What is not coloured Red?

In Cobalt Red, Siddharth Kara travels deep inside Congo to look at how Cobalt is mined. He tells us that Cobalt is the element that runs our smartphones, tablets and laptops, providing stability and slow release of power from Li-ion batteries. But, the biggest use for Cobalt now that these batteries are super-sized is from Electric Vehicles, where a 50g smartphone battery with 8-10g of Cobalt can be scaled up to 50Kg of Cobalt per 100 KW!

But the book is mainly about how this Cobalt is extracted, through “artisanal mining” where basically locals go and dig it up with their tools with little safety or protection, and have to sell it to depots manned usually by Chinese to take home a pay of around 1$ per day after working almost all daylight. And eventually all this fuels into phones and EVs that earn their bosses millions of dollars with hardly any risk.

Kara goes into painstaking detail about the risks undertaken, about the families that are broken, about the local environment where villages where people managed with some farming and schools are now completely broken, taken over by mines whose profits go almost entirely to Chinese companies, and the amounts they pay as royalties or tax go to politicians higher up, with the locals left with nothing.

This sounds eerily identical to pretty much every large mining operation, be it for iron ore in Bastar, coal in Surguja or Bauxite in Malkangiri. Lithium in Bolivia, oil in Nigeria, diamonds in different countries of Africa, the list can go on and on. What is common in all this is how the mines are all in the global south and those who benefit are elsewhere, except in India where we have internalised colonialism within our classes.

It makes you wonder if there’s anything at all that is got in a fair fashion where the producers are paid a fair rate and manage to earn a decent livelihood. The food we eat is produced by farmers deep in debt. The clothes we wear also not only produced by farmers who can’t earn a livelihood of it, but also stitched by workers working in sweat shops while “brands” take all the cake. Our houses are constructed using exploited labour – look beyond the skilled workers and masons, those delivering your iron bars, bricks or granite.

It is an economy sustained by those who are regularly exploited, and the spoils flow to a few at the top, while those who pay have to pay to wear names, or experience food.

Coming back to the book itself, there’s a lot of movement of EV batteries away from Cobalt since the book came out, and since the human rights abuses became common. Tesla and BYD, the largest makers of EVs are transitioning away from Cobalt based batteries to LFPs. The price of Cobalt is likely to crash. The human rights abuses will vanish as the mining sector in Congo will likely collapse. Elon Musk and BYD can pat themselves on their backs for solving an inconvenient problem, never mind that they were the ones who caused it in the first place. Companies will move on to other minerals which will rain its own misery on those who live above those ores.

But, what becomes of the people Congo? Those whose lands forcibly taken and dug up, whose water sources and air poisoned, whose forests cut down, whose schools closed, whose children left with nothing but broken bones. If the prices of Cobalt crash, they will be left bearing the brunt of it, and might even have to pull more children out of schools to earn a living wage for the family.

Sometimes I feel there is only one option – to burn it all down, one billionaire at a time and rebuild the political economy from scratch into an equitable and just system based on fair prices. It is also what is likely to save the vast majority of us too.