Notes - Power Metal

Vince Beiser | February 2, 2026

Chapter 1: The Electro-Digital Age

The Paradox of the Energy Transition

The twenty-first century is defined by three interconnected drivers: digital technology, renewable energy, and electric vehicles (EVs). While this transition away from fossil fuels is essential to combat climate change, it creates a paradox where saving the atmosphere may lead to other environmental and social catastrophes. This high-tech era relies heavily on metals, which are extracted through some of the world's oldest and dirtiest industrial processes. Despite the "weightless" feeling of digital life, our machines—from routers to data centers—depend on the extraction and processing of titanic quantities of physical materials.

The Material Reality of Modern Devices

Modern electronics are built from a kaleidoscopic array of elements. A typical mobile phone can contain two-thirds of the elements on the periodic table, including gold, tin, and nickel, along with exotic materials like indium for toucheens, europium for screen color, and neodymium for vibration mechanisms. Batteries for these devices and EVs rely on lithium, cobalt, and nickel. The scale of material consumption is massive; a single Tesla Model S contains as much lithium as ten thousand mobile phones.

The Faustian Bargain of Renewables

Renewable energy sources like solar and wind are often described as "free," but capturing and transmitting that energy requires a vast physical infrastructure of machines.

Wind Turbines: Towering structures are made of steel reinforced with niobium, while internal magnets use neodymium to convert motion into power.
Transmission: Thousands of pounds of copper and aluminum cables are required to move electricity from remote wind farms to urban centers.
Storage: EV batteries require approximately one hundred pounds of nickel, cobalt, and lithium each, alongside nearly as much copper.

Surging Demand and the Toll of Mining

To meet renewable goals, the world must mine as much copper in the next twenty years as has been produced in all of human history. By 2050, the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts demand for lithium will surge fifteen times higher than 2022 levels, while nickel demand will increase tenfold. Mining these materials involves tearing up ecosystems, blasting rock with explosives, and using oceans of chemicals for refining. Metal mining is America's leading toxic polluter, contaminating nearly half of the watersheds in the American West. Workplace accidents kill thousands of miners annually, and since 2012, at least 320 antimining activists have been murdered worldwide.

Geopolitics and Global Power Shifts

The race for critical metals is reshaping the global balance of power, often benefiting authoritarian regimes.

China's Dominance: China currently dominates the entire supply chain, from mining to refining and manufacturing. It controls more than half of the world's refining capacity for lithium and cobalt and produces nearly three-quarters of all lithium-ion batteries.
New Resource Wealth: Nations like the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) hold nearly half of the world's cobalt, while New Caledonia possesses a quarter of unmined nickel, and Brazil produces almost all the world's niobium.
Strategic Vulnerability: Western nations have belatedly recognized their dependency on these materials as a threat to national security, leading to massive domestic subsidies like the Inflation Reduction Act to build local supply chains.

The Evolving Mining Industry

Historically a "rape-and-run" business, the mining industry is facing increased pressure to change.

Social License: Companies now require a "social license" to operate, as nearly every cell phone acts as a potential NGO that can broadcast environmental damage to the world instantly.
Legal Delays: Stricter regulations and community opposition have extended the time it takes to open a new copper mine from three to four years in the 1950s to an average of sixteen years today. These long lead times pose a serious challenge to meeting Paris Agreement goals.
Recycling Limits: While often touted as a solution, recycling is an energy-intensive, complex "reverse supply chain" that currently cannot meet the mushrooming demand for new metals.

Chapter 2: The Elemental Superpower

The 2010 Rare Earth Crisis

In September 2010, a collision between a Chinese fishing trawler and Japanese Coast Guard vessels near contested islands triggered a global economic shock. When Japan refused to release the Chinese captain, China abruptly halted exports of rare earth metals to Japan. Because China supplied 95 percent of the world's rare earths at the time, prices skyrocketed by as much as 2,000 percent, bankrupted fifty-nine renewable energy companies, and alerted the West to China’s "stranglehold" on a critical economic choke point.

Defining Rare Earths

Rare earths are a set of seventeen elementthat are neither rare nor earths. While relatively abundant, they are dissipated in low concentrations within other minerals, making them difficult and expensive to isolate. They act like "vitamins" or "spices" that confer unique magnetic and electrical properties to other materials, enabling high-tech hardware to be lighter, stronger, and longer-ranging. Key uses include:

Consumer Tech: Smartphones contain europium and gadolinium in screens and dysprosium in speakers.
Military: Lasers, radar, night vision, and missile guidance systems depend on these elements.
Permanent Magnets: This is their most vital application, converting movement into electricity in EV motors and wind turbines.

