Iss2/Ch2 Do electric cars generate waste worse than nuclear power plants? The answer may surprise (and poison) you (part 1)

Chapter 1 began as a duel between nuclear, wind, solar, and geothermal energy, but the unexpected conclusion was that trying to determine the best form of green energy is of very limited utility. Scientists estimate that we will need millions of tons of cobalt, lithium, and several other minerals in order to phase out fossil fuels, but neither nuclear, solar, wind, nor geothermal themselves require these minerals. As discussed in Chapter 1 and more deeply investigated in Chapter 3, electric cars are expected to account for the bulk of this demand for minerals. In other words, most of the severe environmental impact of mining is necessary not to generate energy per se, but specifically for building and charging electric cars.

We ended Chapter 1 with the idea that the type of thinking that got us into the climate crisis can’t be the type of thinking that gets us out. We are in a climate crisis because leaders in the past thought we didn’t matter, that we were far enough in the future that they didn’t need to worry about us. We cannot have the same cavalier attitude about the dangers tailings impoundments pose to future generations. Chapter 2 expands on this idea by exploring the immediate impact of the mining needed for a full green energy transition. Just as it is wrong for us to ignore the impact of mining on future generations, it is wrong for us to ignore the impact of mining on people and ecosystems today because they are half a world away.

We started this issue by noting that climate change seems to have forced us into a deal with the devil: in order to save the world from climate change, we must sacrifice parts of the planet. There is no way to obtain the minerals needed for a green energy transition without totally destroying parts of the planet with mining, or so goes the mainstream logic. In this chapter, we will see how this Faustian bargain is a lie: but first, we need to more fully understand the terms of the green energy deal with the devil by investigating how several critical minerals of the green energy transition are actually mined. Chapter 1 focused on the dangers of mining waste; Chapter 2 focuses on the other harms of mining, from the destruction of livelihoods to wiping out ecosystems.

Lithium mining

Phasing out fossil fuels means we will no longer be able use fuels like gasoline, natural gas, or diesel. Thus, anything that can’t be plugged in must utilize rechargeable batteries. We also discussed the need for rechargeable utility batteries in the last chapter. Clearly, the need for rechargeable batteries will be immense. Because a green energy transition will be so reliant on rechargeable batteries – and because the best battery technology currently available uses lithium to store electric charge – a full green energy transition will require an astonishing amount of lithium.

Trying to put numbers to this demand is mind-boggling. According to researchers at UC-Davis, to build enough electric cars to replace all gasoline-powered passenger cars in the US – excluding trucking and all other forms of transportation – would require the entire world’s annual production of lithium times three, every year for the foreseeable future. After tripling the world’s lithium production to meet demand for electric cars in the US, lithium production would have to be expanded even further to somehow meet the demand for electric cars in every other country. And that’s only for the cars themselves: the utility batteries required to ensure electric cars can be charged each night when the sun isn’t shining will require enormous amounts of lithium. That would take care of cars; we would then have to expand lithium production even further for everything that requires rechargeable batteries other than electric cars, like cell phones and ambulances. The amount of lithium needed for a full green energy transition is astounding.

Lithium is mined in two ways: brine extraction and open pit mining.

Before proceeding, we need to acquaint ourselves with the international legal standard for opening a new mine. On paper, any community affected by mining must give free, prior and informed consent: consent must be given free of coercion, prior to the start of mining, and fully informed of the consequences of opening a mine.

Brine Extraction

Brine extraction occurs in the so-called Lithium Triangle in Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina because it has the unique geological phenomenon of lithium-rich aquifers. Aquifers are basically giant, underground lakes. Unlike aquifers in the US, Lithium Triangle aquifers are not full of fresh, drinkable water, but salty, briny water. Among the salts dissolved in this brine is lithium. The Lithium Triangle currently produces about a third of the world’s lithium, but holds about half of the world’s known lithium reserves.

