The Pause At Oak Flat and the Politics of the Energy Transition

Here’s the letter Joan Pepin, US Forest Service attorney, sent to the Clerk of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit yesterday afternoon. Reuters has the full story, with comment from Rio Tinto, the San Carlos Apache, and the Mayor of Superior, Arizona, who fears investors will be scared away because “the federal government can’t make up its mind.”

I thought I should have a look at the actual Pepin letter and share it, along with the parts of the argument video to which her letter refers — two exchanges dealing with representations made by the US government in Apache Stronghold v. USA. I allowed a little extra discussion in the second clip because it provides important context.


The Biden administration is sure to take some flack over this latest delay, especially because Resolution Copper is “hoping to supply more than a quarter of U.S. copper demand for the energy transition.” Republicans will cry hypocrisy. But the case could also reflect poorly on the Trump administration, which appears not to have taken its formal consultation responsibilities seriously.

In November 2020, just after the election and before her nomination as Secretary of the Interior, Deb Halaand said the Trump administration had “tossed tribal consultation out the window.” A 2020 Harvard Law school report found that “a lack of foundational recognition of tribal sovereignty and the importance of nation to-nation relationships” during the Trump administration had “[undermined] consultation and collaborative efforts.” Upon taking office, Biden set out to repair the damage done by his predecessor, issuing an executive order that reaffirmed the government-to-government relationship and reinstated the consultation mandate.

At a prayer vigil outside the White House last month, San Carlos Apache Tribal Vice Chairman Tao Etpison said “no meaningful consultation has occurred with tribes.” And yet, he added, “the administration is moving forward to give the copper to the Chinese” because that is the most likely place the ore would go for processing.

These are, by now, all familiar political themes of the energy transition: the need for meaningful consultation (and consent), conflicts over land and water use, complaints of administrative delay (and calls for permitting reform), China’s strategic advantage and outsize influence. How we address these issues will determine the kind of transition we ultimately get.

“Attention is Precious”

The title is borrowed from artist Ken Jacobs, and it’s one of the central themes running through the retrospective of Jacobs’ work currently at Broadway Windows. It could also serve as the caption for all the photographs I took when I went to see the exhibition last Friday. Here are a half dozen of them.

Plenty of people have written about the value of attention and the attention economy. What I like about Jacobs’ guidance is that it never demands we pay attention to his work, but asks us to attend to our own. It’s a playful reminder that we make choices, starting with where we focus attention (and how we carry intentions). In an economy built to distract, that’s a timely existential theme.

Enbridge and Indigenous Rights at Citigroup’s Shareholder Meeting

One of the many signs outside Citigroup headquarters during last week’s shareholder meeting.

A proposal brought by several religious orders at last week’s Citigroup annual shareholder meeting asked the company to report on its policies and practices “in respecting internationally-recognized human rights standards for Indigenous Peoples’ rights.” The proposal (page 125) specifically called out Citigroup’s financing of oil and gas operations in the Amazon, which “pose an ‘existential threat’ to Indigenous Peoples” in the region, and it applied equally strong language to the bank’s $5 billion-plus in financing to pipeline company Enbridge:

Indigenous leaders from the Great lakes tribes have called Enbridge’s line 5 pipeline reroute “an act of cultural genocide.” A 2022 ruling found that line 5 was operating illegally on Bad River Band territory since 2013. Michigan Governor Whitmer canceled Enbridge’s certification in 2020, citing “Enbridge’s historic failures and current noncompliance” as jeopardizing the safety of Michigan residents and the environment. Michigan’s twelve federally recognized Tribal Nations requested President Biden to decommission line 5 in 2021, and the pipeline faces ongoing litigation from numerous plaintiffs. The severity of Indigenous opposition is reflected by the Bay Mills Indian Community formally banishing the pipeline from its reservation, noting Enbridge’s deceptive tactics, poor environmental track record, and risk of “catastrophic damage” to Indigenous rights. Companies like Enbridge, financed by Citigroup, consistently fail to meet the international standard of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) with affected tribes.

Here’s audio of the brief discussion of that proposal at the shareholder meeting. Listen closely to Tara Houska present the case for the proposal. What follows is disappointing but no less revealing. Citigroup Chair John C. Dugan tells shareholders the board recommends voting against the proposal; then, after a question about why Citigroup misled shareholders about its financing of Enbridge Lines 3 and 5, Dugan effectively closes the discussion with evasive boilerplate. The board retreats to lawyered statements and specious claims like the one about Enbridge’s “industry-leading engagement policies.” Still, 31.6 percent of Citigroup’s shareholders voted for the proposal — an impressive showing.

