The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth

How did we get to this point, and how might we make things better? This book is the story of the genius that produced the batteries, the men—and it has mainly been men—and women who turned them to their profit, and the people who have suffered on account of our lust for concentrating ever more power in ever smaller devices. It is also the story of how the geology and colonization of Congo were key factors in shaping the supply chain we use today. Without Congo, the battery revolution would have been much slower.

This story is one of tremendous innovation, of political intrigue, of the rise and fall of empires. But it is also a tragic saga whose protagonists are some of the poorest people in the world. And it is the tragedy of Congo. Why is a country so rich in minerals still so poor? How could a U.S. mining executive who lived in Congo and loved the country tell me, in 2023, "It's always going to be the land of maybe, and it's never going to be the land of dreams"? Threaded through this narrative is the history of the country, which sits at the bottom of the supply chain for many of the metals that power our devices, and exemplifies the consequences of the renewable energy revolution. Congo, after all, is the place that people say will power the green, fossil-fuel-free future.

Part 1 tells the tale of the conditions that wrought the current rush for minerals and batteries, during the colonial days in Congo, and in the United States, during the 1960s and '70s.

Part 2 examines how batteries were perfected, how Cold War-era geopolitical rivalries and political competition allowed for a predatory system to emerge, and how globalization set the stage for China's primacy in lithium-ion battery production.

Part 3 focuses on how batteries came to be in cars, and how new and more powerful batteries were created to power them; how China understood it could control and profit from that industry; and how the mining system that feeds this industry pollutes and exploits.

Part 4 describes the system that is currently in place, how Congolese children still mine for cobalt and other metals in abysmal conditions, and how industrial mining functions. It shows how seas are poisoned in Indonesia in the search for metals like nickel and how China consolidated control of the supply chain. Seen from this vantage point, the green transition looks more like a displacement of pollution from wealthy cities to poor, rural communities.

Part 5 explores how remarkable new technologies have been created to address issues up and down the supply chain, as well as how, in Congo and in the Western Sahara, there still exist stumbling blocks when it comes to technologies like batteries based on iron and phosphates. I also tell the tale of my own detention to show just how the status quo is enforced. Lastly, I look at the U.S. and Europe's rude awakening to China's dominance of the supply chain, and their attempts to wrest back control.

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AN INCREASING NUMBER OF PEOPLE worldwide began trading in their combustion-engine cars for electric vehicles at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. By the end of 2024, there were forty million electric vehicles in use globally. In the States, they accounted for 10 percent of the market. And they were set to grow in popularity: That summer, researchers at Bloomberg predicted that more than thirty million electric vehicles would be sold in 2027 (33 percent of all vehicles globally) and that by 2070, this number would reach seventy-three million (73 percent of global car sales).

By late 2024, even Trump, a longtime EV skeptic, was getting on board, despite announcing that he would cut tax credits for electric vehicles. Trump wasn't exactly consistent, though: During his first administration, Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, was involved in a successful lobbying effort to exempt consumer electronics from tariffs on Chinese goods; during Trump's second administration, the company looked vulnerable to tariffs, especially since many of its lithium-ion-powered devices are manufactured by BYD, a huge electric vehicle manufacturer and Tesla competitor.

Then, in March 2025, after a precipitous fall in Tesla's share price, partly thanks to Musk's political activities but also thanks to a slowing pace of new vehicle deliveries, Trump used the South Lawn of the White House to promote the electric car company. The company's Cybertruck, he said, had the "coolest" design, and he tweeted that "Radical Left Lunatics" were trying to destroy Tesla.

But people were starting to question whether the electric vision of the future is quite as green as its advocates have liked to trumpet. Some of the questions they are asking revolve around how ethical electric vehicles are and how battery minerals are produced. "Last night Teslas burned again in Berlin," a German anarchist website announced after a night of car destruction in June 2024. "In Congo, children work themselves to death for cobalt, and new toxic lithium mines are being opened all over the world to satisfy the hunger of the car industry."

By 2025, such attacks had spread to the U.S., with Tesla cars being vandalized across the country, often in response to Musk's political involvement with Trump. A disgruntled veteran blew himself up in a Tesla Cybertruck in Las Vegas on New Year's Day. In Oregon, someone fired bullets into a Tesla dealership. Tesla superchargers from Massachusetts to Italy were set on fire.

The powerful are violently lashing out in response, not just at people who are committing vandalism, but at people who dare ask questions about Musk and Tesla. Pam Bondi, Trump's attorney general, said that Tesla vandals would be prosecuted as domestic terrorists, and Elon Musk told Bret Baier on Fox that the "real villains" are not the vandals but "the people pushing the propaganda." On-screen, he issued a threat: "The president's made it clear: We're going to go after them." When Musk fell out with Trump, the proclamations stopped but the prosecutions continued.

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THIS IS NOT A BOOK that advocates for simplistic solutions. I don't believe violence and vandalism are the answer, and I don't think we should turn away from mining, at least mining ethically, that is, and the power of human endeavor.

What's more, I do not believe that a return to fossil fuels would solve any of the problems that have been unleashed by the battery revolution. I have seen firsthand how global warming is drying out the African Sahel, how it is melting ice caps in Antarctica, and how it has prolonged drought conditions in El Salvador. And, in any case, cobalt, one of the metals I focus on most, is used in some types of fossil-fuel production.

Don't get me wrong—batteries, and the cobalt, lithium, and other metals that are used to create them, are not intrinsically bad. In fact, we need more solutions to tackle a warming planet, and lithium-ion batteries should be among them. But electric vehicles as they are currently built are not always a great solution. If you count scope one, two, and three emissions—that is, indirect emissions and those that arise from production as well as from the tailpipe—several studies have shown electric vehicles are more polluting than hybrid vehicles in most places. If you take a Tesla Model 3 and compare it to a Toyota Prius, the Model 3 is more polluting than the Prius in China, the U.S., and Germany over both the short and the long term. Only in countries that use a majority of clean energy—countries like Congo, incidentally, although the grid there is so unreliable that an electric vehicle would be a risky prospect for any owner—are Teslas less polluting. This is because the manufacturing of electric vehicles and their batteries is hugely emissions intensive, and since people tend to upgrade more quickly in the electric realm, they end up adding more pollution to the environment. That's to say, if you buy a new Tesla every 3.6 years, like the average U.S. customer, you're actually doing more harm than good.

I don't have grand answers to the questions that arise from this book. I have approached them as a journalist, and tried to understand them in their complexity. I believe that before we jump into a better future, we must know something of the past and present. This book is an attempt to delineate crises of the status quo and look at the forces shaping where we are going.

We know how to make batteries. We know that they can help us cut down on emissions. And we know how to sustainably mine the metals that make them. But at the moment, with a few exceptions, some of which I explore in this book, we are not doing these things. Instead, we are desperately scrambling into the abyss. We are, by and large, cloaking a lack of real action in hollow virtue signaling while ignoring solutions that are sitting right in front of us, solutions that mean that local communities can share in the world's mineral wealth without destroying their lives and homes, and at the same time turning a blind eye to those whose only motive is squeezing out profit from a dying world.