UC-Davis researchers explain the process:

Lithium found in brine deposits is extracted by pumping the brine out of underground aquifers, then concentrating the brine to increase the percentage of lithium salts. Typically, this concentration is achieved via evaporation from large pools under the sun… until the lithium levels reach approximately 6 percent of the solution, a process that takes around a year to complete. Producing 1 metric ton of lithium in this manner requires evaporating approximately 2 million liters of water from brine.

The lithium requires further energy- and chemical-intensive processing to get the 6% lithium salt to a concentrated form usable for battery manufacturing.

There are two major problems with this type of mining. The first occurs in the immediate vicinity of the mine. Salt is toxic to plant life, and the brine contains naturally occurring toxins like arsenic. Thus, once the evaporation step is complete, the massive evaporation pools become barren, toxic areas where nothing can survive. The toxic chemicals used after the evaporation step are also left behind. Over time, these toxic salts and chemicals will be spread far and wide via wind erosion.

The second issue occurs many miles away from the mining site. Remember, to produce 1 metric ton of lithium requires evaporating 2 million liters of water. That water is no longer a part of the ecosystem. Since mining corporations started exploring the feasibility of lithium brine extraction in 2010, local groups have protested over concerns that removal of groundwater would render the area uninhabitable by collapsing freshwater supplies. These protests highlight suspicions that Lithium Triangle communities never gave free, prior, and informed consent. First, locals have alleged that community “consent” was given in closed-door meetings where mining corporations invited only people who already agreed with mining projects. Second, mining corporations claimed there would be no impact on freshwater because they would only withdraw undrinkable, salty brine.

But that’s not how groundwater works. All of a region’s groundwater is connected in the same way that all of a region’s lakes and rivers are connected. Indeed, modeling by Argentina’s Environmental and Natural Resources Foundation (cited here; report is available in Spanish only) predicted that the area’s many springs, lakes, lagoons, and wells – all fed by groundwater – would literally run dry. Furthermore, what groundwater remained would be pulled closer to the salt flats and thus become contaminated with salts, rendering it undrinkable. As we saw in the last chapter, there is no way to remediate groundwater contamination. Obviously, communities can’t give informed consent if mining corporations provide inaccurate information about the consequences of mining.

Indeed, the most dire predictions have proven accurate. In Susques, Argentina, the normal sources of drinking water have dried up and locals are so desperate for freshwater that they have resorted to drinking from the Pastos Chicos River. Pastos Chicos is tainted with natural volcanic runoff; among other toxins, the river has arsenic contamination well above the levels known to cause cancer. Locals report that wild animals have left the area, unable to survive without a source of water. Meanwhile, groundwater levels have fallen 10-15 meters across the entire Salar de Atacama, Chile region. The loss of groundwater has dramatically affected the ecosystem, wiping out vegetation and lagoons in much of the area, and rendering agriculture impossible. So much water has been withdrawn by mining that the land is sinking by 1-2 centimeters per year. The Trapiche River in Argentina – as well as the grasslands wetlands it supported – have been totally wiped out, and wild animals, including vicuñas, pumas, Andean cats and three species of flamingos, have left:

This collapse of freshwater resources very clearly illustrates the green energy deal with the devil. No life is possible without water. In one of the driest places in the world, there is not enough rain to replace billions of liters of groundwater except on geologic timescales. By the time all the lithium is extracted, there will be no possibility of any life in the area because there will be no water. The sacrifice of the Lithium Triangle for the green energy transition will be total.

Open pit mining

About half of the world’s lithium reserves are outside the Lithium Triangle and therefore must be accessed via open pit mining. In open pit mining, all vegetation is destroyed and all soil overturned in search of lithium-bearing ore. No ecosystem can survive open pit mining. Once harvested, the processing of lithium ore leads to even more harm because lithium can only be removed from the ore by literally dissolving the rock and all the toxins it contains in highly concentrated sulfuric acid. Two mines will give us an idea of the harms of open pit lithium mining.

A proposed lithium mine in the Jadar Valley, an agricultural region of Serbia, has been met with massive protests including roadblocks and a petition with 292,000 signatures (more than 4% of the population of Serbia). According to a study* published in Nature, exploratory digging already caused significant enough soil and water contamination to wipe out nearby crops (photo below), with toxins detected far downstream, either from exploratory digging or a previous spill of mining tailings in 2014.

