Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future by Vince Beiser

From Penguin / Riverhead Books The crucial role that rare metals play in technology and energy and the global race to secure them for the future.     An Australian multimillionaire's plan to mine the ocean floor.    Garbage pickers in Ghana risking their lives to salvage e-waste at "the most polluted place on Earth."    Tesla's former chief technology officer building a battery-recycling plant in the Nevada desert.     These people are at the center of the increasingly important global competition to locate and mine the metals and minerals essential for two critical technologies that will shape humanity's future: the internet and renewable energy. It's a race that will create new industries, generate enormous wealth, and destabilize the global balance of power, and it could either propel us to a more sustainable future or plunge us into an environmental nightmare.    In Power Metal, journalist and author Vince Beiser explores the Achilles' heel of the digital age: that the cell phones