Cobalt Red, How The Blood Of The Congo Powers Our Lives

“Unspeakable riches have brought the people of the Congo little other than unspeakable pain.” So writes Siddharth Kara in Cobalt Red, How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives . Kara surrounds his subject—artisanal cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—with broad historical and economic context. He explains battery technology and the global dominance of battery manufacture by South Korean, Japanese, and, most of all, Chinese industrial titans. Equally predatory Western industrial titans sold cobalt mines to their Chinese counterparts, in one significant instance brokered by none other than Hunter Biden.  “In 2010,” Kara recounts, “there were only 17,000 electric vehicles on the road in the entire world. By 2021, that number had skyrocketed to 16 million. Meeting the ambitions of the Paris Agreement would require at least 100 million total electric vehicles in use by 2030.