In the race against time against global warming, before the waiting lists to get an electric car from its dealership, there are major problems of unbridled mining and respect for human rights in the countries poor. These are questions that our governments and public opinion are essentially sweeping under the carpet, and which are relayed only by NGOs like cries in the desert. However, the energy transition perpetuates in these extractive countries the no less existential threat for their populations of the “curse of raw materials”, as elsewhere and for a long time oil.
It is the exploitation of lithium that is destroying ecosystems and local communities in Argentina, Chile and Bolivia, three of the main producing countries of this “future” material. It is that of cobalt, the extraction of which in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) supplies some 70% of the world market. It is well documented that in the DRC, artisanal mines, but not only them, exploit workers and employ children. They breathe in cobalt dust, classified as “possibly carcinogenic” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (a UN agency), and descend into tunnels which can collapse at any time. These little people, that’s how it is, are the very first link in the supply chain of the globalized economy.
Lithium and cobalt are, along with others, essential metals in the manufacture of batteries for cell phones, computers, bicycles and electric cars. However, unless the energy transition is accompanied by a revolution in North-South power relations and an unparalleled regulatory effort, the ongoing scandal of human exploitation induced by mining is bound to grow in size.
A study by the International Energy Agency (IEA), noted by colleague Gérard Bérubé, outlines the context and the horizon: at least 130 million electric vehicles (EVs) should be circulating in the world by 2030, against 11 million currently. Thus, it is expected that the demand for cobalt will be multiplied by 20 within 20 years and that for lithium by 40. To name only these two metals. An explosion in demand which announces, warns the IEA, “an imminent gap between increased global climate ambitions and the availability of essential minerals to achieve these ambitions”.
Continuous scandal, we said: one of the most recent cases relates to a complaint filed at the end of 2019 in the United States by the organization International Rights Advocates against Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, Google and Dell for child labor in the mines of the DRC. A complaint presented on behalf of 14 children killed or injured in the collapse of tunnels. These tech giants would, a few months later, demand the dismissal of this complaint, on the heartless pretext that the children were not forced to work in the mines in the sense of the American law on human trafficking. .
The complaint pinpointed two of their suppliers of raw materials in southern Congo: the Chinese mining company Huayou Cobalt and the Anglo-Swiss Glencore, which also owns the Horne smelter in Rouyn-Noranda. Inescapable parallel: in the opaque world that is the big mining industry, the silence that has too long stifled the public health problems posed by the Horne smelter is to Rouyn-Noranda what the exploitation of the Congolese in the cobalt mines is to the DRC.
Concretely, the essential process of transport electrification is a capitalist race for control of natural resources. Xi Jinping’s China is in a leading position in this regard, having taken ownership of Congolese mines from American mining companies in the mid-2010s.
Facts: China is now the largest EV market in the world, and its industry provides 85% of the cobalt that goes into the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries globally (a sector that, incidentally, Quebec is developing vigorously in Bécancour). If, for example, this information is linked to the fact that Tesla’s factory in Shanghai now manufactures more cars than at its facilities in California, it becomes difficult to believe, to say the least, in the promises of “responsible sourcing” of minerals – and, therefore, respect for workers’ rights – that Tesla and other manufacturers tell us.
The DRC, immensely rich in natural resources, is at the same time one of the five poorest countries in the world, according to the World Bank, while three quarters of Congolese live below the poverty line. The green turn is announced for this lumpenproletariat more toxic than ecological.