The Rise and Fall of Mountain Pass

For decades, the Mountain Pass mine in California was the world's leading rare earth source, primarily providing europium for color televisions. However, in the 1990s, the mine was closed after its wastewater pipeline ruptured dozens of times, spilling three hundred thousand gallons of radioactive waste into the Mojave Desert. This closure allowed China to move in and dominate the market.

China’s Strategic Dominance

China rognized the importance of rare earths as early as the 1970s, with leaders like Deng Xiaoping noting, "The Middle East has oil. China has rare earths". China holds one-third of the world’s reserves, including the massive Bayan Obo mine. The concentration of production in China came at an extreme environmental cost. Processing rare earths involves crushing rock, baking it at high temperatures, and bathing it in acid. In the city of Baotou, toxic by-products have created a "nightmarish hell on earth" of black sludge at has poisoned the Yellow River and caused skeletal deformities, leukemia, and hair loss among local residents.

Weaponizing the Supply Chain

The U.S. Department of Defense considers China’s dominance a significant risk to natial security. China has shown it is willing to weaponize its market power, recently restricting exports of gallium, germanium, and graphite in response to U.S. trade restrictions on computer-chip technology.

Chapter 3: The Global Treasure Hunt

Reviving American Mining

The Mountain Pass mine has recently returned to action under the ownership of MP Materials. Despite skepticism from the finance world, the new owners tripled previous production levels, reaching forty-two thousand tons in 2022—nearly 15 percent of global production. The U.S. Department of Defense has supported this revival with $45 million to scale operations as a matter of national security.

The Technical Process of Extraction

Modern extraction is a high-precision, muscle-intensive process:

**Blasting: Engineers use ammonium nitrate to shatter up to 150,000 tons of rock at a time, calibrated to crack the rock without sending it flying.
Milling: Huge "ball mills"—studded cylinders filled with steel balls—bash pebbles into a powdered slurry.
Concentration: Chemicals make the target ore "hydrophobic," causing it to latch onto air bubbles in a process called froth flotation.
Waste Management: Unlike older mines that used dangerous tailings ponds, the new Mountaiss uses a giant filter to separate solid waste, which is then buried, while the water is recycled.

The Persistent Reliance on China

Despite the success of domestic mining, a major gap remains in the "reverse supply chain". Currently, Mountain Pass must still export its concentrate to China for refining because there are no non-Chinese facilities capable of handling the required scale. MP Materials and the Australian firm Lynas Rare Earths are both working to build refining plants in Texas to break this dependency.

Innovations in Prospecting

Finding new deposits is notoriously difficult, with only one in one hundred boreholes typically turning up viable resources.

Junior Miners: Small startups take the highest risks, often burning through millions in capital before failing or being bought by larger firms.
Artificial Intelligence: Companies like KoBold Metals use AI algorithms to scan thirty million pages of geological reports and satellite imagery to identify patterns where metals are likely to be found.

The "Sacrifice Zone" in Myanmar

As China has sought to reduce its own domestic pollution, it has outsourced the dirty work of mining to the neighboring nation of Myanmar. This region has become a top producer of "heavy" rare earths like dysprosium, but at a gruesome cost.

Conflict Minerals: Armed militias seize land from Indigenous people, killing those who resist.
Ecological Devastation: Miners inject ammonium sulfate into mountainsides to liquefy the earth, creating thousands of bright blue, chemical-saturated pools. This has caused massive landslides and destroyed entire ecosystems, leaving areas where "there's nothing left, not even a small bird".
Global Connection: These poisoned metals are refined in China and sold to Western companies, meaning most EVs and smartphones are likely linked to this violence and environmental destruction.

Chapter 4: Killing for Copper

The Medium of Power

Copper is the literal medium of power, serving as the primary metal for electrical cables and wires due to its high ductility and superior conductivity, surpassed only by silver. Decarbonization is effectively impossible without copper, as it connects cells in solar panels, forms generators in wind turbines, and makes up the battery, motor, and wiring systems of electric vehicles (EVs). A typical EV contains roughly 175 pounds of the metal. Consequently, global demand is predicted to double by 2035, with the world needing to consume more copper by 2050 than the total consumed between 1900 and 2021.

