In a new book, Nicolas Niarchos traces the mineral supply chain for lithium-ion batteries, exposing their considerable human and environmental costs.
No object is marketed with a greater sense of messianic promise than the electric vehicle. Here, we are told, is the corrective to centuries of environmental catastrophe as the price of material gain. Here is the antidote to climate change.
Yet that framing has always sat uneasily alongside a troubling reality: Extracting and processing the raw materials needed to make the electric car’s central element — the batteries — entails its own environmental destruction, along with the exploitation of workers.
The journalist Nicolas Niarchos is intent on confronting us with this tension, transporting us on a world tour of its uncomfortable implications. His book, “The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth,” is a deeply reported revelation of the human costs of mining the minerals on which those batteries depend, from cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo to nickel in Indonesia.