Were the project approved, mining would irreversibly contaminate one of Serbia’s largest groundwater reserves and threaten 145 separate endangered species and 50 historically significant or archeological sites. Deforestation alone would contribute to 56 kilotons of carbon dioxide as a whopping 26,000 cubic meters of wood mass would be destroyed. Additional carbon emissions would be necessary for the energy-intensive processes of ore processing and producing sulfuric acid.

While mining is normally pitched to communities as a job creator, these promises rarely pan out. That’s true here; the job loss to the agricultural sector would more than offset the jobs created by mining. Moreover, all the jobs created by mining would disappear once the mine was exhausted, but agriculture will never fully recover due to all the mining waste. The mine would generate 1.76 million tons of waste every year for its 64-year lifetime. Tailings impoundments would cover 187 hectares, and absurdly, the proposed impoundment sites are sited near two rivers that are notoriously prone to heavy flooding. As we learned in Chapter 1, there are three major reasons why this is foolish. First, flooding is the most common cause of tailings impoundment failures. Second, rivers are especially vulnerable to tailings spills. Finally, released tailings can travel a great distance when carried by rivers.

Another proposed open-pit lithium mine, in Thacker Pass, Nevada would, over its expected 41-year lifetime, “use 5,200 acre-feet of water per year (equivalent to the water usage of around 15,000 US households) from a nearby groundwater well. It would also produce 354 million cubic yards of clay tailings waste.” It would wipe out a rare sagebrush ecosystem and (according to the mining corporation’s own estimates) emit 152,713 tons of carbon dioxide per year, or more than 30,000 cars emit in a year. Similarly, mining operations would require 5,800 tons of sulfuric acid per day. In other words, even according to the company’s own estimates, the mine would require ten times as much sulfuric acid by weight as it will produce in lithium.

What kind of environmentalism wipes out entire ecosystems? What kind of environmentalism threatens endangered species, irreversibly contaminates soil and water, destroys forests, and leaves behind hundreds of millions of tons of toxic waste? What kind of environmentalism requires corrosive chemicals by the ton? By contributing to deforestation, open lithium pit mining adds to the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere – at a time when climate scientists say we need to protect forests for their ability to sequester carbon. There must be a better way.

Cobalt mining

Like lithium, cobalt is an essential component of rechargeable batteries. A single car battery can require a whopping 44 pounds of solid cobalt. Building enough electric cars to phase out gasoline-powered cars will thus require an extraordinary amount of cobalt, and the Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo currently accounts for 72% of world production and nearly half of all known reserves of cobalt. Much of this section comes from Cobalt Red, an astonishing on-the-ground investigative report in Katanga Province by Siddharth Kara, an academic who studies slavery.

In order to understand the human and environmental costs of cobalt mining, we have to understand how the cobalt mining economy works.

By “artisanal” we don’t mean “artisanal”

The Responsible Mineral Initiative and the Global Battery Alliance claim to conduct independent audits on the ground in Congo to make sure cobalt is being sourced ethically. Kara claimed that he never once saw any indication of any sort of corporate responsibility in Congo. He bluntly wrote that in the many months he spent around cobalt mines in Congo and talking to local officials, he never once saw any evidence that either organization had ever set foot in Congo: “On the contrary, across twenty-one years of research into slavery and child labor, I have never seen more extreme predation for profit than I witnessed at the bottom of global cobalt supply chains.”

Among the victims of this “extreme predation for profit”  are workers known as “artisanal miners.” According to research sponsored by the World Bank, 45 million people worldwide, or the populations of Austria, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Ireland combined, work in artisanal mining. An astonishing 90% of all of the world’s mining workforce is artisanal miners. The dictionary definition of an artisan is:

1. A person skilled in making a product by hand.
2. One skilled in any art, mystery, or trade; a handicraftsman; a mechanic.
3. One skilled in a fine art; an artist.