The High Cost of Extraction

As demand surges, the quality of remaining ore is rapidly declining; in Chile, the average copper grade has dropped below 1 percent in the last 15 years, compared to 5 percent a century ago. This means ever-larger tracts of land must be destroyed and more energy consumed to extract the same amount of metal. Mining operations have a history of catastrophic failures, such as a 2014 spill in British Columbia that annihilated an entire creek and its surrounding forest, and a Philippine spill that smothered coral reefs and wiped out fisheries. Violence often follows the metal: in Peru, police have killed protesters at copper sites; in Pakistan, copper resources fuel armed separatists; and on Bougainville Island, a conflict over mine waste and profit-sharing led to a civil war that claimed 20,000 lives.

Historical and Modern Titans

The industry's history is one of "Copper Kings" who ran Montana like a corporate fiefdom, where 168 miners died in a single 1917 fire. Today, the frontier has shifted to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Chile. Billionaire Robert Friedland's Ivanhoe Mines is developing the Kamoa mine in the DRC, a joint venture with China, which refines and consumes more copper than any other nation. Chile remains the world's top producer, but its massive operations like Chuquicamata have turned the Atacama Desert into an industrial wasteland, sucking up limited aquifers and forcing Indigenous farmers to abandon drying land.

Black Markets and Fatal Scavenging

The soaring price of copper has created a global black market, leading to brazen thefts ranging from $4 million heists in Chilean seaports to "train robbers" who leap onto moving railcars to slice away copper slabs. In South Africa, the crisis is lethal; illegal miners known as "zama zamas" live underground for weeks in suffocating 100-degree humidity, often dying in rockfalls or floods to strip copper from active mine cables. This thievery causes massive secondary damage, such as the closure of hospitals and the cancellation of train lines, costing the South African economy over $2 billion annually.

Chapter 5: Holding Power

The Battery Era

Batteries are the keystone technology of the Electro-Digital Age, essential for storing renewable energy and powering over five billion mobile devices. Modern lithium-ion batteries consist of a cathode (usually nickel, cobalt, and manganese), an anode (graphite), and lithium ions that flow between them to generate current. While early 20th-century cars were often electric, they were eclipsed by fossil fuels until Tesla’s 2008 Roadster reclaimed the technology. China currently dominates this supply chain, refining most of the world's cobalt, nickel, and graphite and producing 70 percent of all lithium-ion batteries.

Nickel: The "Goblin's Copper"

Nickel is vital for increasing a battery's energy density, allowing EVs to travel farther on a single charge. A typical Tesla battery is approximately 80 percent nickel by weight.

Russia and Nornickel: Russia is the top exporter of high-quality nickel, primarily from Norilsk. Built by Gulag prisoners, the Norilsk complex is one of the most ravaged places on Earth, emitting sulfur pollution that rivals erupting volcanoes.
Indonesia’s Industrial Melee: Indonesia holds the world’s largest nickel reserves and has banned raw exports to force domestic refining. This transition has been bloody; explosions at the Chinese-owned PT Gunbuster plant killed dozens of workers, and the refining process often involves "high-pressure acid leaching," which creates millions of tons of acidic waste that have turned local rivers dark red.

Cobalt: The Blood of the Congo

Over 70 percent of global cobalt comes from the DRC. The industry is split between large industrial mines and "artisanal" operations where 200,000 people—including thousands of children as young as seven—chip out ore by hand in cramped, dangerous tunnels. These children are often subjected to physical abuse, whippings, and whippings from security guards. While Western corporations like Apple and Google claim to audit these mines, critics argue these inspections are brief and ineffectual. China owns more than 80 percent of the DRC's cobalt-producing mines, often managing them via remote video feeds from Beijing.

Practical Trade-offs and Alternatives

Manufacturers are attempting to phase out cobalt and nickel by using lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries. However, LFP batteries are less energy-dense and rely on phosphate mining, which can displace wildlife and destroy habitats in places like Florida. Additionally, LFP components are currently so cheap that they may not be worth the cost of recycling, potentially leading to them being junked in mass quantities.

Chapter 6: The Endangered Desert

Lithium: The Oldest Metal

Lithium is the irreplaceable ingredient for lightweight power storage. It was created in the Big Bang and was historically used for H-bombs before becoming the driver of the EV revolution. Demand grew sevenfold between 2017 and 2022. While it can be mined from hard rock, extracting it from brine is much cheaper.

