The fight against climate change is rife with cognitive dissonance. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the dash to electrify cars. In the words of Siddhart Kara, a journalist who appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience earlier this year, it has caused such misery that never in history “has more suffering generated more profit, and been linked to the lives of more people around the world.”
He was referring to the appalling conditions under which cobalt is mined in the south of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The central African country contains up to 70 percent of the world’s accessible reserves of the metal, which is used to stabilise and enhance the performance of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries; the kind that’s used in practically every rechargeable electronic device and electric car.
Congolese cobalt is probably in the battery of the device you’re using to read this article. And a significant portion of it was probably dug out of the ground by hand, by a shabbily dressed man or teenager, crushed, washed and loaded into a sack, and then lugged to a depot and sold for pennies to a foreign company, probably a Chinese one, thereby entering the global cobalt supply chain.
Up to a fifth of cobalt that leaves the DRC is produced through artisanal mining, as this method of extraction is known, according to a Reuters report. This is more than all the cobalt produced by Russia, the world’s second largest source before 2022. As of 2021, more than 150,000 artisanal miners were digging for cobalt in the DRC, on the margins of industrial mines, in random fields across the mining belt, and even through the floors of their own houses (such is the richness of the deposit).
It is a labour-intensive and highly dangerous endeavour, with higher rates of mine collapse, pollution, workplace injuries and exposure to toxic materials than in the formal mining sector. Additionally, the vast majority of these miners, as Mr Kara documented over several trips to the DRC, lack personal protective equipment. But the lack of viable alternative employment makes them so dependent on the work that they cannot feasibly just stop doing it.
Western companies, like Switzerland-based Glencore, whose DRC mines produce nearly 20 percent of the global supply of cobalt, are quick to point out that they are better than their Chinese counterparts, with more formal and industrial mines. This may very well be true; being public companies, at least they get to be scrutinised by human rights organisations and have to comply with Western-style regulation.
But that doesn’t mean they are as clean as they should be. Multiple reports have detailed human rights abuses at Glencore’s mines and instances of massive corruption in its global operations over the years. Just last year, the company was fined over US$1.1 billion after pleading guilty in the United States to charges of “foreign bribery and market manipulation schemes,” including bribing officials in the DRC. 
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A recent report by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, a non-profit, is the latest to draw attention to the human suffering caused by this climate change hysteria-induced industry. According to the organisation, which has tracked these matters since 2010, Glencore, once again, ranked highest in a list of mining companies ranked by the number allegations of human rights abuses.
What’s more, as Mr Kara argues, there is no such thing as clean cobalt. Not even the technology and automotive companies that claim to only use cobalt that’s not obtained by artisanal mining – like Tesla, which sources almost exclusively from Glencore – can ensure that they don’t get the tainted stuff.
Even Glencore’s cobalt is refined by Chinese companies, which mix it in with everything else. And that’s to say nothing of all the other companies, whose cobalt sources are shrouded in even more mystery. For instance, China-based CATL, the world’s largest lithium-ion battery manufacturer and a major battery supplier to major European and American automakers, is much less transparent about how it sources cobalt.
However, the fact that it has a stake in China Moly, a major cobalt miner that is known, along with its fellow Chinese mining companies, to buy large amounts of artisanal cobalt in the DRC, as well as for their tendency to mistreat and subject even their formal employees to dangerous working conditions, says a lot.
In short, the drive to promote electric vehicles is joined at the hip with this human tragedy. What’s more, everyone knows about it, including all the organisations that are shouting the loudest about the need to curb climate change. Crucially, however, not one has suggested applying the brakes, or even taken concrete measures to resolve the situation by, for instance, helping artisanal miners obtain personal protective equipment.
So obsessed with the green agenda are they that the furthest they are willing to go is impotent handwringing. The most concrete suggestion that has been made is that perhaps the industry should reduce its dependency on cobalt. But, aside from the fact that cobalt-free lithium-ion batteries are still unstable fire hazards, moving away from cobalt would also leave hundreds of thousands of people without an income, and a scarred landscape upon which agriculture would no longer be tenable.
In the meantime, from the capitals of Europe, North America and the Far East, far away from the worst of the suffering, policy makers are going full steam ahead with their energy transition. China is madly churning out electric vehicles. The European Union has banned the sale of internal combustion engine (ICE) cars after 2035. The UK’s deadline is 2030.
Across the pond, the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 strongly pushes for the mass adoption of EVs. And California, an influential car market, has also banned new ICE vehicle sales by 2035, which will probably drag along the rest of the US anyway. Given that electric vehicles only made up just over 14 percent of new car sales in 2022, the demand for cobalt and, with it, the misery of even more poor Congolese artisanal miners, are about to shoot through the roof
Advocates of the energy transition like to point out that poor countries, like the DRC, are likely to suffer the worst effects of climate change. They point to erratic weather, droughts, floods, landslides and intensified tropical storms as just a taste of the troubles to come. Perhaps the irony of attempting to forestall these effects by countenancing the suffering of the poorest people in the world is lost on them.
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Mathew Otieno is a Kenyan writer, blogger and a dilettante farmer. Until 2022, he was a research communications coordinator at a university in Nairobi, Kenya. He now lives in rural western Kenya, near the shores of Lake Victoria, from where he’s pursuing a career as a full-time writer while concluding his dissertation for a master’s degree. His first novel is due out this year.
Image credit: cartoon by Brian Doyle
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