Description

‘A remarkably hopeful and useful book…The climate crisis leaves us no choice but to build a new world and as Sanderson makes clear, we are capable of making it a better one than the dirty and dangerous planet we’ve come to take for granted.’ Bill McKibben, Observer book of the week

We depend on a handful of metals and rare earths to power our phones and computers. Increasingly, we rely on them to power our cars and our homes. Whoever controls these finite commodities will become rich beyond imagining.

Sanderson journeys to meet the characters, companies, and nations scrambling for the new resources, linking remote mines in the Congo and Chile’s Atacama Desert to giant Chinese battery factories, shadowy commodity traders, secretive billionaires, a new generation of scientists attempting to solve the dilemma of a ‘greener’ world.

Publisher Review

'The urgency of a green transition means the world faces new power struggles over access to scarce metals and minerals. Sanderson carefully walks us through the minefields that are the world's finite supplies of lithium, cobalt and nickel and reveals with startling immediacy the Machiavellian machinations for control over these precious resources. A riveting guide to our perilous future.' -- Ann Pettifor, author of The Case for the Green New Deal 'As we glide along serenely in our electric vehicle, recharging it with clean solar power and perhaps feeling a little smug, we prefer not to be reminded of the vast industries that got us there, industries that gouge out the landscape, exploit workers, spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and engage in ruthless geopolitical power plays. Along the way, as Henry Sanderson shows in his essential book, we have become dangerously dependent on China which now dominates global battery supply. Under President Xi Jinping, who uses economic blackmail to extract political concessions, China has got a lock on the future. All this can change and Volt Rush shows us how.' -- Clive Hamilton, author of Hidden Hand 'This is a terrific book. Henry Sanderson brings alive one of the most fateful questions of our time: who will control the resources that power a post-carbon world? What makes the book so compelling is the cast of colourful characters he meets and the insightful judgements he makes.' -- James Kynge, FT China editor 'A must-read book, well written and investigated, on one of the most important ecological challenges we'll face in the next decades.' -- Guillaume Pitron, author of The Rare Metals War