Something described as “artisanal” seems like it should be quaint, special, rewarding, or even pleasurable. It’s not. Artisanal mining is among the worst jobs in the entire world. A better term would be “mining without safety equipment or modern tools.” Only desperate poverty is adequate motivation to take up such dangerous and hazardous work. Artisanal miners in the Congo are so poor they generally can’t even afford tools and instead use scavenged rebar to whack at solid rock.

Artisanal mining is such an embarrassment that mining corporations and their clients go to great lengths to conceal the fact it’s occurring. All mining corporations flatly refused to allow Kara on their properties, but he gathered from interviews with artisanal miners, local officials, and even people in the industry that supposedly reputable mining corporations are, in fact, voracious consumers of artisanally-mined cobalt ore, and even encourage artisanal miners to work in the formal mines. This is because artisanally-mined heterogenite – a cobalt-rich rock – is of substantially higher grade than the ore harvested by mining corporations. By its nature, industrial mining takes large amounts of rock, processes it with energy and chemicals, and eventually separates out the cobalt. By contrast, artisanally mined ore has ten- to fifteen times the cobalt content as ore produced by conventional mining. That’s because child miners pick out heterogenite pebbles, separating them from valueless rock and soil. And it’s because women and children labor in toxic waters, washing away the dirt and dust from heterogenite. And it’s because men work in exceptionally dangerous tunnels, digging to find veins of heterogenite that contain up to 20% cobalt. Mining corporations do not want to stop artisanal mining because artisanal mining generates a substantially better product than formal mining.

Of course, corporations fear the embarrassment of public exposure, so they actively work to cover up evidence of artisanal mining. Indeed, much of the economy of artisanal mining serves no purpose but to make it seem like artisanal mining isn’t occurring. After a day’s work, artisanal miners take that day’s haul of heterogenite to a cobalt depot, where they sell it to middlemen who then sell it to the mining companies. The process approaches farce at Tenke-Fungurume, a massive open pit mine larger than New York, Chicago, and San Francisco combined. Artisanal miners bribe guards to allow them into the formal mine, where they mine all day. At the end of the day, they take their haul of heterogenite off the Tenke-Fungurume property to a depot hidden deep in a forest. The depot workers buy the heterogenite from the artisanal miners, then retrace the steps of the artisanal miners, hauling the heterogenite past the guards back into Tenke-Fungurume, where they sell it to the formal mine. Mine employees then mix artisanally-mined heterogenite into the ore dug up by the formal miners, and it is all processed as one. There is obviously no point to this process other than to make it appear that the formal mine is not using artisanally-mined cobalt.

Men are generally paid $2.20 per day, women and teenagers $1.10; small children are not paid and are simply helping out their parents. Kara pointed out that “There was nothing to stop mining companies from going to the artisanal sites themselves and directly paying the women, men, and children who dug their cobalt,” but corporations value maintaining the fiction that they are not using artisanal miners more than paying workers higher than near-starvation wages.

Over and over, Kara witnessed arrangements that met the legal definition of forced labor, and encountered other instances of literal slavery that were not so subtle: children shot dead for trying to leave their job, and Congolese men whipped like slaves by mining overseers or locked for two days in a shipping container without food or water for refusing orders.

The Congolese military is obviously profiting from the cobalt trade, with forced labor becoming more extreme the further Kara traveled from population centers. Soldiers even force children to mine.

”The Republican Guard watches everything in Lualaba Province,” I was told by a colleague in Kolwezi. “They monitor the villages, and they intimidate anyone who tries to speak. When I say that, what I mean to tell you is if someone who works at Tilwezembe or Lac Malo or Kasulo speaks to someone like you, they will be shot in the night, and their body will be left on the street to instruct anyone else on the consequences of opening their mouths.”

Kara was shocked that the military would be involved with forced labor and the cobalt trade. But as our bonus chapter on the devastating First and Second Congo Wars explains, it should be no surprise that the military is involved. As we detail in that bonus chapter, eastern Congolese militias learned about forced labor and mineral exploitation from Rwandan and Ugandan soldiers; as part of a peace deal, these militias were incorporated into the formal Congolese Army, where they further spread the practices perfected in eastern Congo during the wars. The Congo Wars have been nicknamed “Africa’s World War” for the number of casualties and the number of countries involved. Being ignorant of this conflict would be like someone in the 1960s or 70s having no clue about World War II.

