If you want to know what’s being unleashed by the rush to mandate electric cars for a so-called clean-energy transition, read Cobalt Red. It will leave you almost as shaken as its author, Siddharth Kara, who braved lawless militia and state-backed soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo as he visited the fountainheads of the world’s lithium-battery supply chain ... The book has no photographs, an understandable absence given the risks of using a camera with armed guards everywhere. Instead Mr. Kara captures the impact of artisanal mining through the powerful stories of the miners—men, women and children—that he has gleaned through interviews. It’s often hard to read his descriptions of the miners’ daily lives, the risks, accidents, promises unfulfilled and, too often, heart-wrenching tales of maimed or dead children ... Cobalt Red concludes that the 'exploitation of the poorest people of the Congo' is a 'moral reversion.' Amen.
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