In the twentieth century, wealth and power was dictated by access to oil. This century will have different kingmakers, perhaps different wars.

'A remarkably hopeful and useful book...The climate crisis leaves us no choice but to build a new world and as Sanderson makes clear, we are capable of making it a better one than the dirty and dangerous planet we've come to take for granted.' Bill McKibben, Observer book of the week

We depend on a handful of metals and rare earths to power our phones and computers. Increasingly, we rely on them to power our cars and our homes. Whoever controls these finite commodities will become rich beyond imagining.

Sanderson journeys to meet the characters, companies, and nations scrambling for the new resources, linking remote mines in the Congo and Chile's Atacama Desert to giant Chinese battery factories, shadowy commodity traders, secretive billionaires, a new generation of scientists attempting to solve the dilemma of a 'greener' world.

Introduction 1. The battery age 2. Dashed hopes: the troubled history of the EV 3. The breakthroughs: the lithium-ion revolution 4. China's battery king 5. The Chinese lithium rush 6. Chile's buried treasure 7. The cobalt problem 8. The rise of a cobalt giant 9. Blood cobalt 10. Dirty nickel 11. The green copper tycoon 12. The final frontier: mining the deep sea 13. Reduce, re-use, recycle: a closed loop 14. The world's greenest battery 15. Cornwall's mining revival Conclusion Acknowledgements Notes Index