The Atacama Water Crisis

The Atacama Desert holds the world's largest lithium reserves. The extraction process involves pumping mineral-rich brine into massive ponds and letting the sun evaporate the water.

Water Loss: This process is not as "clean" as companies claim; an estimated 114 billion gallons of water were lost to the Salar de Atacama environment between 1985 and 2017.
Ecosystem Collapse: Indigenous Atacameño communities report that their agriculture is dying and lagoons are shrinking. Independent studies have confirmed declining soil moisture and the death of one-third of drought-tolerant algarrobo trees near the mines.
Flamingos at Risk: The delicate balance of the salt flats supports rare flamingos; disturbances in the water levels could lead to an irreversible reduction in their populations.

Geothermal Innovation in "Lithium Valley"

In California’s Imperial Valley, startups like Controlled Thermal Resources are attempting to extract lithium from 600-degree brine located a mile beneath the Salton Sea. This method uses zero-carbon geothermal energy and pumps the leftover water back underground, theoretically using far less surface space and fresh water than Atacama operations. If successful, this could transform a chronically impoverished farming region into a lucrative "Lithium Valley".

The Consumption Warning

While new technologies and "responsible mining" partnerships (including BMW and Mercedes-Benz) aim to improve standards, experts warn that lithium mining is fundamentally not sustainable. The core issue is the sheer volume of resources human beings devour; maintaining current levels of consumption while switching to renewables is physically impossible. True sustainability requires a fundamental change in how humanity lives on Earth rather than just finding new places to dig.

Chapter 7: Depth Charge

The New Frontier of Nodule Harvesting

A ninety-ton machine the size of a house recently tested the extraction of ancient black stones from the Pacific seabed. These stones, known as polymetallic nodules, are often referred to as "batteries in a rock" because they are densely packed with cobalt, nickel, and copper. The United States Geological Survey estimates that one region of the Pacific alone contains twenty-one billion tons of these nodules, potentially holding more nickel and cobalt than all known dryland deposits combined. The extraction process involves industrial ships like the Hidden Gem lowering remote-controlled vehicles that use water jets to dislodge nodules from the sediment three miles underwater.

Geopolitics and the Two-Year Trigger

Deep-sea mining is governed by the International Seabed Authority (ISA), an agency tasked with both protecting the ocean floor and organizing its commercial exploitation. A legal loophole known as Paragraph 15 or the "two-year trigger" states that if a member nation notifies the ISA of its intent to mine, the agency has two years to finalize regulations or must provisionally approve the work. The tiny island nation of Nauru pulled this trigger in 2021 in partnership with the Metals Company, forcing a deadline that has alarmed environmentalists and scientists. Countries like China are particularly eager to proceed, actively building deep-water capacity and opposing moratoriums.

Environmental Warnings and Scientific Gaps

Critics warn that mining machines could strip 3,900 square miles of seabed over a standard contract, causing irreversible damage to unique ecosystems. Key environmental risks include:

Sediment Plumes: Stirred-up silt could travel for miles, suffocating aquatic life and potentially releasing dissolved toxins.
Noise and Light Pollution: Industrial racket could echo for hundreds of miles, interfering with the navigation and feeding habits of organisms evolved for silence and darkness.
Carbon Sequestration: Scientists fear that disturbing the seafloor could release stored carbon, impacting the ocean's ability to regulate the climate. Many researchers argue that at least five more years of study are required to understand these impacts, yet the commercial race is moving forward.

Chapter 8: Mining the Concrete Jungle

The Concept of Urban Mining

Recycling is a globe-spanning, multibillion-dollar industry often described as urban mining. Instead of extracting ore from the earth, this process treats finished products like car bodies, water heaters, and computers as raw materials. This creates a reverse supply chain that essentially runs the manufacturing process backward, disassembling goods into components to recover purified metals. While recycling is generally better for the environment than traditional mining, it is often more expensive and labor-intensive than extracting virgin metal.

The Role of Freelance Scrappers

Individual "scrappers" or waste pickers are the primary engine for gathering atomized metal waste that big companies find too small to bother with. In cities like Vancouver, these individuals navigate back alleys and dumpsters to find copper cores in light fixtures or aluminum sheets. In developing countries, millions of pickers provide a vital service by keeping junk out of landfills and reducing the need for virgin materials. Despite their contribution, these workers are often underappreciated, poorly paid, and marginalized by society.