P.S. An earlier version of this audio file was not showing up on phones — something to do with the way WordPress converted it, or failed to convert it. Sorry about that. It should work now.

A Shift in Strategy for Antofagasta’s Twin Metals Project

Chart from opensecrets.org

I usually post the quarterly lobbying disclosures for Antofagasta’s Twin Metals project on Twitter, but I am taking a social media break. So here’s a quick post about what this quarter’s disclosures show.

Q1 2023 disclosures reflect a change in strategy after the actions taken last year by the Solicitor of the Interior, the Bureau of Land Management, and the US Forest Service. Lobbying of the executive branch has shifted to the Department of Energy. The focus of the lobbying is now around the energy transition, positioning Twin Metals as “a world-class project to provide the critical metals that a growing and greener world requires.” (That’s from the latest Antofagasta annual report).

It also looks as if the company is off to a slightly more modest start this year, committing a total of $180,000 for the first quarter of 2023. (In 2022, as I noted back in January, Antofagasta spent over 1 million dollars lobbying the US federal government for its project near the Boundary Waters — $1010,000, to be precise. First quarter expenditures were $200,000; second quarter, $290K; Q3, $280K; and Q4, $240K).

Let’s break down that Q1 2023 number.

  • The Daschle Group, the only group that lobbies directly for the Chilean mining company (and not for its Twin Metals US subsidiary), reports $20,000. This is just a retainer: for this quarter, as in the first and fourth quarters of last year, they report no lobbying activity.
  • Brownstein Hyatt continues to command the lion’s share of the Twin Metals lobbying dollars, and with good reason. Former Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt rejoined Brownstein Hyatt after the Trump administration came to its ignominious end; and in 2021 the firm poached Wilmer Hale’s Andrew Spielman, who during the Trump years helped shepherd the Twin Metals project through the agency Bernhardt led. Last year, Brownstein pulled in $490,000 for Twin Metals lobbying; $120,000 of that was billed in Q1 of 2022. In the first quarter of 2023, Brownstein Hyatt reports just a little less for its Twin Metals work: $110,000. The firm lobbied the Senate, the House, and the Department of Energy for “supporting development of mining a project in Minnesota” [sic].
  • Wilmer Hale may no longer lead the Twin Metals lobbying efforts, but the firm still reports $50,000 for the first quarter of 2023. They  lobbied the Senate and the House on “mining issues.”

Antofagasta’s three lobbying firms may have to take a slight haircut this year, if this first quarter sets the pattern; but things could pick up again, especially if Antofagasta can get a favorable judgment in federal court. Currently, the project faces some enormous administrative and legal hurdles, enough to trigger a $177.6M impairment in Antofagasta’s accounting. But the Group, as Antofagasta likes to refer to itself, appears to be taking the long view. Administrations come and go, priorities shift, rules change, and Antofagasta needs to keep its American friends close.

Anti-ESG Activists Come To Intel

A shareholder proposal asking Intel to square its business in China with its ESG commitments looks like a Trojan horse.

The proposal (Proposal 7, p. 130) argues that “Intel’s environmental promises and human rights commitments are belied by its cozy relationship with China, a country that is controlled by the dictatorial and inhumane Chinese Communist Party.”

Doing business with China, which is the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world and which commits genocide against ethnic minorities – [sic] runs counter to everything that Intel claims to stand for. It is therefore critical that the Board commission and publish a third party review that includes experts who are fully aware of the dangers that China poses to ensure that Intel’s actions as a company live up to its words.

It’s brought by the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative organization that has been around since the Reagan era, with longstanding ties to the American Legislative Council (ALEC) and the State Policy Network. The Center also counts among its allies the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), which last year scored a small victory at 3M when one of its proposals on China and human rights garnered an impressive 12 percent support. Intel is a new target for these groups, who claim to be outraged by the company’s about-face apology on Xinjiang in 2021 as well as its sponsorship of the 2022 Olympics.

These days, the Free Enterprise Project is (predictably enough) all about “Woke Capitalism,” a product of “the Left’s Radical ESG Agenda” that will result in “the leftist capture of American corporations.” Or, as they put it in their 2022 Investor Value Voter Guide, “the ESG boosters, both in and out of C-suites, want to make our lives poorer, less reliable and less safe, while enriching the enemies of the West, for no possible good outcome except their own self-aggrandizement.” This is the reasoning behind their opposition to everything from DEI to decarbonization.