The corporations that use cobalt – auto, computer, and phone manufacturers – must know how the cobalt economy works. If they don’t, it’s because they don’t want to know. Again, Kara summed up his reporting in Congo: “across twenty-one years of research into slavery and child labor, I have never seen more extreme predation for profit than I witnessed at the bottom of global cobalt supply chains.”

Human impact

The work of artisanal mining is exceptionally dangerous, backbreaking, and hazardous. Men dig out heterogenite and bring it to women and younger children to wash. From sun-up to sundown, women and small children perform this extremely physical labor, straining to swish heavy sacks of rock back and forth through lake or river water to wash away as much dirt as possible. This process leaves the once-clear waters a putrid rust color, stained with mud and toxins. Women and children wade literally all day, every day, in this polluted water. Simply standing in this water slowly poisons people’s bodies; even worse, this polluted water is often the only source of drinking water. One woman summed up the health impacts: as she washed heterogenite, she remarked, “Mosquitoes do not drink the blood of the people who work here.”

Mining dust is everywhere, the product of physically smashing countless tons of rock. The dust itself is deadly, as the severe effects of particulate pollution on health – including heart attacks and early death – are well established. As we already know, mining dust carries toxic byproducts of mining, like uranium, lead, and other heavy metals, some of them radioactive. In this way, mining dust is poisonous to every part of the body. Miners have no choice but to eat food caked in this toxic dust, and the homes of families that live in the area, whether they mine or not, are covered in this dust. Children are covered in dust as they play. Kara described the air as so thick with dust that dust visibly hangs in the air, and he had to frequently spit out a sticky clay that collected in his mouth. In addition to mining dust, a different, mustard-colored dust settles on everyone and everything near the formal mines. This is sulfuric acid used to process ore. Hydrofluoric acid and sulfur dioxide, toxic byproducts of the chemical reactions necessary to separate cobalt from the ore, are also airborne poisons. Of Kolwezi, a city of 1.5 million that happened to be built on top of a rich cobalt deposit and has been turned into a giant open pit mine, Kara wrote: “Breathing hurts. Looking stings.”

Cobalt mining occurs via open pit methods. Since all trees are gone, there is no shelter from the sweltering, equatorial sun. At one point, Kara was able to get inside an open pit mine. The rocks on the descent into the mine were so jagged that they literally tore the soles off Kara’s shoes before he even reached the bottom. Miners, unable to afford shoes, must walk this barefoot while carrying huge sacks of rock – all day, every day. The slopes were so steep and the soil so loose that Kara reported he was barely able to keep his balance, even though he was carrying nothing. Badly malnourished and exhausted, these slopes are death traps for miners. Grievous – often fatal – injuries from falls in open pit mines are common.

As dangerous as open pit mining is, tunneling is substantially worse. Workers drop down a vertical shaft one meter in diameter, pressing their hands and feet against the sides of the shaft, slowly and perilously “walking” their way down 20 or 30 meters. Once at the bottom, they chip away at veins of heterogenite in tunnels only large enough to squirm through on their bellies, with only a small battery-powered headlamp for light. Every breath is painfully hot and full of dust, and miners work all day in these literally hell-like conditions. If an unexpected rainstorm blows in, there is no way to leave quickly enough to avoid drowning.

Due to the lack of ventilation, tunneling amplifies all the toxic exposures of mining. But the biggest danger is tunnel collapse. Kara described limbs that had been crushed so badly that they were grotesquely mangled and missing pieces. He met people with limbs amputated following tunnel collapses. One boy gave an interview through agonizing pain, and his mother admitted afterwards, through tears, that she knew he would soon die. The boy was going into septic shock, his family unable to afford further medical care. His time left to live was numbered in days, if not hours. In a single neighborhood of Kolwezi, a tunnel collapse occurs about monthly, each collapse claiming entire teams of a dozen or more men.

