This is a lively journalistic account of a geopolitical struggle over access to the select group of rare metals that are essential for our technological solutions for climate change (‘the drivers of new energies’). This seems to be down to their magnetic conductivity - though they also have other sought-after properties. They are the metals that power our phones, computers, electric cars and such like. These rare metals are essential to both the generation of green energy and the digital technologies that enable for its efficient use.

That’s the good news - but this book is about the bad news. The metals are ‘rare’ and exist in minute quantities within other metals. Extracting them is a pretty polluting process and has only been going on since the 1970s. We are going to have to mine a lot lot more if we are to meet the climate change targets agreed at the Paris 2015 summit. It just gets worse from here.

The author gives a pretty rounded (and global) view of the life-cycle of these metals: from disputes over access rights, the messy business of mining and purifying the metals, to their trading and deployment and on to efforts to recycle them (and dump the toxic side-products). Each of these stages is inefficient, toxic and comes with a murky hinterland of black market practices, geopolitical espionage, corporate pollution, and coverups. None of this is in our minds when we think of green energy and no country comes out of this looking good - those that stopped toxic production for environmental reasons, just bought it in from, and dumped it back in, other countries without regulation.

The message is that the worst aspects of colonial exploitation never went away and are being more intensively pursued under neoliberal conditions than ever before. Then he moves on to explain the nationalist protectionism that is, in turn, weaponising chemical elements and industrial knowledge. For Pitron, China is a vital centre of mining, manufacture and application for such future technologies and with its readiness to engage in long-term planning to maximise its dominance that is already shifting the balance of geopolitics.

Pitron has put in the legwork and joined a lot of dots. He has a good sense of how much explanation the reader is likely to need and how to explain things effectively. The writing is always lively and the book’s themes are developed with a storyteller’s skill. That story is important and I learned a far more than I expected about the hidden energy costs of modern technology and the dangers of monopolies and embargoes used for geopolitical reasons. Daniel Yergin’s The New Plan (2020) gives a more positive gloss on new energies and how international markets adjust to new disruptive situations. But Yergin doesn’t focus on the precise set of rare metals issues that Pitron does so this book makes a lively counterpoint. Glad I read it.