The elements of power, p.2
The Elements of Power, page 2
But Apple was not telling the whole truth. It had built a vastly profitable supply chain on the back of cheap extraction from poor countries like Congo and cheap manufacturing, especially in China. Its supply-chain audits only disclosed a limited range of information. The company said it was not buying hand-mined cobalt. But its very own approved smelter list, released that year, included a company, Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, that was involved in some of the worst human-rights abuses—like child labor and wage slavery—in Congo.
A few months after critical metals lawsuits were filed, Apple quietly issued a statement that it would completely halt buying minerals like tin and tantalum from Congo and Rwanda, parties to the conflict in the East. (Other essential minerals like cobalt, which overwhelmingly comes from mines in southern Congo, were not included in this announcement.) “We believe that this statement is a very significant development in the international consensus and the international world of supply chain,” Peter Sahlas, one of Congo’s lawyers, told me. Still, he said that Apple’s announcement was only the beginning. “It doesn’t mean that we’re going to go away.” Other companies needed to be scrutinized, he said. “Apple didn’t become a $3 trillion company without using conflict minerals, and we’re going to hold them to account for that.”
* * *
For half a decade, I have seen the battery transition up close, in some of the places where it has had its greatest effects. In Congo, in Indonesia, and in the Western Sahara, I saw where battery minerals are mined and spoke to people whose lives have been changed by the new energy map. I traveled to France and Germany to see how cars are being produced using lithium-ion batteries, and to Belgium, where the original colonial supply chain was forged. In Japan, I saw where the lithium-ion industry first arose and later collapsed, and in China, I saw where a new one was being built. In London and Switzerland, I spoke to traders of the minerals that make the batteries. In the United States, I learned about how the country has been trying to revamp its mining and battery industries.
I made my first trip to Congo in May 2019. There, I saw firsthand how some of the poorest people toiled in the country’s copper-and-cobalt mines, employing techniques that had been abandoned as far back as the 1700s in many other countries. I returned home to news that Elon Musk had raised $2.7 billion for Tesla. Later that year, I visited Congo again. I showed my phone to Ziki, a fifteen-year-old former child miner, and said that the latest smartphone models, which contained some of the metals whose ores he used to dig up, cost upward of $1,000. “I have sadness in my heart when I think of people who buy the minerals,” Ziki said. “They make so much money, and we have to stay like this.”
On these trips and four additional visits to Congo, I saw mine sites, spoke to child laborers who dug out the minerals, and met with executives who ensured that these lucrative extracts flowed into factories and ultimately into the hands of consumers. I chatted with the politicians and the spies shaping the geopolitics of this new power. As an expert witness, I gave testimony to the United States Congress about just how dangerous this supply chain could be, geopolitically and environmentally.
I was lucky. Some of my friends and colleagues who tried to speak the truth, in Congo especially, were locked up and tortured.
I was detained, twice, as I tried to investigate aspects of the battery supply chain. A reporting assignment in 2017 occasioned my ejection from the Western Sahara by Moroccan authorities. They were concerned about their control over the supply of phosphate, which had started to be used in some lithium-ion batteries. While working with the Congolese journalist Jeeftour “Jeef” Kazadi Kamwanga in 2022, in the city of Lubumbashi, I was detained on spurious charges by the Congolese secret police. Congo’s copper, cobalt, and lithium resources were their priority. I was released after six days and banned from the country. Kazadi was detained for almost three weeks.
Over and again, in less dramatic ways, I was stymied, frozen out, and told not to report this story. Emails went unanswered and calls were cut short. People would often only meet me in private locations and on the condition of anonymity. Governments even refused me entry into their countries. In 2018, as I was first conceiving this book, I traveled to China on a broad informational trip, where I met some of the players in that country’s international business scene. When I tried to go back, in 2023, the consulate in New York would not issue me a visa.
This was a book on batteries, I thought, a topic that might cause eyes to glaze over during dinner talk. But as I delved further into the world of lithium-ion, I realized that it was not simply a story about sockets and charges—it was also a story about control and immense power.
* * *
It might have seemed that power had become more dispersed in the first decades of the twenty-first century, placed through digital wizardry into the hands of the multitudes, but the inverse had also happened: Power had become more and more centralized, not just by Musk and executives at tech firms but by governments. States used technology, and especially technology powered by lithium-ion batteries, to extend their reach into every aspect of life.
In a single fortnight in 2024, for instance, the Canadian government announced 100 percent tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, which were threatening to flood the market and push out cars made by traditional manufacturers, and thousands of lithium-ion-powered pagers had been detonated in Lebanon, killing and maiming civilians and militants alike. The pagers, which had been bought by Hezbollah, a secretive terror-group-cum-political-party, were widely thought to have been detonated by the group’s enemies in Israel’s intelligence service. Lithium-ion batteries were everywhere—even in some of the most secretive hideouts on the planet.
