Kerby Anderson

The proposed mandate for electric cars has a tragic human cost that most Americans know almost nothing about. Professor Siddharth Kara writes about it in his book, Cobalt Red. Mark Mills wrote an excellent three-page summary of the book so that you might be spared the horror of reading about what take place in cobalt mines.

Cobalt is necessary for lithium batteries in electric cars, but also essential for smartphones, laptops, and a variety of toys. Three-fourth of the cobalt being used comes from the Congo, and the demand exceeds 140 kilotons to construct the half-ton batteries in electric vehicles.

Mr. Kara is a professor of human trafficking and human slavery. His book takes to you to the digging of cobalt done by manual labor, not trucks and backhoes. In his investigations, he saw “a hellscape of craters and tunnels, patrolled by maniacs with guns.” He describes a “lunar wasteland” and later a “devastated landscape” that “resembled a battlefield after an aerial bombardment.”

He describes visiting a typical mine where “more than three thousand women, children, and men shoveled, scraped, and scrounged . . . under a ferocious sun and a haze of dust.” Because of the risk of using a camera around armed guards, the book has no pictures. But you can see lots of pictures by typing “cobalt mining congo” into any search engine that posts images.

Three decades ago, human rights activists coined the term “blood diamonds.” We should have the same concern about the mining of cobalt, along with other minerals (like copper, lithium, and nickel) essential to batteries in electric vehicles. There is a tragic cost to the proposed energy transition.