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Whatever the present incumbent of the White House might say, the race is on to electrify the world’s economy with green energy. Ridding the world of fossil fuels will not only mitigate climate change but bring a welcome end to energy-related pollution of land and sea and the human rights abuses involved in the extraction of raw materials – after all, clean energy must surely come with clean, ethical practices, right?
Any such naivety is comprehensively dispelled by this authoritative account of the hunt for the materials that are essential to the decarbonisation of the world’s energy systems, including cobalt, lithium, copper, tin and tungsten. It turns out, perhaps to no great surprise, that the mechanics of procuring these raw materials, the supply chains and infrastructure, are depressingly reminiscent of the worst excesses of the fossil fuel industries they are supposed to be replacing. Immorality, greed and chicanery are still present and correct. We – society, the corporate world – are making the same Mephistophelian bargain once again, argues author Nicholas Niarchos.
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The oil pollution and related human rights abuses in the deltas of Nigeria are simply being replicated in Africa, Latin America and Asia, but perhaps most appalling in the cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Cobalt is in particular demand because it is an ideal cathode for high-density and durable lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles and laptops, and for alloys used in wind turbines. And Congo is the country blessed – cursed – with more cobalt than anywhere else on earth. The epicentre is the city of Kolwezi in the southern Congolese region of Katanga, which resembles an inner circle of hell, a place of ‘metal-poisoned children with swollen, malformed heads’ caused by breathing the detritus of raw and processed ore, and where thousands of boys have worked in the mines.
The deliberate lack of corporate curiosity is just as stomach-churning, argues Niarchos, to the consequences of mankind’s insatiable appetite for these materials. Apple, Sony, Tesla, Microsoft and other large corporations are all name checked, a decidedly mixed barrel of apples that rely, Niarchos argues, on the convolutions of the supply chain to remove by degrees the companies buying, selling and making use of Congo’s minerals from the reality on the ground. All, though, are asking roughly the same question: how to grab these elements before someone else does? Less attention is paid to the probity of the process of acquisition. ‘No-one seemed particularly concerned about where the metals to make these batteries were coming from. They seemed abundant, never-ending even,’ he writes.
Niarchos unflinchingly documents the appalling excess of the rush for the requisite raw materials and traces its roots back to the 19th century, when King Leopold of Belgium declared the Congo Basin his personal territory and exploited it ruthlessly for rubber. Contemporary exploitation set the framework for predatory operations ever since, with ownership structures ensuring little wealth goes back to the Congolese people. Amid more recent Cold War rivalries and geopolitics, China is merely the latest in a long stream of nation-states to exploit Katanga (in 1896, the groundwork for Chinese influence across the continent was laid here, when the Qing court signed a treaty of commerce with Leopold’s colonial state, giving the Chinese the right to work and own property in the country).
This fine book is the result of first-hand reporting and six visits by the author to the DRC, and while Niarchos is clearly outraged by what he finds, his prose is all the more authoritative for eschewing the temptation to be shrill, to preach to the converted. He leaves no stone, not even a pebble, unturned in his forensic defenestration of the extractive industry supply chain. Niarchos admits he does not ‘have grand answers to the issues that arise’ from his work. ‘We know how to make batteries… we know how to sustainably mine the metals that make them,’ he writes, adding ‘but at the moment with a few exceptions, we are not doing these things.’
The detail is extraordinary, and a copy of this book should land with a resounding thump on the desk of every blue-chip CEO and policymaker. Niarchos works hard to vary the pace, weaving data between anecdotes in what is a dense, detailed read. The granular detail extends to tracking the mindboggling growth of companies that have become major players in the world of clean energy transportation, such as BYD, now the world’s biggest producer of electric vehicles, and its sharp-suited, driven founder Wang Chuanfu, who rose from a rural rice-farming town to scale up his business on the cheap with ‘a human sea’ of labour. The same scalpel is applied to the documenting of the ‘Big Vegetables’, the in-country elites who benefited from their cuts from deals, and whose children would bemoan the lack of roads in the DRC on which to drive their sports cars.
A sombre piece of reportage concludes the author’s journey. Niarchos visits an unmarked mass grave in Katanga, the resting place for 30 men who died when a mining tunnel they had been digging caved in. The new, green energy transition is literally being built upon the bodies of humans. Solar energy may be part of the transition from fossil fuels, but this book demonstrates how, when it comes to obtaining or utilising new ‘clean’ resources, there really is nothing new under the sun, or indeed, under the ground.
