The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth

INTRODUCTION

THE NEW POWER

Lithium-ion batteries make the modern world possible. First commercialized in 1991, they put powerful tech at our fingertips, tools to get around, ways to be more and more connected.

Take the iPhone 16. The top model, Apple said, can run for thirty-three hours while playing video. It has a forty-eight-megapixel camera and a built-in AI system to scan objects. You can use the phone to call your mother, to trade in decentralized cryptocurrency, and, if you had lost something under your bed, you could use it as a flashlight. None of this would be possible without a substantial source of charge from a lithium-ion battery.

Electric vehicles like Teslas and BYDs use similar batteries, just on a larger scale, to hum soundlessly and smokelessly around our streets. And as technology develops and has to meet new standards, it will need better batteries to keep its tech humming: For the iPhone 17 Air, for example, engineers worked on developing a "high density" battery to reduce its size without compromising on power.

But humanity has also made a Mephistophelian bargain with batteries. The raw materials used to build them come from every corner of the globe: metals like lithium, cobalt, and nickel, as well as materials like graphite, silicon, and phosphate. To access them, tech profiteers, politicians, and battery makers have made a trade-off: cleaner power at home for pollution and suffering elsewhere. We have, explicitly or implicitly, accepted some of the pernicious consequences of the power revolution as inevitable, including the risk of human-rights abuses and labor exploitation, without much thought about how to mitigate these externalities.

The metals and materials that have gone into these batteries are often rare. They come from complicated parts of the world. It was not for nothing that people who knew metals would say, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, that batteries and green energy had created the greatest dislocation of demand and supply in their lifetimes.

The twentieth century was powered by oil, but by the second decade of the twenty-first century, we have developed myriad ways to store power without using fossil fuels. Among these methods, lithium-ion batteries have come to dominate. Batteries are globalized products—they are built from materials mined in one place, refined in another, assembled somewhere else, and eventually sold in yet another, crisscrossing a multitude of borders in the process—and without globalization, it would be impossible to build them or the computers, telephones, and cars they power. Politicians may claim otherwise, but global trade and supply chains are the only way that such products, especially at the scale modern society demands, can exist. Understanding these batteries and how they are made is key to understanding how a new form of power is being created, one that is measurable in dollars, strategic influence, and volts.

Lithium-ion batteries are produced using supply chains that are vulnerable to geopolitical rivalries, most notably the rivalry between China and the United States and Europe. Through strategic investment, Beijing has taken control of large parts of the extraction and refining of battery metals, and by 2024 one report estimated that 70 to 90 percent of lithium-ion batteries were being made in China. Critical metals have been as valuable in times of war as in times of peace. History is rife with examples of nations that failed to secure access to raw materials and suffered defeat in conflict or serious disadvantages in peacetime.

Like all revolutions, the battery revolution has had its winners and its losers. Lithium-ion batteries have helped create great fortunes. Elon Musk's share of the electric car company Tesla was the single greatest contributor to him becoming, in 2021, the world's wealthiest man, and Apple and Microsoft, two companies whose portable devices rely on the batteries, vie for the title of the world's richest. Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, people have toiled in squalid conditions, in poverty and human bondage, to extract the minerals needed to make these batteries.

And, as with oil, battery power has increasingly become political power. Musk arguably became one of the most influential people in U.S. politics after putting an outrageous $288 million behind Trump's 2024 presidential bid and buying himself a seat at the table of governance, only to flame out, mid-2025, partly over disagreements over electric vehicle policy. But even his grasp of the complex issues behind where these batteries come from does not seem solid: In a 2023 shareholder meeting, Musk answered a question about child labor by saying he would put webcams in cobalt mines to check whether underage miners were descending into unsafe pits. His answer belied ignorance of how and where this mining actually happened.

In the end, Tesla provided only a monthly satellite image of its main cobalt source, the Kamoto Copper Company mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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