Green cars and green energy are built on the blue hypocrisy of cobalt mining

Mathew Otieno

June 21, 2023 11 Reactions

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