BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: The War Below
By Ernest Scheyder
Published by Ithaka, 2025, rrp £12.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
As the war in Ukraine gets ‘interesting’, And with Trump making bizarre attempts to ‘buy’ Greenland, with threats and menaces, in another plug for rare earth minerals, this excellent new book is very timely.
The subtitle is ‘Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives’. The author, who works for Reuters with a special interest in the ‘green transition’, has a wide-ranging and well-researched yet chatty and readable approach to a complex subject. He gives a lot of space to industry boosters, and also to Native Americans protecting sacred spaces, and environmentalists. He bookends his work with a story about an imperilled newly discovered buckwheat that thrives in the lithium-rich clays of Nevada’s ‘Rhyolite Ridge’.
The book gives a frankly concerning glimpse of the regulatory and financial fetters of developing new mines in the US, as well as to developments in Chile and Congo where human rights and pollution issues dominate. The global aspect of the supply and manufacturing chain is another absurd and decidedly un-Green aspect the current model of ‘sustainable’ ‘green’ ‘transition’. Scheyder gives us a glimpse of the issues here, but I suggest researching it in more depth. It is not a pretty tale, but it is necessary that we understand what we are up against.
THIS WARMING IS PUSHING TIPPING POINTS
His focus is on the US, which has vast mineral resources, possibly 25% of global lithium, and huge untapped copper reserves, though there are many other rare earth minerals needed in your SUV batteries. Getting these resources is harder than it sounds, though Trump’s ‘bonfire of regulations’ will help in this endeavour. Nevertheless, it is true that the infrastructure is nowhere near available, much of the processing etc being completed in China, amongst other places. The UK’s position is far worse. We’ve less access to minerals, and no infrastructure, even having closed our last steel mill. Try not to laugh / cry.
The role of Trump in signing off on a few projects on leaving office at the end of his first term, plus his interest in Greenland, may confuse some readers. Surely, he has been quite the climate change denialist? And very vocally anti-green transition policies? Well, that’s just his cake-hole yapping to get the incel voters out in his favour. Because, clearly, signing off on developing lithium mines for EV batteries, and angling for an in up in the Arctic Circle to fence off resources for the good ol’ boys down South, is a tacit acknowledgement that he knows full well those resources are becoming more accessible due to, you guessed, global warming, and that this warming is pushing tipping points thus making a ‘green transition’ imperative. One wonders what his voters might make of that if they could add two and two.
Though it is more complicated than that, of course. Gary McKinney, of the People of Red Mountain tribe, is adamant that ‘the green transition is just all about money’, said in the context of a battle to protect indigenous peoples and their sacred spaces. And, anyway, hugely expensive lithium mines will ‘by 2050’ be running down as lithium is readily recyclable (guess what: few countries are doing this efficiently yet, adding yet more carbon-miles to the process). Meanwhile, a company in Vancouver has started ‘vacuuming’, or more accurately, bulldozing, lithium nodules off the Pacific sea-bed, much to the ire of Greenpeace and other environmental groups, and the rather less ‘green’ whaling industry.
EASY. STOP INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM
Here’s Brian Menell, of mining investment company Techmet: “We need government to say, ‘Sure, we love wildflowers […]’ But, at some point, we’ve got to say, ‘Mister wildflower group, you had your say, now go and shut up. We are going to develop this mine, even if we destroy the habitat of a wildflower, which everybody would regret. It’s better than destroying the world with climate change’.” One ‘Warren’ of North Carolina points out “we don’t need to destroy the United States to address climate change […], this mine would create an environmental issue in an attempt to address an environmental issue”.
Amplifying this issue, Marco Lambertini of the World Wildlife Fund points out that “it is the very gravity of our current circumstances that requires us to act with utmost care for our planet’s life-support system: nature.” An application of the ‘precautionary principle’ puts us in the uncomfortable position of desperately needing to curb fossil-fuel culture, but at the same time desperately needing to replace it with a genuinely ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ alternative. The capitalist model that currently runs the world may accept a transition from one mega-energy culture to another, but they say ‘there is no alternative’ to some form of ‘business as usual’. Of course, that is not true, but the alternatives are not attractive to most of those living in ‘the West’, as they require swingeing changes. Here, to give a flavour of where we’re at, is Derrick Jensen & Aric McBay, who, in their book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet, say:
“How do you stop or at least curb global warming? Easy. Stop pumping carbon dioxide, methane, and so on into the atmosphere. How do you do that? Easy. Stop burning oil, natural gas, coal, and so on. How do you do that? Easy. Stop industrial capitalism. When most people in this culture ask, ‘How can we stop global warming?’ that’s not really what they’re asking. They’re asking, ‘How can we stop global warming, without significantly changing this lifestyle that is causing global warming in the first place?’. The answer is you can’t.”
The War Below is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE
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