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

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

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

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Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today, the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. Roughly 75 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. 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.” Source

The book centres on the mineral cobalt, currently sought after the world over for the production of high-end batteries. More than 70% of the world’s supply originates from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Kara’s project, he says, is to expose the trade’s dirty secrets for all of us to see.

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Newsweek’s Meredith Wolf Schizer’s interviewed the author in her article, “ Clean Energy’s Dirty Secret—Human Rights Abuses in Cobalt Mining” I thought that the ground in the Congo took its vermillion hue from the copper in the dirt, but now I cannot help but wonder whether the earth here is red because of all the blood that has spilled upon it.” Unfortunately the bulk of the people who do that mining are “artisanal” miners – they are mining on their own, so to speak; they are not employed by any company. They are extremely poor and have no other options to make money. Their kids could go to school, but even though it’s supposed to be free, it is not funded well-enough for that to be the case and they need to pay. Most families cannot afford to pay, so their kids also have to go to work mining. There are no health or safety standards and when people die or are injured not only is no one held accountable, no one is there to help pay medical bills. What they are paid for the cobalt they mine (putting their lives at risk) is next to nothing. Samsung has a zero-tolerance policy against child labor as prohibited by international standards and relevant national laws and regulations in all stages of its global operations. With extraordinary tenacity and compassion, Siddharth Kara evokes one of the most dramatic divides between wealth and poverty in the world today. His reporting on how the dangerous, ill-paid labor of Congo children provides a mineral essential to our cellphones will break your heart. I hope policy-makers on every continent will read this book." - Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost

It is in every aspect an enormous and atrocious lie in action. If it were not rather appalling the cool completeness would be amusing. This nonfiction book will make you stop and think about the impact our lives have on others around the world. The book explores the impact of cobalt mining on the people of Democratic Republic of the Congo. Cobalt is used in the rechargeable devices we all use. I am writing this review on my laptop with a rechargeable battery, looking at my tablet with a rechargeable battery. I brushed my teeth this morning with an electric toothbrush with, yes, a rechargeable battery. I wear a smart watch, with a rechargeable battery. And when we trade in our leased car, I expect its replacement choices will all be EV cars.

Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara informs us of the horrifying conditions cobalt miners in the Congo experience in an effort to keep up with the increasing world demand for cobalt. He claims that “the blood of the Congo powers our lives” and provides the unvarnished truth, alarming proof that many powerful companies are desperate to hide. The author, Siddharth Kara researches modern day slavery. This is his latest book exploring the subject. He goes to the Democratic Republic of the Congo over many years to interview people involved in the supply chain of cobalt. He talks to those at the bottom that are exploited for the labor to extract the ore to those at the top who get the cobalt to the global market. Cobalt is an essential ingredient of the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power our smartphones, laptops and electric cars. It’s a rare, silvery metal that is also used in many of our low-carbon innovations crucial to achieving our climate sustainability goals. It’s mined in the Katanga region, a part of the Congo that has more reserves than the rest of the world combined.

As long as people in the West continue to understand local cobalt mining in the Congo as a “grim wasteland of utter ruin”, as in Cobalt Red, as opposed to Wainaina’s landscape in which people laugh, struggle and make do in usually mundane circumstances, history will repeat. Credit: Fairphone. DRCongo to flourish being a dynamic economic State grounded in normative public administrative values requires demands a shifting in the pluralist public civic civil social zeitgeist transformative. It seems likely that Cobalt Red’s clear pursuit of the ‘greater good’ has made it easier for people to turn a blind eye to these issues. The book has been sold as an exposé, and as Kara himself says during an interview with Joe Rogan, “I was the first outsider to get into this mine.” If this was all new information then it would be easier to forgive Kara for trying to maximise his impact, even if that meant taking a shortcut or two. Who wouldn’t accept that ‘for the greater good’?The outsider’s gaze is nowhere more obvious than when Kara makes simplistic comparisons between “our generally safe and satisfied nations” in the West and Congolese people in the DRC. He depicts the country as a place that does not exist in the modern age. I hybrid read this book. The audiobook is read by Peter Ganim. He takes care in pronouncing the names of places and people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Why have some States prospered while other have failed?—not because of failure in a specific set of policies,—hope instead is entailed within a key cardinal development bargain,—whereby State elites shift from protecting their own economic social positions and, instead administratively gamble implementing a process procedure controlled managed explicit dedicated to a growth-based state future creating more winners resulting in a State stable secure prospering inclusive for the majority of peoples.



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