This article is adapted from Vince Beiser’s “Power Metal” newsletter.

If you’ve heard anything about the dark side of the shift to renewable energy and digital tech—one of the main topics of my new book, Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future—you’ve probably heard about the children working in cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). That particular outrage has been covered by major international news outlets, human rights organizations and another recent book, Cobalt Red. But it turns out there are many other places where children, as well as enslaved adults, are producing the metals that go into our electric cars and cell phones.

Our present ecocrisis drives human insecurity. Single weather events killed hundreds in 2024, even in wealthy countries such as the United States or Spain. And beyond that staggering toll in human lives lurk staggering amounts of money required to repair and rebuild. In the United States alone, inflation-adjusted disaster-attributable costs have reached on average $153 billion each year. These factors and others make global environmental change a severe risk to human security.

Pronatalism, the push for women to have more children, has elbowed its way into prominence in public discourse. In the United States, cultural and institutional pressures on women to bear children are articulated in various ways, from negative portrayals of women who don’t consider having a child a viable choice for themselves, to a burgeoning Silicon Valley subculture that advocates having “tons of kids” to save the world, to policy proposals that would further restrict reproductive choice or limit the voting power of the childless. The stigmatization of people without children and the recent rise in contemporary pronatalism is a global phenomenon.

This article, by Sharon Guynup, originally appeared on Mongabay.

Bottlenose dolphins leapt and torpedoed through the shallow turquoise waters off Florida’s Sarasota Bay. Then, a research team moved in, quickly corralling the small pod in a large net.

When I stepped into the bustling exhibition hall at Enlit Africa in Cape Town in May 2024, I was surprised by the riot of colorful banners featuring Chinese characters. A whopping 40% of the exhibitors at one of Africa’s largest energy and power conferences in Cape Town from China—more than any other country. 

As public policymakers and NGO advocates around the world meet in Baku for COP29, the urgency of the climate crisis grows ever more pressing. Yet hopes that the targets and commitments will lead to meaningful policy action have contended with persistent national and global inaction on climate change mitigation and adaptation.

When the White House released the US Framework for Climate Resilience and Security in September 2024, it was an important opportunity to highlight the significant impacts of climate change on US national security, economic, and strategic interests. The Framework also emphasized the need for tailored approaches in fragile, conflict-affected, and vulnerable (FCV) contexts, particularly in managing and allocating resources, as well as ensuring that climate finance addresses conflict drivers.

One of academia’s latest buzz phrases is “the planetary.” While it may seem on the surface to lack a clear connection with climate security, a closer inspection suggests that this term does have significant relevance to discussions about this key concept.

Use of “the planetary” is an attempt to compel people to think much more carefully about the current human condition. The climate crisis—as well as the extinction event we are living through—are challenging contemporary notions that humans are somehow separate from nature. In short, a relatively stable world in which our infrastructure, economies, and modes of thinking remain rooted is no longer a useful construct.