New iPhones and Teslas come with an insatiable demand for lithium and other 'critical metals.'
Late last month, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management granted approval for a massive new lithium mine in the Nevada desert, the start of what could foretell a rapid ramp-up of domestic mining for so-called "critical minerals" in the coming years. When the plant comes online, it's expected to produce enough lithium to help power the batteries of 370,000 electric vehicles every year. Though an impending Donald Trump administration seems poised to roll back many EV and climate change initiatives, the need for particularly coveted metals—which include copper, cobalt, and nickel—supersedes politics. Critical metals are at the core of the iPhone, Teslas, and countless other high-tech products. Global demand for these metals is expected to rapidly increase by 400-600 percent in the next few decades. But there's a problem brewing. All this rapid new demand for metals and the products they power may be outpacing the available supply. That means domestic mining operations, which have a long history of dealing devastating environmental damage and displacing communities, are about to get a lot more common. Governments and businesses rushing to extract as many of these resources from the Earth as quickly as possible risk further polluting the planet. Ironically, these metals are also crucial to building the wind turbines and solar panels being built to stave off a future climate disaster. These are some of the dilemmas journalist Vince Beiser wrestles with in his new book, Power Metal: The Race For the Resources That Will Shape The Future. Beiser provides a stark account of the mind-bending amounts of extracted resources that will be needed to fuel what he's calling the coming "Electro-Digital Age." To illustrate that, Beiser travels to several sources of production, including a lithium mine baking in Chile's Atacama desert. The experience of mine workers and nearby residents there at times overlap in meaningful ways with the planned mine in Nevada. The book notably isn't…