Joe Rogan guest, Siddharth Kara, is the author of "Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives" and is an expert on modern-day slavery, human trafficking, and child labor. Kara discusses the disturbing reality of ‘cobalt mining’ and how tech companies benefit when producing many smart devices, especially electric vehicles.
“…cobalt that's being mined is in every single lithium-ion rechargeable battery manufactured in the world today. Every smartphone, every tablet, every laptop, and crucially every electric vehicle.” —
Kara explains his work by stating this is the worse suffering-to-profit in human slavery history:
“Throughout the whole history of slavery, I'm going back centuries, never in human history has there been more suffering that generated more profit and was linked to the lives of more people around the world ever in history than what's happening in the Congo right now. And the reason I say that is this, the cobalt that's being mined in the. is in every single lithium-ion rechargeable battery manufactured in the world today. Every smartphone, every tablet, every laptop, and crucially every electric vehicle.”
The Difference Between Conflict Minerals and Cobalt
In response, Rogan mentions that documentaries on ‘conflict minerals’ expose the conditions that Kara has seen. However, Kara corrects him and explains the difference between ‘conflict minerals’ and ‘cobalt’:
“…conflict minerals was phase one, and that's actually not cobalt. Conflict minerals, also called the three TG minerals are tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold.
… those are in the Eastern Congo. And catastrophe started around the year 2000, the late 1990s… Shortly after the Rwandan genocide. The militias moved in, and Eastern Congo is sitting on some of the largest reserves in the world of those three TG minerals, especially tantalum… all used in microprocessors …
Cobalt really took off about 10, 12 years, and it's in another part of the country, in the mining provinces in the southeast of the Congo… Cobalt took off because it was started to be used in lithium-ion batteries to maximize their charge and stability. And it just so happens that the Congo,… is sitting on more cobalt than the rest of the planet combined.”
As discussions continued, a heart-wrenching video started to play in the background. Kara notices and starts narrating the scene of thousands of adults and children working in horrendous conditions:
“This is the bottom of the supply chain of your iPhone, of your Tesla, of your Samsung… All of them… This is an industrial cobalt mine where there's not supposed to be one artisanal miner—now, that's the term used for people who are just digging by hand as opposed to tractors and excavators. There's not supposed to be one here. That's what the story is told at the top of the chain… There's more than 15,000 human beings crammed into that pit, digging by hand… It's a massive humanity.”
In the remaining discussion of this clip, Rogan asks if there are mining companies that have “ethically supplied” cobalt and what efforts they are bringing to change this modern-day human slavery.
Rogan: “… any attempts to mitigate this in any way?”
Kara: “The truth, Joe, is no—not sufficient efforts. Most of what is done is PR statements, marketing—all these companies will say we have zero tolerance policies on child labor… they'll all say this down to the mining level… And they may throw some money at the odd NGO or coalition or alliance that's meant to be working on these things. Nothing's actually happening on the ground.”
“…not one company, not one business alliance, not one entity up the chain is doing remotely enough to ensure that the dignity and human rights of the people of the Congo.”
How China Leads The Green Energy Slavery Movement
What I found disturbing from this interview was Kara’s mention of who has a stronghold of these valuable cobalt-rich areas:
“… before anybody knew what was happening, Chinese government, Chinese mining companies took control of almost all the big mines. And the local population that has been displaced is under duress… they dig in absolutely subhuman, gut-wrenching conditions for a dollar a day, feeding cobalt up the supply chain into all the phones, all the tablets, and especially electric cars.”
Not surprisingly, the first article that pops up on a Google search engine is from The New York Times and is titled “Chinese Company Removed as Operator of Cobalt Mine in Congo” and is dated February 28th, 2022. However, knowing better than to depend solely on Google, I used my custom search tools to find related news on the topic.
One article titled “The dirty road to clean energy: how China’s electric vehicle boom is ravaging the environment” By Antonia Timmerman focuses on the Indonesia-China partnership and describes the social disruptions among thousands of locals in countries with high demand for these minerals to produce “green energy” products.
The oddity of China’s now-dominate mining activities for EV battery materials in select countries is taking into account its pledge to be carbon neutral by 2060. Timmerman, in the article mentioned above, writes that China “will need almost 90% of its vehicles to be fully electric by 2035 to meet its target…”
In another post, I will go deeper into China’s dominance in the mining industry and the not-coincidental connection between their dominance in cobalt mining and the irrationally massive push for green energy by Joe Biden and The Democrat Party—only one country will come out profiting. At the same time, the other falls into destructive dependency.
GREEN ENERGY SLAVERY: How China Leads the Inhuman Mining Movement for Rechargeable Batteries