gasoline in providing the energy needed to run a car’s engine. Batteries, therefore, aren’t just important for supporting the little tech items we use everyday; they’re crucial for widespread adoption of clean energy.

But very, very few people have given any kind of serious thought to just how batteries are made, and where the materials to make them come from. They are invaluable to life in the twenty-first century, and will be pivotal as society increasingly turns away from fossil fuels in pursuit of clean energy, but the average person can’t point to a source when asked the question “Where do batteries come from?” in the same way they could probably point to an oil well when asked “Where does gasoline come from?”

That’s what Niarchos reveals to the reader in this book: where batteries come from. And there is a reason why part of the book’s subtitle includes the phrase “The Dirtiest Supply Chain in the World”, because it IS.

At the heart of this story is cobalt: one of the most important components for making lithium ion batteries, the most common type of battery used in almost every piece of tech today. Most of that cobalt is mined from Congo, one of the most troubled places in the world, where it is mined by some of the poorest people in the world. The very beginning of the battery supply chain starts with some of the most oppressed people on the planet, who do some of the most dangerous work there is, and who earn a mere pittance of what the big mining companies (mostly European and Israeli, and now also Chinese) and manufacturers (mostly European, Israeli, and Chinese) make. And that’s just the mining: that’s not taking into account the suffering they endure from rampant corruption and abuse from their leaders and the foreigners running the mines. These are people who mine the cobalt that makes the batteries in a smartphone work, but who themselves are too poor to buy a smartphone, and whose suffering is rendered invisible by all the layers of economics and politics in the way.

While Niarchos spends a great deal more time tackling the situation and history of Congo, he also does take a side-trip to Indonesia to take a look at nickel mining. Like cobalt, nickel is an important component in making batteries, and in Indonesia, large-scale nickel mining (by Indonesian companies that are funded by and sell to Chinese business and government entities) has created pollution so terrible that agriculture and fishing are no longer possible in the places where the mines are founded. And that’s before we get into the destruction of the rainforest where the mines are, and the destruction of the coral reefs and sea life in the parts of the coast where the tailings are dumped.

It’s the bit about nickel mining that gets to me the most, because my country also sits on top of large nickel deposits, and there is so much mining going on here that might SEEM legal, but given the depth of corruption in my country’s government, I’d say that a lot’s going on behind the scenes that no one knows about but which is very much NOT legal at all. The only thing that’s visible to us are the literally disappearing tree cover and mountains, as well as the tailings destroying formerly pristine rivers and coastlines. And that’s before we get into the displacement of locals, who are usually indigenous peoples for whom the land is sacred, or which they’ve inhabited for generations before it was stolen from underneath them by corrupt government officials and foreign mining companies.

That being said, Niarchos does not hesitate to point out where all this awfulness is rooted in: the colonial exploitation of countries by First World powers, which has been reduced countries into nothing more than resource wells they can bleed dry. While colonies (supposedly) no longer exist, the structures of colonialism and the destruction it has wrought have rendered it so that many countries (Congo, Indonesia, the Philippines, etc.) are vulnerable to predation by more powerful countries. While the First World demands that everyone else adopt clean energy, they, in their turn, are shoving the dirty truth of that adoption into countries that suffer for their demand. Niarchos shows that green energy is actually incredibly dirty: the energy needed to make batteries is very high, and that energy is NOT coming from solar or wind or any other similar source - it’s still coming from fossil fuels. Moreover, the consequences of acquiring the materials to make those batteries, as it is practiced now, is utterly destructive to the environment, and it very literally kills people, not just in mining accidents, but via birth defects and chronic poor health. The First World likes to act all sanctimonious, calling the Third World filthy, when in truth THEY are the reason for that filthiness in the first place. Congo would like to adopt clean energy, as would Indonesia, and as would the Philippines. We would LOVE to get onboard that particular train, not least because it would prevent the destruction of so much of the natural resources that are vital to sustaining our nations. But we cannot do so, because we are ground under the twin heels of corruption and the bottomless capitalistic demand for resources - resources, by the way, that rarely ever trickle down to us in a way that compensates us for the death and destruction the extraction of those resources necessitated in the first place.

So: all this is awful, all this is terrible. Is there a solution? Yes - but it’s not something that regular individuals can execute. It requires wide changes on a national and international level. It requires people with power and money to listen to people who don’t otherwise have either of those things, and come together to agree on how these vital minerals are to be extracted and processed. Mining is necessary: it is the only way to shift towards clean energy, because we need batteries to store that energy, and the only way to make batteries is to mine for the minerals that go into making them. But HOW those minerals are extracted, how miners are treated, and how the batteries themselves are made are things that can be controlled for. And there ARE ways of going about all of those things in an equitable manner, and with as little environmental destruction as possible. But to DO any of that would require governments and, very importantly, private corporations to actually CARE about something other than profit margins and offshore bank accounts for once. What individual consumers do matters, yes, but in order to actually create sufficient change, that change must come from powers greater than us - powers that are, currently, not too interested in reducing the overall suffering in the world in favor of watching numbers go up on a quarterly income spreadsheet.

Overall, this was a very good, but also very enraging, read. Niarchos has clearly put in the work: his research appears to be solid (forty percent of the book is basically made up of notes, references, and the index), and his goal to present the truth behind the battery supply chain is pretty much accomplished. But Niarchos also presents a LOT of information, and the narrative structure he’s chosen for this book don’t really make it easy to digest all of it. There is also a dryness to his tone that makes sense for such a serious topic as this, but some readers will likely bounce off it. The book can get pretty grim in places, and Niarchos does nothing to mitigate it - admirable and appreciated from a journalist, but again, something that may make readers bounce off the book. Still, this is an important book, and one that’s worth devoting time, brainspace, and emotions to.