This year’s Proxy Preview from As You Sow includes an entire section dedicated to bad faith proposals that sound an awful lot like this one and are in reality “anti-ESG.” The Free Enterprise Project and its allies tend to copy

verbatim the resolved clauses of their ideological opponents, or use language in resolved clauses that makes the resolutions appear to support sustainability objectives—although the rest of the proposals cite right-wing opinion pieces and argue against their purported goal.

The objective is to find a point of leverage, call out corporate hypocrisy, and demonstrate that ESG commitments are a costly and destructive diversion of company resources.

When it comes to human rights in China, right wing activists see that this strategy can get results: “this human rights issue – involving both slave labor and genocide of the minority Muslim Uyghur population at the hands of the CCP – animates factions from both the political right and left.” That’s from the Free Enterprise Project Investor Value report, cited above. As You Sow concurs:

The ideas in anti-ESG resolutions have no traction with investors—nor with many companies—and on average earn 4 percent support or less. The sole exception concerns doing business in China, where the left and right agree that China’s authoritarianism is deeply problematic, as is its persecution of the Uyghur people.

That “exception” helps explain the self-righteous, combative tone of the Free Enterprise Project proposal, and the copy-paste approach they and the NLPC have taken for this year’s proxy season:

Proxy Monitor data showing human rights proposals submitted by the National Center for Public Policy Research and the National Legal and Policy Center.

The question before Intel shareholders is what practical effect voting for this proposal might have. The board of directors opposes it, for all the usual reasons, so it is unlikely to pass; but it could garner enough support to qualify for re-submission. That would bring the Free Enterprise Project back again next year.

More importantly, the proposal would require that Intel engage “experts who are fully aware of the dangers that China poses.” Those are not necessarily human rights experts or even China experts, but people who qualify as experts because they are “fully aware” — that is, ideologically aligned on China with the National Center for Public Policy Research. Think Peter Navarro (or worse): that’s who would be engaging with the company, and whose views the company would “publish.” This doesn’t sound like a constructive way to push the company to raise human rights standards (or improve its business performance); it just sets the stage for right wing bluster, fake outrage, and ideological preening.

It is difficult for me to vote against any measure that asks companies to do more in the area of human rights, and I am disappointed by the Intel board’s boilerplate response. They could do so much better. But in this case I am voting with them and against Proposal 7.

Update. The proposal received 4.31 percent support at the 11 May Annual Stockholders’ Meeting, falling short of the 5 percent needed to qualify for re-submission next year. For more on Trojan Horse proposals, see the brief write-up in this 2021 report (page 59) from Glass Lewis, which I had not read before I wrote this post.

A Piece of Legislative Mischief

Something else worth noting happens toward the end of this video clip, when Stauber tries to plant a green flag. “If you are at all serious about emissions reductions, you will vote to support H.R. 1. We need to pass H.R. 1 for energy independence and critical mineral dominance.”

There has already been plenty of commentary around the misleading claim that this bill would reduce emissions. Common Dreams published a pretty good rundown. Opponents have labeled H.R. 1 the Polluters Over People Act; the Center for Western Priorities notes that it would reverse many of the Inflation Reduction Act’s reforms to the onshore oil and gas leasing program; and as for the notion that this bill is “serious” about the energy transition, Chuck Schumer called that “laughable,” and declared this “wishlist for big oil” Dead On Arrival in the Senate.

Equally specious is the Trumpian claim that this legislation is a formula for “critical mineral dominance.” This US Geological Survey presentation on global distribution of critical minerals or these maps from The Wilson Center suggest just how infeasible that is. Misleading claims and rhetorical swagger on this score can lead to bad policy at home and serious missteps abroad.

Take a closer look and it’s clear that this is an act of legislative mischief. The stated legislative purpose of H.R. 1 is to “lower energy costs by increasing American energy production, exports, infrastructure, and critical minerals processing”; but when it comes to critical minerals the bill does nothing of the sort. In fact, the piece of H.R. 1 Stauber wrote (the not-so-subtly entitled  Permitting for Mining Needs Act, or Permit-MN) would do nothing to help secure “critical minerals dominance.” Instead it would effectively do away with critical minerals.

