‘Artisanal mining’ is a euphemism, meant to disguise the exploitation of Congolese laborers that makes our battery-powered lives possible.
If you want to know what’s being unleashed by the rush to mandate electric cars for a so-called clean-energy transition, read “Cobalt Red.” It will leave you almost as shaken as its author, Siddharth Kara, who braved lawless militia and state-backed soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo as he visited the fountainheads of the world’s lithium-battery supply chain.
Mr. Kara, a professor of human trafficking and modern slavery at Nottingham University and a senior fellow at Harvard’s School of Public Health, labels himself an activist. His journeys through the Congo’s jungles and mines are surprisingly reminiscent of the country’s 19th-century explorers, as he treks where few others have dared and evokes the grandeur of a magnificent country—all to witness the shocking labor and environmental practices that the world papers over with, as the author writes, “vacant statements on zero-tolerance policies and other hollow PR” in pursuit of cobalt.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; a partner in Cottonwood Venture Partners, an energy-tech venture fund.
Photo by Sebastian Meyer/Getty Images
