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I was detained, twice, as I tried to investigate aspects of the battery supply chain. A reporting assignment in 2017 occasioned my ejection from the Western Sahara by Moroccan authorities. They were concerned about their control over the supply of phosphate, which had started to be used in some lithium-ion batteries. While working with the Congolese journalist Jeeftour "Jeef" Kazadi Kamwanga in 2022, in the city of Lubumbashi, I was detained on spurious charges by the Congolese secret police. Congo's copper, cobalt, and lithium resources were their priority. I was released after six days and banned from the country. Kazadi was detained for almost three weeks.

Over and again, in less dramatic ways, I was stymied, frozen out, and told not to report this story. Emails went unanswered and calls were cut short. People would often only meet me in private locations and on the condition of anonymity. Governments even refused me entry into their countries. In 2018, as I was first conceiving this book, I traveled to China on a broad informational trip, where I met some of the players in that country's international business scene. When I tried to go back, in 2023, the consulate in New York would not issue me a visa.

This was a book on batteries, I thought, a topic that might cause eyes to glaze over during dinner talk. But as I delved further into the world of lithium-ion, I realized that it was not simply a story about sockets and charges—it was also a story about control and immense power.

* * *

IT MIGHT HAVE SEEMED THAT power had become more dispersed in the first decades of the twenty-first century, placed through digital wizardry into the hands of the multitudes, but the inverse had also happened: Power had become more and more centralized, not just by Musk and executives at tech firms but by governments. States used technology, and especially technology powered by lithium-ion batteries, to extend their reach into every aspect of life.

In a single fortnight in 2024, for instance, the Canadian government announced 100 percent tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, which were threatening to flood the market and push out cars made by traditional manufacturers, and thousands of lithium-ion-powered pagers had been detonated in Lebanon, killing and maiming civilians and militants alike.

The pagers, which had been bought by Hezbollah, a secretive terror-group-cum-political-party, were widely thought to have been detonated by the group's enemies in Israel's intelligence service. Lithium-ion batteries were everywhere—even in some of the most secretive hideouts on the planet.

These batteries and the materials used to make them were themselves protagonists in the wars—hot and cold and commercial—that have come to scar the history of the twenty-first century. The people who controlled these resources wielded an extraordinary amount of political power, the power to shape world affairs.

China had taken an early lead in battery making, but by the early 2020s, governments in the U.S. and in Europe were cottoning on to the conundrums raised by batteries and their manufacturing. President Joe Biden's Executive Order 14017 occasioned a strategic review of critical mineral supply chains conducted by the U.S. Department of Defense in 2021 and 2022 that recommended the Pentagon focus on U.S. production of critical minerals, engage with allies and partners, and mitigate foreign control of the supply chains. As one former Defense Department expert told me in 2024, this meant, for example, that the U.S. military stopped using Chinese-produced cobalt to build military equipment.

It wasn't just technologists who had become filthy rich off lithium-ion batteries. Thanks to the preponderance of metals and minerals that go into them, mining firms and commodities traders were also getting flush. Lithium, cobalt, nickel, phosphate, graphite, and other materials were feeding what came to be called "the revenge of the miners."

The miners were passed over by the finance and media worlds, and by the world at large, in the 2000s, as tech companies promised a shiny digital future and conjured dollars out of thin air. But they instinctively understood a basic truth about human society: Everything we use, everything we eat, everything we work and play with—it's all either grown or dug out of the ground. Mines and mining companies had long been considered dirty, a pollutive anachronism, but, all of a sudden, everyone was realizing that they needed people who carved open the earth in search of its riches.

And somewhere in this mix was hope. Hope that the people who controlled this new power might have answers to the complex questions around humankind's impact on the climate and the planet. After all, multiple studies have shown that a lithium-ion battery, if used correctly and long enough, can help reduce the carbon footprint of our society, which was only racing faster and faster.

* * *

BY THE MID-2020S, ALMOST EVERYONE on the planet (except, perhaps, members of uncontacted tribes) had some kind of exposure to lithium-ion batteries. They powered cell phones, breathed life into laptops and other portable devices, allowed for smokeless cars and motorbikes.

A tourist in London, say, might be knocked off her electric bike by an electric bus, all while looking at her lithium-ion-powered iPhone. Lithium-ion-propelled drones had changed the face of modern warfare and of videography. And it wasn't just the phones and cars and drones: Garden tools, cattle prods, gas detectors, vapes, air enrichers, industrial robots, and children's toys all used lithium-ion technology. Batteries were being touted as the solution to the climate crisis, since they produced no emissions (at least not when they were used, that is—production emissions were a very different story). Militaries relied on lithium-ion when wars were waged; doctors used lithium-ion-powered medical devices to save lives—pacemakers, drug pumps, defibrillators. In fact, if you're reading this book on a screen, you're probably using lithium-ion technology right now.

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