Is the shift to renewable energy and digital devices going to free us from severe pollution, material shortages, and military tensions?

Rare metals are essential to electric vehicles, fighter jets, wind turbines, and solar panels, and also to our smartphones, computers, tablets, and other everyday connected objects. But consumers know very little about how they are mined and traded, or the environmental, economic, and geopolitical costs of this dependence.

This book reveals the dark side of the world that awaits us. It is an undercover tale of a technological odyssey that has promised much, and a look behind the scenes. Behind it all lurks China, which has captured the lion's share of the ownership and processing of rare metals we now can't do without. Drawing on six years of research across a dozen countries, this book shows that by breaking free of fossil fuels, we are in fact setting ourselves up for a new dependence--on rare metals that have become vital to our new ecological and digital society.

A gripping new investigation into the underbelly of digital technology, which reveals not only how costly the virtual world is, but how damaging it is to the environment.

The Dark Cloud is the searing exposé of the immense toll the cloud takes on our environment. A simple like sent from our smartphones mobilizes a cascade of invisible consequences. This small notification, crossing the seven operating layers of the internet, travels around the world, using submarine cables, telephone antennas, and data centers, going as far as the Arctic Circle in what will soon constitute the largest infrastructure built by man.

It turns out that the digital world, essential for communicating, working, and consuming, is much more tangible than we would like to believe. Today, it absorbs 10 percent of the world's electricity and represents nearly 4 percent of the planet's carbon dioxide emissions. We are struggling to understand these impacts, as they are obscured to us in the mirage of the cloud.

In this follow-up to his global bestselling book, The Rare Metals War, Pitron, a journalist, researched the dark truth behind the easy mirage of our digital world, in an investigation carried out over two years, across four continents. The result shows the anatomy of a technology virtual only in name. Pitron argues that the cloud needs to be exposed and understood--because our future is implicated.

Praise for The Rare Metals War:

Pitron weighs the awful price of refining the materials, ably blending investigative journalism with insights from science, politics and business.
Simon Ings, New Scientist

[E]xposes the dirty underpinnings of clean technologies in a debut that raises valid questions about energy extraction.
Publishers Weekly

An expert account of a poorly understood but critical element in our economy ... Pitron delivers a gripping, detailed, and discouraging explanation.
Kirkus Reviews

The resources race is on. Powering our digital lives and green technologies are some of the Earth's most precious metals -- but they are running out. And what will happen when they do?

The green-tech revolution has been lauded as the silver bullet to a new world. One that is at last free of oil, pollution, shortages, and cross-border tensions. Now updated after several years of research across a dozen countries, this book cuts across conventional green thinking to probe the hidden, dark side of green technology.

By breaking free of fossil fuels, we are in fact setting ourselves up for a new dependence -- on rare metals such as cobalt, gold, and palladium. They are essential to electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels, our smartphones, computers, tablets, and other everyday connected objects. China has captured the lion's share of the rare metals industry, but consumers know very little about how they are mined and traded, or their environmental, economic, and geopolitical costs.

The Rare Metals War is a vital exposé of the ticking time-bomb that lies beneath our new technological order. It uncovers the reality of our lavish and ambitious environmental quest that involves risks as formidable as those it seeks to resolve.