Permit-MN goes through 30 U.S. Code § 1607, the “Critical Minerals Supply Chain and Reliability” section of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and at every opportunity strikes the word “critical” from the books. It changes the title of the section to “Minerals Supply Chain and Reliability.” It removes the word “critical” from “each place such term appears” in the Sense of Congress section. That section currently reads:

It is the sense of Congress that-
(1) critical minerals are fundamental to the economy, competitiveness, and security of the United States;
(2) many critical minerals are only economic to recover when combined with the production of a host mineral;
(3) to the maximum extent practicable, the critical mineral needs of the United States should be satisfied by minerals responsibly produced and recycled in the United States; and
(4) the Federal permitting process has been identified as an impediment to mineral production and the mineral security of the United States. [emphasis mine.]

Sense becomes nonsense. And Permit-MN makes the same move in subsequent sections, striking the word “critical” wherever it appears. In other words, H.R. 1 would extend the special legislative consideration given to critical minerals, because they are “fundamental to the economy, competitiveness, and security of the United States,” to any and every mining project.

Permit-MN has already won Stauber some favorable local press but it only makes a mockery of serious concerns about national security and the energy transition. What really counts here is not the public interest, or making responsible industrial policy to meet the country’s critical mineral needs, but the immediate financial interests of mining companies. And if this is an indication of the reckless permitting reform we can expect from this Congress, then we are better off leaving things as they are.

ChatGPT does Public Relations in the Wake of an Industrial Accident

This experiment took all of two minutes. It’s got empathy, accountability, and soothing words for investors. A few edits and it’s good to go.

Granted, this is just a little test run. A lark. My request wasn’t even carefully worded. But if you can’t see how this technology will render whole departments, functions, and consultancies redundant, you’re in denial.

The Luna Human Rights Amendment in Context

The amendment Anna Paulina Luna crowed about on Twitter today would appear to give no quarter to bad foreign actors in the mining sector.

A closer look reveals that it’s actually a stripped-down version of a much more robust and far-reaching amendment introduced by Representative Raul Grijalva earlier in the day, which Republicans strenuously opposed. Notably, this narrower version cedes significant ground, giving mining companies a pass on environmental damage and destruction of cultural heritage sites.

Here are a few highlights, just to give the flavor of the discussion.

On The Reliability of Cobalt Red

In my last post, I promised to have more to say about Siddharth Kara’s Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, and in particular about Kara’s reliability as a narrator. This post tries to make good on that promise and set out some markers for further discussion of an issue that comes up repeatedly throughout Cobalt Red — and in all human rights reporting. Highlighting it can, I hope, offer ways to engage critically with Kara’s work and help others do the same.

“Our daily lives are powered by a human and environmental catastrophe in the Congo.”

In Cobalt Red, Siddharth Kara sets out to confront that catastrophe, and to demonstrate that “the ongoing exploitation of the people of the Congo by the rich and powerful invalidates the purported moral foundation of contemporary civilization and drags us back to a time when the people of Africa were valued only by their replacement cost.” This “moral reversion” to the colonial past, he argues, is “itself a form of violence.”

Kara advances that argument in an unapologetically first-person account. Cobalt Red invites readers at every turn to see the conditions in the Copper Belt of the Congo through Kara’s eyes. The book is informed throughout by Kara’s reading of the history and literature of the Congo and colored by his own imagination. How could it be otherwise? Yet the very qualities that make the writing here so compelling, so readable and moving, are those which make it unsettling and disorienting.

At several points, Kara himself has a hard time getting his bearings or coming up with a satisfactory answer to the question put to him by a Congolese man named Josue: “What are you doing here? What are you doing here?…What good will it do?” (Even the Congolese ambassador to the United States tells Kara he does not think a “foreigner” like Kara should be the one to report the Congolese people’s story.) In his attempts to gain access to mining sites, Kara has to invent different answers to Josue’s question; and these cover stories contribute to the sense of uncertainty throughout the book.

To his credit, Kara doesn’t shy from the problem: he foregrounds and tries to make a narrative virtue of it. As a result, the main impression of the Congo one takes away from Cobalt Red is of a world that is often inaccessible, reluctant or afraid to reveal itself to outsiders, only disclosing its harsh and inconvenient truths in moments of frenzy, violence, death, and human suffering.

