Go to: Library Events or Community Calendar
Author Talk: Vince Beiser on Power Metal
Saturday February 22 @ 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
Join author and Bowen Island local Vince Beiser as he speaks on his 2024 release, Power Metal: The Race for Resources that Will Shape the Future (Riverhead Books).
Free event • Drop in
Power Metal is about the powerful ways the metals we need to fuel technology and energy are spawning environmental havoc, political upheaval, and rising violence — and how we can do better.
Copies of the book will be available for sale by the author.
About the Book
An Australian millionaire’s plan to mine the ocean floor. Nigerian garbage pickers risking their lives to salvage e-waste. A Bill Gates-backed entrepreneur harnessing AI to find metals in the Arctic.
These people and millions more are part of the intensifying competition to find and extract the minerals essential for two crucial technologies: the internet and renewable energy. In Power Metal, Vince Beiser explores the Achilles’ heel of “green power” and digital technology – that manufacturing computers, cell phones, electric cars, and other technologies demand skyrocketing amounts of lithium, copper, cobalt, and other materials. Around the world, businesses and governments are scrambling for new places and new ways to get those metals, at enormous cost to people and the planet.
Beiser crisscrossed the world to talk to the people involved and report on the damage this race is inflicting, the ways it could get worse, and how we can minimize the damage. Power Metal is a compelling glimpse into this disturbing yet potentially promising new world.
“Power Metal is a necessary, illuminating, and often shocking read. Fast-paced, fascinating, and alive with colorful characters, it’s a whirlwind tour of the epochal energy transition currently underway as we enter what Vince Beiser so aptly calls the ‘electro-digital age.’”
–John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather
About the Author
Vince Beiser is an award-winning journalist and author. He has reported from over 100 countries, states, provinces, kingdoms, occupied territories, no man’s lands and disaster zones. Vince’s first book, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization about the deadly and destructive impacts of humanity’s use of this little-considered yet crucially important natural resource, was a finalist for a PEN America award and a California Book Award, and spawned a TEDx talk. Read more about Vince Beiser.