The Brutal Human and Environmental Costs of Mining Cobalt for EV Batteries

Sacrifices at the Altar of Climate Change

Siddharth Kara has written a stunning book Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, describing in detail the horrific abuse of the Congolese people and the out of control environmental destruction wrought in the mining of cobalt for EV batteries.

Kara, a fellow at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health and at the Kennedy School, has been researching modern-day slavery, human trafficking and child labor for two decades. He says that the Congo has more cobalt reserves than the rest of the planet combined, but there's no such thing as a "clean" supply chain of cobalt from the country. In Cobalt Red, Kara writes that much of the Congo’s cobalt is being extracted by so-called "artisanal" miners — freelance workers who do extremely dangerous labor for the equivalent of just a few dollars a day.

From Kara:

"You have to imagine walking around some of these mining areas and dialing back our clock centuries,"

"People are working in subhuman, grinding, degrading conditions. They use pickaxes, shovels, stretches of rebar to hack and scrounge at the earth in trenches and pits and tunnels to gather cobalt and feed it up the formal supply chain."

I also refer to an excellent review of the book by Mark P. Mills in The Wall Street Journal on February 1, 2023:

‘Cobalt Red’ Review: The Human Price of Cobalt

‘Artisanal mining’ is a euphemism, meant to disguise the exploitation of Congolese laborers that makes our battery-powered lives possible.