Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

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Cobalt Red : How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

I expected more of a human interest story. While we do have that type of content, it’s dispersed throughout and within a whole lot of industry, economic, and political information. I want now to understand how consumers can make an impact. It is too morally easy to accept that the politically and financially powerless Congolese will be able to pressure for better wages and safe work conditions.

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In between history the author does interviews with the local artisanal miners who make up the vast work force in the mines. Many of them are entire families, all having to work to have enough just to put a meal on the table. One of the biggest themes over and over again through the interviews is many just have no choice. There is one interview done with a young man named Makano, who after the death of his father had one option to keep his family fed, go into the mines. It is there at only sixteen he falls and gravely injures himself. It is a common story, teen boys pulled from school to work in the mines for a variety of reasons. The severity of harm being caused by cobalt mining is sadly not a new experience for the people of the Congo. Centuries of European slave trading beginning in the early 1500s caused irreparable injury to the native population, culminating in colonization by King Leopold II, who set the table for the exploitation that continues to this day. The descriptions of Leopold’s regime remain disturbingly applicable to the modern Congo. Content is profoundly bleak. Siddharth Kara takes us through an industry responsible for horrifying human rights abuses, including severe long-term health repercussions, child labor, and deaths for which no one is held responsible. Such then was the main task: to convince the world that thgis Congo horror was not only and unquestionably a fact; but that it was not accidental or temporary, or capable of internal cure … To demonstrate that it was at once a survival and a revival of the slave-mind at work, of the slave-trade in being.

Review: “Cobalt Red” by Siddarth Kara - The New York Times

Apple works to protect the environment and to safeguard the well-being of the millions of people touched by our supply chain, from the mining level to the facilities where products are assembled … As of December 31, 2021, we found that all identified smelters and refiners in our supply chain participated in or completed a third party audit that met Apple’s requirements for the responsible sourcing of minerals. While Tesla’s responsible sourcing practices apply to all materials and supply chain partners, we recognize the conditions associated with select artisanal mining (ASM) of cobalt in the DRC. To assure the cobalt in Tesla’s supply chain is ethically sourced, we have implemented targeted due diligence procedures for cobalt sourcing. While I was expecting more of a human interest story and I felt bogged down with the amount of information presented, I did realize the importance of this book. We ALL need to care about what’s happening here because we are all implicated. We are ALL powering the digital revolution. ALL OF US.Please tell the people in your country, a child of the Congo dies every day so that they can plug in their phones. The interior is mostly a magnificent and healthy country of unspeakable richness. I have a small specimen of good coal; other minerals such as gold, copper, iron and silver are abundant, and I am confident that with a wise and liberal (not lavish) expenditure of capital, one of the greatest systems of inland navigation in the world might be utilized, and from 30 months to 36 months begin to repay any enterprising capitalist that might take the matter in hand.2 The New York Times review about the book asks, “How Is Your Phone Powered? Problematically.” Siddharth Kara’s “Cobalt Red” takes a deep dive into the horrors of mining the valuable mineral — and the many who benefit from others’ suffering. The price of lithium batteries has superseded the cost of human labor to mine cobalt. This is one of the factors that is crucial to the investigative conditions of geospatial mining that affects the chilling effects of its global distribution. Kara misses an opportunity to compare the similarities of deplorable conditions of mining in general to that of cobalt mining. This missed opportunity could have strengthened his painful and repetitive descriptions of the expl

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

Jeff Gibbs, writer, director, and producer of the film Planet of the Humans, notes, “Bright Green Lies dismantles the illusion of ‘green’ technology in breathtaking, comprehensive detail, revealing a fantasy that must perish if there is to be any hope of preserving what remains of life on Earth. From solar panels to wind turbines, from LED light bulbs to electric cars, no green fantasy escapes Jensen, Keith, and Wilbert’s revealing peak behind the green curtain. Bright Green Lies is a must-read for all who cherish life on Earth.” – SOURCE An unflinching investigation reveals the human rights abuses behind the Congo’s cobalt mining operation—and the moral implications that affect us all. This nonfiction book will make you stop and think about the impact our lives have on others around the world. The book explores the impact of cobalt mining on the people of Democratic Republic of the Congo. Cobalt is used in the rechargeable devices we all use. Throughout much of history, mining operations relied on the exploitation of slaves and poor laborers to excavate ore from dirt. The downtrodden were forced to dig in hazardous conditions with little regard to their safety and for little to no compensation. Today, these laborers are assigned the quaint term artisanal miners, and they toil in a shadowy substrate of the global mining industry called artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). Do not be fooled by the word artisanal into thinking that ASM involves pleasant mining activities conducted by skilled artisans. Artisanal miners use rudimentary tools and work in hazardous conditions to extract dozens of minerals and precious stones in more than eighty countries across the global south. Because ASM is almost entirely informal, artisanal miners rarely have formal agreements for wages and working conditions. There are usually no avenues to seek assistance for injuries or redress for abuse. Artisanal miners are almost always paid paltry wages on a piece-rate basis and must assume all risks of injury, illness, or death.In the Western world, almost all our technological devices use rechargeable batteries, and with the push to move to more electronic vehicles, there are more and more rechargeables needed. A good amount of cobalt goes into each of those batteries, and the Congo is where you’ll find the majority of cobalt to be mined. Kara’s ability to “exhume” the conditions of the cobalt miners on an international geopolitical platform will elicit interest and proffered change. This is a grim and not terribly hopeful story about how our ambitions for new and better (and sometimes "greener" -- think electric vehicles) technology play a role in the continued subjugation of people in a distant land. But it's an absolutely vital one for those of us in the developed world to read, because it's our consumerism that drives atrocities like these. It is in every aspect an enormous and atrocious lie in action. If it were not rather appalling the cool completeness would be amusing.