Description:
Winner of the 24th Annual Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize
Finalist for the 2023 Cundill History Prize
Gold Medal Recipient, Nautilus Book Awards, Sustainability
The dirty work essential to a clean energy transition
To achieve fossil fuel independence, few technologies are more important than batteries. Used for powering zero-emission vehicles, storing electricity from solar panels and wind turbines, and revitalizing the electric grid, batteries are essential to scaling up the renewable energy resources that help address global warming. But given the unique environmental impact of batteries--including mining, disposal, and more--does a clean energy transition risk trading one set of problems for another?
In Charged, James Morton Turner unpacks the history of batteries to explore why solving "the battery problem" is critical to a clean energy transition. As climate activists focus on what a clean energy future will create--sustainability, resiliency, and climate justice--the history of batteries offers a sharp reminder of what building that future will consume: lithium, graphite, nickel, and other specialized materials. With new insight on the consequences for people and communities on the front lines, Turner draws on the past for crucial lessons that will help us build a just and clean energy future, from the ground up.
Brief description: Paul Sutter is series editor for the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series. He is professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has published five books, including Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South (Georgia, 2015) and Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Washington, 2005).
Review Quotes:
"The book provides readers with a valuable history of battery technology, the interdependency of batteries and the environment, and the challenge (and perhaps impossibility) of just energy transition policies."
-- "Environmental History"