It’s a difficult storytelling project. It doesn’t help that Kara’s access to the artisanal miners and the artisanal mine sites themselves is checked at every turn, often with the threat of violence, and everything having to do with cobalt mining in the Congo is murky, “opaque and untraceable by design.”

Inevitably, Kara oversteps, imposing on his encounters or filling in where his interlocutors would prefer to remain silent. One striking instance comes about midway through the book, when Kara meets Nikki, a fifteen-year-old mother with a baby strapped to her back as she digs for cobalt in a trench. She works alongside a fourteen-year-old mother named Chance. They rise at dawn, walk thirty minutes from their village to the artisanal mining area, dig, and wash stones together. In a day, they can fill about one raffia sack with cobalt-bearing heterogenite, which will earn them between one and two dollars. Kara counts “at least two hundred children and several hundred adults” digging in the same trench.

Kara starts to interview the two teenage mothers, but Nikki’s daughter is crying and Chance tells him she can’t talk more because she has to get back to work.

Nikki was having no success at consoling her daughter. She tried to feed her, but the infant did not respond. Her cries turned to shrieks. Was she colicky? Had she soiled herself? How did one care for a baby in circumstances such as these, especially when the mother herself was a child? [Kara’s guide] Arthur motioned to me that we should continue down the trench.

Moments later, Kara and Arthur find themselves surrounded by guards, “red-eyed and stinking of liquor” and firing Kalashnikovs into the air. After some back and forth, and an examination of Kara’s phone and documents, a cool-headed Arthur persuades the militia to let them go.

As we exited the artisanal mining area, I caught a glimpse of Nikki one last time. Her daughter had finally calmed down and was sleeping on her back as she dug in the trench. Nikki stared at me blankly, coldly…then with the slightest tremble in her eyes, her expression changed to that of a terrified child. Our eyes locked in recognition. I think we both understood that she was doomed.

Of course, this may not be the moment of mutual understanding Kara makes it out to be. It reads like a re-telling of the Orpheus and Eurydice story, which would line up with Kara’s depiction of the Congo as “hell on earth,” a “hellscape,” but how much is Kara reading into this moment of “recognition”? What does Nikki’s expression convey? Why the dramatic use of ellipses? How much of this is projection? The last we saw of her, Nikki was tending to her child; Kara didn’t stay with her but followed Arthur down the trench. Nikki might well have drawn other conclusions about Kara’s passing interest in her or his intentions.

Kara makes similar moves elsewhere: at a brothel in Kasulo, Kara sees “a young girl wearing a deep violet dress, with her hair tied in pigtails” who gives off a “childlike radiance”; at a church service in Fungurume, “a child looked at me, his wide eyes alight and comforting.” From this look, Kara “understood at last how the people of the Congo survived their daily torment–they loved God with full and fiery hearts and drew comfort from the promise of salvation.”

At other moments in Cobalt Red, nothing so clear comes of such looks and shared glances. At Tenke Fungurume, “no one smiles,” or at least not in Kara’s presence. At the Shabara mine, after a fight distracts Kara’s official minders, Kara “locked eyes with some of the nearby workers. Some gazed back curiously, others defensively, and some looked right through me as if I were just another chunk of stone in the dirt.” Another teenage mother, fifteen-year-old Elodie, orphaned and forced to turn to prostitution to survive, grows “weary of [Kara’s] presence. I was just another unwelcome burden.”

For Kara, Elodie “was the nullity of the world,” and his meeting with her seems to move him more than any other encounter he has in the Congo. Upon hearing that Elodie has died, he sits beneath a tree to pray and ends up imagining her final moments. He cannot: he can only wonder what she thought and knew and felt, but he ends up imagining Elodie, too, praying “to whichever God might be listening, ‘Please take me home.'”

At times Kara has to leave out important details on purpose, to protect his subjects; at others, it’s unclear why he would. To take just one example: a distraught mother living near the Tenke Fungurume mine asks Kara for help for her child Makano, who was badly injured in a mining accident and is now dying. After agonizing over the risks of giving a source money, Kara admits: “I did what I could to assist Makano as discreetly as possible.” What, exactly, did he do?

The uncertainties that attend so many of the encounters in Cobalt Red are compounded by the fact that most of Kara’s interviews are conducted with the help of “numerous guides and translators” like Arthur, Oliver, and Augustin. How much gets lost in translation is impossible to say. At one point, Kara meets a girl named Aimee, who looks to be about eight or nine, rinsing and stacking stones.