Industrial Scale and Global Flow

Scrap metal follows a path from small-scale collectors to large-scale aggregators like ABC Recycling. Enormous machines at these facilities chomp railroad cars into pieces and compress autos into metal pancakes. Most of this processed scrap is eventually loaded onto ships bound for China, which has become the "Scrapyard to the World". China’s metal-recycling industry employs a quarter of a million people and generates $60 billion annually.

Hidden Dangers and Toxic Costs

Scrapping can be lethal due to heavy machinery accidents and the presence of hidden hazards. In some cases, workers have been killed when old mortar rounds or Air Force bombs accidentally mixed into the scrap stream exploded. Environmental costs are also significant:

Particulate Matter: Shredding scrap releases metal dust into the air.
Toxic Emissions: Intense heat from furnaces can vaporize plastics and paints, creating airborne toxins.
Energy Consumption: Smelting scrap requires massive amounts of power, often derived from carbon-heavy coal or gas plants.

Chapter 9: High-Tech Trash

The Crisis of E-Waste

The world generates over fifty-three million tons of electronic waste (e-waste) annually, a figure expected to reach seventy-five million tons by 2030. E-waste is a uniquely problematic form of trash because gizmos left in landfills can leach toxic chemicals into the soil. However, this waste is also a dense source of critical metals; for instance, one ton of circuit boards can contain up to eight hundred times more gold than a ton of gold ore. Despite this value, only about 17 percent of global e-waste is officially collected and recycled.

The Informal Economy in Lagos

In Nigeria’s Ikeja Computer Village, thousands of workers dismantle digital devices by hand. Business owners like Tijjani Abubakar (TJ) employ vast networks to buy discarded phones from across Africa and even Europe. Workers crack open phones to extract printed circuit boards and working microchips, which are then sorted and exported to refineries in China or Europe. This industry creates thousands of jobs for the impoverished but operates in appalling conditions.

Dangerous Processing Methods

In informal dumpsites like Katangua, recycling practices are often primitive and deadly. Workers frequently burn the plastic coatings off wires to reach the copper inside, releasing thick, oily smoke containing toxic dioxins. Others use highly corrosive acids to remove gold from circuit boards, often dumping the spent acid into local waterways. Studies in these areas have found dangerously high levels of lead and other toxins in the blood of local children.

The Challenge of Battery Recycling

Lithium-ion batteries are the most dangerous form of e-waste because they can burst into flames or explode if punctured or overheated. These fires can reach 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit and cannot be extinguished with water. Because of this risk, shipping companies are reluctant to transport old batteries, leading many to be dumped in landfills or mislabeled for export. While companies like Li-Cycle and Redwood Materials are building high-tech facilities to shred batteries under water, the industry currently recycles less than 1 percent of the lithium used worldwide.

Non-Obvious Insights and Practical Realities

Negative Fractions: Some materials in electronics, like low-grade plastic, have no market value, meaning recyclers must pay others to take them away.
Producer Responsibility: Laws in China and Europe that force manufacturers to collect and recycle their own products are helping to scale up the industry.
Phytomining: Researchers are experimenting with "hyperaccumulator" plants that suck metals out of mining waste through their roots, though this can sometimes lead to the spread of invasive species.
Recycling Limits: No product is 100 percent recyclable; material is always lost to vaporization, and some components like touch screens are currently un-recyclable.

Chapter 10: New Lives for Old Things

The Struggle for the Right to Repair

The concept of the "right to repair" was galvanized by individuals like Kyle Wiens, who discovered that tech companies like Apple actively suppressed repair manuals to prevent consumers from fixing their own devices. While recycling is often seen as the ultimate solution, it is actually the most inefficient, labor-intensive, and energy-intensive method of extending a product's life because it reverts highly engineered goods back to their basic elemental forms. Repair is almost always cheaper for the consumer and significantly reduces the planetary burden by decreasing the need for new mining and energy-intensive manufacturing. For example, extending the lifespan of all smartphones in the European Union by just one year would save 2.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. Despite these benefits, a century-old corporate strategy of planned obsolescence has intentionally made products difficult to fix using proprietary screws, glues, and legal threats regarding warranties. In contrast, developing nations like Nigeria have thriving independent repair economies because the "essentials of daily life" are still considered too valuable to discard. Recent breakthroughs in the United States, such as the Federal Trade Commission's 2021 report and new state laws in New York and California, are finally beginning to force manufacturers to provide the parts and manuals necessary for independent repair.