The health impacts of cobalt mining are staggering. Kara spoke to a public health researcher at the University of Lubumbashi who explained:

In the studies we conducted, the artisanal miners have more than forty times the amount of cobalt in their urine as the control groups. They also have five times the level of lead and four times the level of uranium. Even the inhabitants living close to the mining areas who do not work as artisanal miners have very high concentrations of trace metals in their systems, including cobalt, copper, zinc, lead, cadmium, germanium, nickel, vanadium, chromium, and uranium.

As mentioned above, men are paid about $2.20 per day, women and teenagers $1.10; young children help their parents without any pay. Why would anyone expose themselves to all these hazards for near-starvation wages? Why would anyone force their children to scour the earth for toxic pebbles and wade with them in tailings-polluted rivers?

Aside from forced labor, only destitution is sufficient motivation to work as an artisanal miner. Mining is often pitched to communities as an investment that brings prosperity: jobs, local spending, infrastructure. In reality, a typical artisanal miner had a modest livelihood until the mines opened; the mine itself is a cause of the destitution that compels people to mine. Sometimes, this coercion is overt: Kara spoke to a man in Etoile whose home was wiped out by the expansion of a mine, and he was never compensated. Residents displaced by the Tenke-Fungarume mine described being forced out of their homes at gunpoint, abandoning all their possessions except what they were able to carry. Yet even when no law is broken, mining destroys livelihoods. For example, a Kolwesi tunnel miner described losing his home and auto repair business when cobalt was discovered and land prices skyrocketed, leaving him unable to afford rent. Throughout Katanga, mining didn’t bring prosperity, but instead homelessness and destitution, leaving people no option but artisanal mining.

Germain – the environmental researcher at the University of Lubumbashi –  reported that he and colleagues had found very high levels of toxic heavy metals in wildlife and livestock. He grimly concluded: “All the crops, animals, and fish stocks are contaminated.” Kara explained:

Contamination by heavy metals of the local population and the food supply was causing a range of negative health consequences across the Copper Belt. For instance, Germain had recently documented a high rate of birth defects in mining communities, such as holoprosencephaly, agnathia otocephaly, stillbirth, miscarriages, and low birth weight…samples of cord blood taken at birth revealed high levels of cobalt, arsenic, and uranium. Respiratory ailments were also common–”Inhalation of cobalt dust causes ‘hard metal lung disease’ which can be fatal,” Germain said. “Also, prolonged contact with cobalt by the artisanal miners can cause them to suffer acute dermatitis.”

Cancers were also on the rise in artisanal mining communities, especially of the breast, kidney, and lung. “Exposure to nickel and uranium are the biggest causes of cancer,” Germain said. Cases of lead poisoning were also widespread. Samples of dust taken inside homes throughout the Copper Belt had an average of 170 micrograms of lead per square foot. Germain explained that the lead dust probably came from the clothes of the mine workers, as well as metal processing at some of the large mines. By way of comparison, the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States recommends a maximum safe limit of 40 micrograms of lead per square foot inside homes. Levels as high as 170 micrograms per square foot can cause neurological damage, muscle and joint pain, headaches, gastrointestinal ailments, and reduced fertility in adults. In children, lead poisoning can cause irreversible developmental damage as well as weight loss, vomiting, and seizures.

Kara was shocked at the number of babies strapped to their mothers’ backs, exposed to all the same toxins, and speculated that the large number of babies is due to all the sexual assaults, many perpetrated by soldiers. He spoke to a woman whose husband died of respiratory illness; they had wanted to have a family, but she miscarried twice. “I thank God for taking my babies,” she said. “Here it is better not to be born.”

In a particularly disturbing passage, Kara met a teenage girl, “her face caked with mucus and her hair caked with mud,” with an infant on her back.” Her dad died in a tunnel collapse and her mom died of a respiratory infection she almost certainly got from breathing mining dust as she washed heterogenite. Orphaned, the girl had no choice but prostitution, and she eventually started artisanal mining as soon as her body matured enough to be able to carry sacks of ore. However, she told Kara that she only makes about 55 cents per day mining, so she continues to allow soldiers to do “unnatural things” to her. She said that cobalt mining and prostitution are no different; “My body is my marketplace.” The girl was obviously in the final stages of untreated AIDS. Her infant was too young to support his head yet, and his neck snapped every time she stuck a rock with her bent rebar. Both died within a few months and were unceremoniously buried, unmarked, in a field.

