Watch This: Joe Rogan's Podcast Guest Exposes The DARK Truth Behind Mining EV Batteries

Cobalt is one of the major minerals that must be mined and refined to ensure that the devices that make up our modern world function.

Unfortunately, as Fox News reports, cobalt mining has a decidedly dark side. The industry that tears cobalt out of the ground relies largely on child labor and slavery in the developing world. Siddharth Kara, author of “Cobalt Red: How The Blood of The Congo Powers Our Lives,” recently appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast to explain the moral cost of using cobalt to run our devices.

Much of the cobalt used in modern devices comes from the Congo. Cobalt mines in that African country rely on child slave labor to operate. Conditions in those mines, according to Kara, are “appalling.”

December 26, 2022

One of the reasons that industrial cobalt mines are run with child slave labor is that Chinese companies own them. Kara explained, “Before anyone knew what was happening, [the] Chinese government [and] Chinese mining companies took control of almost all the big mines and the local population has been displaced.” The Congolese authorities are “under duress,” and they can do very little if anything.

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Kara explained what the child slave laborers experienced in the cobalt mines. “They dig in absolutely subhuman, gut-wrenching conditions for a dollar a day, feeding cobalt up the supply chain into all the phones, all the tablets, and especially electric cars.”

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December 26, 2022

The Biden Administration, in its zeal to create a green energy future, seems to have turned a blind eye to the conditions in African cobalt mines. Biden has recently agreed with the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia to bolster the green energy supply chain even though the arrangement continues relying on child slave labor and financially benefits the Chinese owners of the mines.

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The tech and energy companies that rely on the flow of minerals, such as cobalt, need to be more concerned about the cost of acquiring them. As Kara noted, “This is the bottom of the supply chain of your iPhone, of your Tesla, of your Samsung.”

Indeed, little or no thought has been given to applying pressure to improve the conditions in the African mines or finding alternate sources of minerals like cobalt in parts of the world where they can be mined more ethically.