Repurposing Electric Vehicle Batteries

A practical application for old technology is found in giving electric vehicle (EV) batteries a "second life" for grid-scale energy storage. Startups like B2U Storage Solutions use batteries from defunct Nissan Leafs that are too worn for cars but can still hold a significant charge to store solar energy for nighttime use. This method is 70 percent cheaper than building new storage systems and bypasses the environmental damage of new mining and refining. However, several warnings exist: there is currently no standard format for EV batteries, making it difficult to combine different brands, and the long-term longevity of these repurposed units remains unknown. Despite these hurdles, major automakers like Nissan, Kia, and Toyota are testing systems to use old batteries to power everything from streetlights to convenience stores.

Reusing Solar Panels

Similar to batteries, solar panels degrade over time, losing efficiency but remaining functional for decades. Organizations like Good Sun collect used panels from those upgrading their systems and redeploy them to schools, homeless shelters, and hospitals in the developing world. This practice is vital because solar panels are extremely difficult to recycle; they are bonded to glass and contain toxic materials like lead and cadmium, making it twenty times cheaper to dump them in a landfill than to recycle them. Furthermore, manufacturing new panels relies heavily on polysilicon, much of which is produced in China using coal power and, in some cases, forced labor. Reusing existing hardware reduces the demand for silver, which is projected to consume half of the world’s mined supply for solar cells by 2050.

Chapter 11: The Road Forward and How to Travel It

The Necessity of Reducing Consumption

While switching to renewable energy is progress, the only way to truly create a sustainable world is to reduce the overall consumption of energy and minerals. A non-obvious point is that everything we use has "embodied energy"—the total power required to extract, manufacture, and ship it—meaning that even "green" products like those made of bamboo carry a significant environmental cost. Fast fashion is a primary example of waste, with 60 percent of garments ending up in incinerators or dumps within a year of production. Beyond individual lifestyle changes, the most effective way to reduce the demand for critical metals is to stop buying cars, as EV and battery production will account for at least half of the mineral demand spurred by the energy transition.

The Hidden Costs of Car Culture

Private automobiles, regardless of their power source, inflict massive, often overlooked harms on society. Motor vehicle crashes kill over 42,000 people annually in the United States and 1.3 million worldwide. Furthermore, EVs do not eliminate all pollution; tires release tiny particles of synthetic rubber that contaminate air, soil, and water, often hitting low-income communities the hardest. Cars are also an economic absurdity, sitting parked 95 percent of the time while occupying stupendous amounts of public real estate. Los Angeles County alone dedicates two hundred square miles to parking, land that could otherwise be used for parks or housing.

The Second Bicycle Revolution

Bicycles are increasingly recognized as the primary tool for reclaiming cities and fighting climate change. In cities like Amsterdam, which reengineered its streets following a 1970s protest movement against child deaths, more than a third of all trips are now made by bike. The rise of electric bikes (e-bikes) is a game-changer, allowing the elderly or those with longer commutes to replace car trips with a device that uses a fraction of the critical metals required for a car battery. For example, the lithium in a single Hummer EV battery could power 240 e-bike batteries. This revolution is most visible in China, where 200 million e-bikes are already on the road, eliminating more carbon emissions than all four-wheeled EVs combined.

Redesigning the Urban Landscape

To make a car-free life practical, cities must be oriented around human beings rather than automobiles. This includes adopting the "15-minute city" concept—where all needs are within a short walk or ride—and implementing "mobility as a service" to integrate public transit with ride-hailing and bike-sharing. Governments must also address the absurdity of subsidies: current systems provide billions for fossil fuels and highways but almost nothing for biking or walking infrastructure. A transition away from private car ownership will cause economic dislocation for autoworkers, but these losses could be offset by well-paying local jobs in the repair, recycling, and renewable energy sectors.

A Vision of the Future

A best-case version of the Electro-Digital Age involves a world where gas stations and parking lots are replaced by housing, and cities are crisscrossed by protected bike lanes. In this future, consumers use used and refurbished digital devices containing certified recycled metals. Buildings draw power from the grid when renewables are active and switch to large subbasement batteries when the wind dies down. Ultimately, the future depends on metal, but the less of it we are forced to rip from the Earth, the better off humanity will be.