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 two leading coalitions are the Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI) and the Global Battery Alliance (GBA).

Cobalt Red : Book summary and reviews of Cobalt Red by Cobalt Red : Book summary and reviews of Cobalt Red by

The reader will hear directly from the Congolese people themselves how they live, work and die to enable our rechargeable lives. Safe Tech International seeks to end the implementation of technologies that are incompatible with health, wellbeing and life.in " The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly " Publishing This Week" newsletter. For thirty-two years, Mobutu supported the Western agenda, kept Katanga’s minerals flowing in their direction, and enriched himself just as egregiously as the colonizers who came before him. In The Casement Report (1904), Roger Casement, British consul to the Congo Free State, described the colony as a “veritable hell on earth. Remove cobalt from the battery, and you will have to plug in your smartphone or electric vehicle much more often, and before long, the batteries may very well catch on fire.

He Needed a Big Megaphone, So He Wrote a Best Seller

It only grew as people across the world relied more than ever on their rechargeable devices to continue working or attending school from home. 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.The region is also brimming with other valuable metals, including copper, iron, zinc, tin, nickel, manganese, germanium, tantalum, tungsten, uranium, gold, silver, and lithium.

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

It is, despite claims to the contrary, all but impossible to isolate artisanal cobalt from industrial production. In all my time in the Congo, I never saw or heard of any activities linked to either of these coalitions, let alone anything that resembled corporate commitments to international human rights standards, third-party audits, or zero-tolerance policies on forced and child labor. The revelatory New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller, shortlisted for the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year Award. The severity of harm being caused by cobalt mining is sadly not a new experience for the people of the Congo.The global cobalt supply chain is the mechanism that transforms the dollar-a-day wages of the Congo’s artisanal miners into multibillion-dollar quarterly profits at the top of the chain. And it will create a culture where trauma is normalized, where living beings become objects, and where the only relationship left is one of domination. Coal mining powered industrialization, and with it came a troubled history of environmental contamination, degradation of air quality, and exacerbation of climate change. None of the lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles are recyclable in the same sense that paper, glass, and lead car batteries are. In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo–because we are all implicated.