A least worst world : battery lifecycles, clean energy, and learning to live with waste

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Eisler, Matthew (2023) A least worst world : battery lifecycles, clean energy, and learning to live with waste. [Review]

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Abstract

[book review] Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future, by James Morton Turner. University of Washington Press: Seattle, 2022. xv + 234 pp. In James Morton Turner’s new book on the environmental history of batteries, the author makes a shocking confession: he throws away spent disposable batteries he once religiously placed in the recycling bin. The admission is doubly dissonant, both because it seems to violate a key sensibility of our times (a sustainable society is a society that recycles everything) and because Turner, a professor of environmental studies at Wellesley College, identifies as an advocate for environmental justice. Turner dumps old disposables because he calculates it costs more energy to transport them to distant recycling depots than it saves by recycling them. It is this big-picture perspective that makes this meticulously researched and highly readable book much more than a history of batteries, a ubiquitous yet obscure technology. Turner tells a story of industrial coproduction, the socialization of risk, and the technopolitics of trade-offs at global scale, one that importantly complements other recent monographs in environmental studies, including Victor Seow’s Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (2022), David E. Nye’s Conflicted American Landscapes (2021), Daniel S. Cohan’s Confronting Climate Gridlock: How Diplomacy, Technology, and Policy Can Unlock a Clean Energy Future (2022), and my own Age of Auto Electric: Environment, Energy, and the Quest for the Sustainable Car (2022). Batteries use complex and sometimes toxic mixtures of chemicals to store and release electricity and are a key enabling technology of consumer electronics, electric cars, and, crucially, renewable energy. They are also an archetypal black box, notoriously recondite to consumers who pay them mind only when they need replacing or recharging. Turner illuminates the externalities that inform the closed world of power source chemistry through lifecycle studies of several exemplary types of battery, engaging the challenges and paradoxes of the quest to build a circular carbon-neutral economy.

ORCID iDs

Eisler, Matthew ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0258-4137;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)