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Reporting for Cobalt Red sent Kara into a deep depression. Aside from witnessing levels of barbarity shocking even for him (a professional researcher on modern-day slavery), he compiled convincing evidence that the official statistics dramatically underestimate the extent of child labor, forced labor, and human suffering in the cobalt trade. This is because the official statistics accept that mining corporations are telling the truth about their supposedly responsible mining practices. In the acknowledgments at the end of the book, he wrote, “Above all, my beloved wife, Aditi, carried this heavy burden with me and gracefully absorbed all that it did to me. I was at times heartbroken, angry, and shell-shocked by what I witnessed in the Congo. Her love and strength carried me through every step of this journey. I would never have crawled out of the darkness without her.”

Clear-cutting the planet in order to save it

In addition to the staggering human costs of cobalt mining, the environmental costs are enormous. Cobalt can only be harvested via open pit mining. Open pit mining necessarily clear-cuts all vegetation, overturns all soil, and therefore destroys all habitat. From gigantic trees and the largest African fauna to the smallest mushroom and single-celled organism, all life is wiped out. Kara describes a land where “giant trees once ruled,” now clear cut and morphed into a “devastated landscape resembl[ing] a battlefield after an aerial bombardment.” Elsewhere, he describes: “There were no trees to be found and no birds in the sky. The earth had been stripped bare as far as the eye could see.” Open pit means total devastation: not even birds fly overhead. Mining runoff leaves rivers with toxic levels of lead, chromium, and cobalt.

Though there are no reliable estimates – Congo remains one of the most dangerous places on Earth – millions upon millions of trees have been cut down to mine for cobalt. The Mutanda open-pit mine is 185 square kilometers, or substantially larger than the land covered by either Minneapolis or Washington, D.C. Above, we discussed the Tenke-Fungurume open-pit mine, which is larger than the land covered by New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco combined. These were all thick equatorial rain forests, now devoid of life. Not even birds fly overhead.

Conclusion to cobalt mining

It’s a bit rich to say that green energy and electric cars are “saving the planet” from climate change. Thousands of square miles of tropical rainforest have been clear cut to get the cobalt needed for electric car and utility batteries, the land permanently poisoned by toxic mining waste. This makes about as much sense as the Vietnam War major who coolly explained, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

Aside from the massive, permanent environmental devastation, the deforestation wrought by mining releases an astounding amount of greenhouse gases. Climate scientists are unanimous that we need to protect carbon sinks like tropical rainforests, not slash-and-burn them to the ground as is necessary for open pit mining. What kind of fight against climate change involves releasing so much greenhouse gases?

People, including children, are working for dimes per day, exposing themselves to toxic chemicals and developing severe medical conditions. What right do we have to draft Congolese men, women, and children to give up their childhood, their health, their bodies, and their lives to save the world? The world couldn’t function if nobody ever had to give something up for the greater good, but when is the price too high?

All mining carries substantial human and environmental costs. Cobalt mining in Congo is not an exception. It’s the norm.

*After sending the final draft of Chapter 2 to the copy editor, this paper was retracted by Nature. The paper studied toxins released by exploratory digging for lithium mining in Jadar. It was retracted because the scientists did not account for a spill of toxic mining tailings that occurred in 2014: the data as presented couldn’t show that toxins were from exploratory digging rather than the 2014 tailings spill. Nature editors wrote that “Post-publication peer review has confirmed that although the data is robust, it is presently not sufficient to support some of the key claims made about the causal impact of the current mining development at Jadar Valley. The Authors have been offered an opportunity to revise the manuscript and submit the corrected version for reconsideration.” The information we cited from this paper (crops that died around exploratory wells, the amount of deforestation open pit mining will create, the volume of tailings that will be created, the displacement of agriculture, etc) was not from the part of the paper that led to the retraction and is not disputed.