These batteries and the materials used to make them were themselves protagonists in the wars—hot and cold and commercial—that have come to scar the history of the twenty-first century. The people who controlled these resources wielded an extraordinary amount of political power, the power to shape world affairs.
China had taken an early lead in battery making, but by the early 2020s, governments in the U.S. and in Europe were cottoning on to the conundrums raised by batteries and their manufacturing. President Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14017 occasioned a strategic review of critical mineral supply chains conducted by the U.S. Department of Defense in 2021 and 2022 that recommended the Pentagon focus on U.S. production of critical minerals, engage with allies and partners, and mitigate foreign control of the supply chains. As one former Defense Department expert told me in 2024, this meant, for example, that the U.S. military stopped using Chinese-produced cobalt to build military equipment.
It wasn’t just technologists who had become filthy rich off lithium-ion batteries. Thanks to the preponderance of metals and minerals that go into them, mining firms and commodities traders were also getting flush. Lithium, cobalt, nickel, phosphate, graphite, and other materials were feeding what came to be called “the revenge of the miners.”
The miners were passed over by the finance and media worlds, and by the world at large, in the 2000s, as tech companies promised a shiny digital future and conjured dollars out of thin air. But they instinctively understood a basic truth about human society: Everything we use, everything we eat, everything we work and play with—it’s all either grown or dug out of the ground. Mines and mining companies had long been considered dirty, a pollutive anachronism, but, all of a sudden, everyone was realizing that they needed people who carved open the earth in search of its riches.
And somewhere in this mix was hope. Hope that the people who controlled this new power might have answers to the complex questions around humankind’s impact on the climate and the planet. After all, multiple studies have shown that a lithium-ion battery, if used correctly and long enough, can help reduce the carbon footprint of our society, which was only racing faster and faster.
* * *
By the mid-2020s, almost everyone on the planet (except, perhaps, members of uncontacted tribes) had some kind of exposure to lithium-ion batteries. They powered cell phones, breathed life into laptops and other portable devices, allowed for smokeless cars and motorbikes.
A tourist in London, say, might be knocked off her electric bike by an electric bus, all while looking at her lithium-ion-powered iPhone. Lithium-ion-propelled drones had changed the face of modern warfare and of videography. And it wasn’t just the phones and cars and drones: Garden tools, cattle prods, gas detectors, vapes, air enrichers, industrial robots, and children’s toys all used lithium-ion technology. Batteries were being touted as the solution to the climate crisis, since they produced no emissions (at least not when they were used, that is—production emissions were a very different story). Militaries relied on lithium-ion when wars were waged; doctors used lithium-ion-powered medical devices to save lives—pacemakers, drug pumps, defibrillators. In fact, if you’re reading this book on a screen, you’re probably using lithium-ion technology right now.
How did we get to this point, and how might we make things better? This book is the story of the genius that produced the batteries, the men—and it has mainly been men—and women who turned them to their profit, and the people who have suffered on account of our lust for concentrating ever more power in ever smaller devices. It is also the story of how the geology and colonization of Congo were key factors in shaping the supply chain we use today. Without Congo, the battery revolution would have been much slower.
This story is one of tremendous innovation, of political intrigue, of the rise and fall of empires. But it is also a tragic saga whose protagonists are some of the poorest people in the world. And it is the tragedy of Congo. Why is a country so rich in minerals still so poor? How could a U.S. mining executive who lived in Congo and loved the country tell me, in 2023, “It’s always going to be the land of maybe, and it’s never going to be the land of dreams”? Threaded through this narrative is the history of the country, which sits at the bottom of the supply chain for many of the metals that power our devices, and exemplifies the consequences of the renewable energy revolution. Congo, after all, is the place that people say will power the green, fossil-fuel-free future.
Part 1 tells the tale of the conditions that wrought the current rush for minerals and batteries, during the colonial days in Congo, and in the United States, during the 1960s and ’70s.
Part 2 examines how batteries were perfected, how Cold War–era geopolitical rivalries and political competition allowed for a predatory system to emerge, and how globalization set the stage for China’s primacy in lithium-ion battery production.
Part 3 focuses on how batteries came to be in cars, and how new and more powerful batteries were created to power them; how China understood it could control and profit from that industry; and how the mining system that feeds this industry pollutes and exploits.
Part 4 describes the system that is currently in place, how Congolese children still mine for cobalt and other metals in abysmal conditions, and how industrial mining functions. It shows how seas are poisoned in Indonesia in the search for metals like nickel and how China consolidated control of the supply chain. Seen from this vantage point, the green transition looks more like a displacement of pollution from wealthy cities to poor, rural communities.
Part 5 explores how remarkable new technologies have been created to address issues up and down the supply chain, as well as how, in Congo and in the Western Sahara, there still exist stumbling blocks when it comes to technologies like batteries based on iron and phosphates. I also tell the tale of my own detention to show just how the status quo is enforced. Lastly, I look at the U.S. and Europe’s rude awakening to China’s dominance of the supply chain, and their attempts to wrest back control.
