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THE RARE METALS WAR

Name: THE RARE METALS WAR
Author: Guillaume Pitron
ISBN: 978-1-950354-31-3

THE DARK SIDE OF CLEAN ENERGY AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES

by Guillaume Pitron ; translated by Bianca Jacobsohn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 6, 2020

A well-rendered explanation of further bad news on the clean energy front.

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An expert account of a poorly understood but critical element in our economy.

Most readers will agree with French journalist Pitron that China is this century’s rising power, but it may be news that it’s the world’s leading producer of 28 vital mineral resources. Some are well known and precious (platinum, palladium, germanium); others are “rare earth metals,” 17 obscure elements with names such as cerium, dysprosium, and yttrium. Taken together, their yearly production is 0.01% that of steel, but they possess dazzling magnetic properties, making them essential in computers, cellphones, rechargeable batteries, and catalytic converters. China produces 95% of rare earth metals. Western leaders have been expressing alarm at the dependence on China for strategic metals, but efforts to self-produce have accomplished little. Pitron delivers a gripping, detailed, and discouraging explanation. During most of the 20th century, American rare metal mines led the world but produced immense chemical and radioactive pollution. The mines were in constant trouble with the EPA. Then, in the 1990s, China offered to sell ore cheaply (actually at a loss). Because American entrepreneurs realized that Chinese labor was cheap and skilled and not subject to environmental regulation, over time, large numbers of high-tech firms moved operations across the Pacific. China once sold Apple the rare metals that make up the iPhone; today, it manufactures the device. China leads the world in renewable technology production—solar panels, wind turbines, electric-vehicle batteries, etc. This not only requires mining, which is not renewable, but leads to massive pollution. Furthermore, experts calculate that the mining, manufacturing, fueling, and operation of clean energy products generates more, not less, greenhouse gas. “Put simply,” writes the author, “clean energy is a dirty affair. Yet we feign ignorance because we refuse to take stock of the end-to-end production cycle of wind turbines and solar panels.”

A well-rendered explanation of further bad news on the clean energy front.

Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-950354-31-3

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Scribe

Review Posted Online: July 20, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020

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ABUNDANCE

by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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Helping liberals get out of their own way.

Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781668023488

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

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CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.