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A celebrated international bestseller that exposes the ticking
time-bomb underneath our new technological order. 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
will reduce our reliance on nuclear power, coal, and oil, but by
breaking free of fossil fuels, we are setting ourselves up for a
new dependence - on rare metals like cobalt, gold, and palladium.
These are essential to electric vehicles, wind turbines, and solar
panels, as well as our smartphones, computers, tablets, and other
technologies. But we know very little about how rare metals are
mined and traded, or their environmental, economic, and
geopolitical costs - until now.
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. If digital technology
were a country, it would be the third-highest consumer of
electricity behind China and the United States. Every year,
streaming technology generates as much greenhouse gas as Spain —
close to 1 per cent of global emissions. One Google search uses as
much electricity as a lightbulb left on for up to two minutes. It
turns out that the ‘dematerialised’ digital world, essential
for communicating, working, and consuming, is much more tangible
than we would like to believe. Today, it absorbs 10 per cent of the
world’s electricity and represents nearly 4 per cent 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’. The result of an investigation carried out over
two years on four continents, The Dark Cloud reveals the anatomy of
a technology that is virtual only in name. Under the guise of
limiting the impact of humans on the planet, it is already
asserting itself as one of the major environmental challenges of
the twenty-first century.
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