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.

We are undoubtedly at the 11th hour for biodiversity. The World Wildlife Foundation recently reported that Earth saw a 70% drop in species populations over the last fifty years.

As global leaders convened at COP16 in Cali, Colombia in late October and early November, many of the most pressing threats to biodiversity and pathways to improving governance effectiveness were on the agenda. This year’s conference theme—“Peace with Nature”—offered an impetus for a deeper dialogue on the conflict-biodiversity nexus, which included the work of “Peace@CBD”: a community of NGOs, institutions, and individuals that promotes relationships between nature, peace, and conflict.

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.