* * *
An increasing number of people worldwide began trading in their combustion-engine cars for electric vehicles at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. By the end of 2024, there were forty million electric vehicles in use globally. In the States, they accounted for 10 percent of the market. And they were set to grow in popularity: That summer, researchers at Bloomberg predicted that more than thirty million electric vehicles would be sold in 2027 (33 percent of all vehicles globally) and that by 2070, this number would reach seventy-three million (73 percent of global car sales).
By late 2024, even Trump, a longtime EV skeptic, was getting on board, despite announcing that he would cut tax credits for electric vehicles. Trump wasn’t exactly consistent, though: During his first administration, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, was involved in a successful lobbying effort to exempt consumer electronics from tariffs on Chinese goods; during Trump’s second administration, the company looked vulnerable to tariffs, especially since many of its lithium-ion-powered devices are manufactured by BYD, a huge electric vehicle manufacturer and Tesla competitor.
Then, in March 2025, after a precipitous fall in Tesla’s share price, partly thanks to Musk’s political activities but also thanks to a slowing pace of new vehicle deliveries, Trump used the South Lawn of the White House to promote the electric car company. The company’s Cybertruck, he said, had the “coolest” design, and he tweeted that “Radical Left Lunatics” were trying to destroy Tesla.
But people were starting to question whether the electric vision of the future is quite as green as its advocates have liked to trumpet. Some of the questions they are asking revolve around how ethical electric vehicles are and how battery minerals are produced. “Last night Teslas burned again in Berlin,” a German anarchist website announced after a night of car destruction in June 2024. “In Congo, children work themselves to death for cobalt, and new toxic lithium mines are being opened all over the world to satisfy the hunger of the car industry.”
By 2025, such attacks had spread to the U.S., with Tesla cars being vandalized across the country, often in response to Musk’s political involvement with Trump. A disgruntled veteran blew himself up in a Tesla Cybertruck in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day. In Oregon, someone fired bullets into a Tesla dealership. Tesla superchargers from Massachusetts to Italy were set on fire.
The powerful are violently lashing out in response, not just at people who are committing vandalism, but at people who dare ask questions about Musk and Tesla. Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general, said that Tesla vandals would be prosecuted as domestic terrorists, and Elon Musk told Bret Baier on Fox that the “real villains” are not the vandals but “the people pushing the propaganda.” On-screen, he issued a threat: “The president’s made it clear: We’re going to go after them.” When Musk fell out with Trump, the proclamations stopped but the prosecutions continued.
* * *
This is not a book that advocates for simplistic solutions. I don’t believe violence and vandalism are the answer, and I don’t think we should turn away from mining, at least mining ethically, that is, and the power of human endeavor.
What’s more, I do not believe that a return to fossil fuels would solve any of the problems that have been unleashed by the battery revolution. I have seen firsthand how global warming is drying out the African Sahel, how it is melting ice caps in Antarctica, and how it has prolonged drought conditions in El Salvador. And, in any case, cobalt, one of the metals I focus on most, is used in some types of fossil-fuel production.
Don’t get me wrong—batteries, and the cobalt, lithium, and other metals that are used to create them, are not intrinsically bad. In fact, we need more solutions to tackle a warming planet, and lithium-ion batteries should be among them. But electric vehicles as they are currently built are not always a great solution. If you count scope one, two, and three emissions—that is, indirect emissions and those that arise from production as well as from the tailpipe—several studies have shown electric vehicles are more polluting than hybrid vehicles in most places. If you take a Tesla Model 3 and compare it to a Toyota Prius, the Model 3 is more polluting than the Prius in China, the U.S., and Germany over both the short and the long term. Only in countries that use a majority of clean energy—countries like Congo, incidentally, although the grid there is so unreliable that an electric vehicle would be a risky prospect for any owner—are Teslas less polluting. This is because the manufacturing of electric vehicles and their batteries is hugely emissions intensive, and since people tend to upgrade more quickly in the electric realm, they end up adding more pollution to the environment. That’s to say, if you buy a new Tesla every 3.6 years, like the average U.S. customer, you’re actually doing more harm than good.
I don’t have grand answers to the questions that arise from this book. I have approached them as a journalist, and tried to understand them in their complexity. I believe that before we jump into a better future, we must know something of the past and present. This book is an attempt to delineate crises of the status quo and look at the forces shaping where we are going.
We know how to make batteries. We know that they can help us cut down on emissions. And we know how to sustainably mine the metals that make them. But at the moment, with a few exceptions, some of which I explore in this book, we are not doing these things. Instead, we are desperately scrambling into the abyss. We are, by and large, cloaking a lack of real action in hollow virtue signaling while ignoring solutions that are sitting right in front of us, solutions that mean that local communities can share in the world’s mineral wealth without destroying their lives and homes, and at the same time turning a blind eye to those whose only motive is squeezing out profit from a dying world.
