Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future by James Morton Turner

Abstract

Reviewed by: Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future by James Morton Turner Richard F. Hirsh (bio) Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future By James Morton Turner. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022. Pp. 234. With floods, droughts, and wildfires wreaking social and economic havoc around the world, policy-makers have begun taking climate change—and efforts to mitigate it—more seriously. Electric vehicles (EVs) have gained popularity because they operate without fossil fuels and produce no emissions. Government incentives in Norway, for example, helped make EVs the choice of 65 percent of new passenger car purchases in 2021. Meanwhile, California regulators approved policies in 2022 to require all new-car sales to be electric starting in 2035. The utility of electric vehicles depends on rechargeable batteries, which in turn require large amounts of exotic and often toxic materials. And here lies the crux of the EV policy quandary, as James Turner, a Ph.D. historian and environmental studies professor at Wellesley College, expounds in Charged. Although electricity storage devices have become more efficient in recent decades, the author explains, their components are largely mined and processed in distant countries. Moreover, those nations' governments generally allow exploitative and dangerous extractive techniques that impose environmental, health, and economic burdens on people who have little capacity to bear them. Climate change mitigation, in other words, comes at the cost of various injustices. Charged is not a traditional historical monograph that delves deeply into the technical or social origins of a technology. Turner honestly admits as much, explaining that his study does not include "the attention to contingency, agency, and context that historians of technology value" (p. 14). Rather, the author describes facets of batteries' evolution to highlight misgivings about the current path of energy policy. For example, for more than a century, lead-acid batteries have become the most frequently employed rechargeable energy storage devices in the telephone, electric utility, and automobile industries. Recognizing that lead in the batteries causes environmental and human health harms, the manufacturing industry has managed to recycle more than 97 percent of the metal, making the power packs appear benign. Yet Turner notes that during the mining, processing, and recycling of lead, small amounts of the metal still enter the environment, resulting in lead poisoning (and ensuing cognitive deficits) in about one in three children globally. Recycling alone, therefore, does not constitute a solution to problems associated with the processing of dangerous materials. Turner further invalidates misapprehensions about single-use batteries that inhabit so many of our remote controls, flashlights, and other electronic devices. Incremental innovation has yielded increasingly powerful and portable forms of energy, but their production consumes tremendous resources. Happily, manufacturers have eliminated mercury in widely used [End Page 595] alkaline batteries, such that they impose little environmental damage when discarded with everyday garbage. But the author argues that whereas recycling such batteries may make people think they are acting responsibly, the process remains inefficient, with the cost of recycling far exceeding its benefits. He even admits that, as a result of his research, he trashes his own single-use batteries. Such myth-busting analyses provide a relevant introduction for discussing the development and use of the lithium-ion batteries employed in electric vehicles. Improvements to these batteries have occurred rapidly since the 1990s, enabling them to store about three times the energy available in earlier rechargeable technologies. But the future demand for the materials going into the batteries, such as lithium, cobalt, manganese, and nickel, will require massive mining and processing enterprises around the world. Even recycling 100 percent of today's batteries will not yield the ingredients needed—about six times more than we currently use—to achieve clean energy goals. The production and processing of those substances have already been accompanied by social abuses (such as the exploitation of child labor) and environmental degradation in South America, Africa, China, and Russia. Overall, Charged provides an insightful (though not truly historical) understanding of the rarely considered consequences of electric-vehicle policies. The book also offers recommendations, such as the need to expand American mining and refining of critical metals to reduce supply...