Epic, shocking, and deeply reported, Congo is rich. Swaths of the war-torn African country lack basic infrastructure, and, after many decades of colonial occupation, its people are officially among the poorest in the world. But hidden beneath the soil are vast quantities of cobalt, lithium, copper, tin, tantalum, tungsten, and other treasures. Recently, this veritable periodic table of resources has become extremely valuable because these metals are essential for the global “energy transition” --;the plan for wealthy nations to wean themselves off fossil fuels by shifting to sustainable forms of energy, such as solar and wind. At great cost, the race to electrify the world’s economy has begun. In this contest for influence and access across the globe, China has a considerable head start. From Indonesia to South America to Central Africa, Beijing has invested in mines, processing and infrastructure for decades. But the US has begun fighting back with massive investments of its own, as well as sanctions and disruptive tariffs. In this rush for green energy, the world has become utterly reliant on resources unearthed far away and willfully blind to the terrible political, environmental, and social consequences of their extraction. If Congo possesses such riches, why are its children routinely descending deep into treacherous mines to dig with the most rudimentary of tools, or in some cases their bare hands? Why are Indonesia’s seas and skies being polluted in a rush for battery metals? Why is the Western Sahara, a source for phosphates, still being treated like a colony? Who must pay the price for progress?; With unparalleled, original reporting, Nicholas Niarchos reveals how the scramble to control these metals and their production is overturning the world order, just as the global race to drill for oil shaped the twentieth century. Exploring the advent of the lithium-ion battery and following the supply chain for its production all the way from the mines in Congo, Indonesia and the Western Sahara, to the factories in China, via the Silicon Valley and Shenzhen boardrooms where the decisions that echo across continents are made, Niarchos tells the story both of the people driving these tectonic changes and those whose lives are being upended. He reveals the true, devastating consequences of our best intentions and helps us to prepare for an uncertain future. If you have ever used a smartphone or driven an electric vehicle, you are implicated....

Autorentext

Nicolas Niarchos

Klappentext

**“A tale of rapacious colonialism, Cold War spy games, dazzling technical innovation, big business rivalry, big power geopolitics . . . Niarchos has produced an unflinching, landmark work on the nature of extractive capitalism.” —Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times best-selling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing

Epic, shocking, and deeply reported, The Elements of Power tells the story of the war for the global supply of battery metals—essential for the decarbonization of our economies—and the terrible, bloody human cost of this badly misunderstood industry**

Congo is rich. Swaths of the war-torn African country lack basic infrastructure, and, after many decades of colonial occupation, its people are officially among the poorest in the world. But hidden beneath the soil are vast quantities of cobalt, lithium, copper, tin, tantalum, tungsten, and other treasures. Recently, this veritable periodic table of resources has become extremely valuable because these metals are essential for the global “energy transition”—the plan for wealthy nations to wean themselves off fossil fuels by shifting to sustainable forms of energy, such as solar and wind. The race to electrify the world’s economy has begun, and China has a considerable head start. From Indonesia to South America to Central Africa, Beijing has invested in mines and infrastructure for decades. But the U.S. has begun fighting back with massive investments of its own, as well as sanctions and disruptive tariffs.

In this rush for green energy, the world has become utterly reliant on resources unearthed far away and willfully blind to the terrible political, environmental, and social consequences of their extraction. If the Democratic Republic of the Congo possesses such riches, why are its children routinely descending deep into treacherous mines to dig with the most rudimentary of tools, or in some cases their bare hands? Why are Indonesia’s seas and skies being polluted in a rush for battery metals? Why is the Western Sahara, a source for phosphates, still being treated like a colony? Who must pay the price for progress?

With unparalleled, original reporting, Nicolas Niarchos reveals how the scramble to control these metals and their production is overturning the world order, just as the global race to drill for oil shaped the twentieth century. Exploring the advent of the lithium-ion battery and tracing the supply chain for its production, Niarchos tells the story both of the people driving these tectonic changes and those whose lives are being upended. He reveals the true, devastating consequences of our best intentions and helps us prepare for an uncertain future. If you have ever used a smartphone or driven an electric vehicle, you are implicated.

Leseprobe
CHAPTER 2

THE GREAT ROCK THAT SPREADS ALL OVER THE LANDS

By the time I met him, in September 2019, Odilon Kajumba Kilanga was thirty‑two. He had lost his right front tooth in a brawl four years before. (“I was in a group of people who clashed with another group of people,” he said. “We didn’t get along.”) His eyes were sunken and hollowed, and his level gaze suggested he had experienced much more than a man should in several lifetimes. Kajumba knew that some people had made it big in Kolwezi, but their number was vanishingly small, and once they’d made their money, they had often gotten as far from the pits as possible, moving on to brighter, airier places in South Africa or even as far away as Malta. The name of the island in the middle of the Mediterranean didn’t mean much to someone like Kajumba, though—it was just an impossible distance. Rather, he dreamed of making enough money to buy a restaurant, a small place where he could serve food and build a stable life, one in which he could afford to send his four children to school. He said that although many people he knew in Kolwezi wasted all their earnings on partying, alcohol, and even narcotics, he tried to avoid such temptations. Whenever I met up with him, he made a point of drinking cola.

For the moment, though, Kajumba was stuck in that suffocating little room, where the smells of manioc root mingled with human sweat and rushed the nostrils. The room was in a small stand‑alone cinder‑block structure on the edge of one of Kolwezi’s teeming cités populaires—slums where wastewater would run in rivulets down dirt hills into patches of garbage. Two walls of the room had been painted green in an effort to lighten the mood, but the color had become caked with grime. The windows were fitted with sheets of metal rather than glass panes. On one of the other walls, which were painted a liverish red, there was a picture of his brother. In the image, Amos, bathed in light, was depicted as an acolyte of the church that Kajumba and the two Mputus—Trésor and Yannick—attended. The church was the “thirtieth Pentecostal community in Congo,” a fading sign painted on the building’s facade proclaimed. It was better to have faith if you were poor and lived in Katanga.

It was not always so. the people of katanga knew their undulating country was rich long before the Europeans conducted their soundings and their sur…