I started to speak with her about her work as a group of women gathered around in a protective formation. I had just about managed to learn that Aimee’s parents were dead and that she lived with an aunt in Kanina when she suddenly began to scream at the top of her lungs. The women shouted angrily at me and moved to console the child. The commotion escalated, and the…soldiers rushed over. My translator tried to calm the situation, but Aimee would not stop screaming. I did not understand what I had done to upset her.

He leaves Lake Golf “amid a storm of protest” that he himself caused. Just a few moments earlier, he has been hearing from other workers about “the men” who buy the heterogenite at Lake Golf, but given “all the talking, shouting, and sloshing going on,” he can’t follow up.

His account of a meeting in Tenke seems to involve a similar lapse of understanding: a man named Kafufu tells Kara he has “something urgent” to show him — a village carpeted in sulfuric acid powder — but it is never clear in Kara’s telling why Kafufu is so insistent that it cannot wait. At yet another moment, Kara’s translator Augustin is “distraught after several days of trying to find the words in English that captured the grief being described in Swahili. He would at time drop his head and sob before attempting to translate what was said.”

There are no ready solutions to the brutalities Kara witnesses in the cobalt mines of the Congo, and there are no easy ways to ensure the reliability and truthfulness of what he, or any human rights researcher, witnesses. Kara seems painfully aware of his own project’s limitations, and he embraces the difficulties of translating the suffering of the Congolese people for readers in the rich world.

In an epilogue, he sets out what he considers a “first step” in surmounting these problems: “advancing the ability of the Congolese people to conduct their own research and safely speak for themselves.” We can believe him when he says that “voices on the ground tell a different, if not antithetical, story to the one told at the top.” Ultimately, we at the top have much more to fear from the truth than those at the bottom.

Kara on Mutoshi: A Note on Cobalt Red

Siddharth Kara’s Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives offers another view of the Mutoshi artisanal mining pilot site discussed in Dorothée Baumann-Pauly’s recent white paper. Kara draws many of the same broad conclusions as Baumann-Pauly:

There were several improvements at the Mutoshi mine compared to other artisanal mining sites in the [Democratic Republic of Congo], especially for female workers. Women endured constant harassment and sexual assault at most of the sites I documented. They received pitiful wages for their work and were still expected to run their households and manage children. Even if they were earning anemic wages at [Mutoshi], the reduction in sexual assault was a considerable improvement in their lives. Supplying clean water, toilets, and at least some protective gear also helped mitigate illness and toxic exposure. The mine was not crawling with children or visibly pregnant women. There also did not appear to be any sort of tunnel digging, which prevented the worst tragedies from occurring.

Other parts of Kara’s discussion are hard to reconcile with this picture. Kara has been led to expect that pilot sites like Mutoshi provide “ironclad assurances” that cobalt supply chains are “untainted by child labor or other abuses.” He is disappointed (but not surprised) when he discovers lax oversight and neglect:

Based on everything I saw and heard during my tour of the Mutoshi mine, as well as my subsequent interviews with artisanal miners who worked at the site, the conditions at the…model site did not match what I had been told by some of the [Washington, DC-based NGO] Pact staff in Kolwezi. Specifically, there appeared to be child-mined cobalt entering Mutoshi through the spaghetti-wire fence. Teenagers worked at the site with fake voter registration cards. The radiation officer was not regularly checking radiation levels. Bags of cobalt were not tagged, and cobalt from unknown origins was purchased from external depots and mixed at [a] refining facility in Lubumbashi. Crucially, reduced or delayed wage payments appeared to be a major disincentive for many artisanal miners and was compromising the viability of the entire operation. The purported supply chain transparency and traceability turned out to be a fiction.

For Kara, this fiction is part of ”a shrewd scheme of obfuscation adorned with hypocritical proclamations about the preservation of human rights”; and it is “the latest in a long history of ‘enormous and atrocious’ lies that have tormented the people of the Congo.”

Kara is quoting Joseph Conrad there, and Heart of Darkness is one of the texts to which he returns throughout the book: “spend a short time watching the filth-caked children of the Katanga region scrounge at the earth for cobalt, and you would be unable to determine whether they were working for the benefit of [King] Leopold [II of Belgium] or a tech company.” His emulation of writers like Conrad and Morel, his eagerness to draw historical parallels, and his tendency to dramatize some of his encounters in the Congo all make Cobalt Red both powerful and unsettling – and not least because this kind of writing raises some questions about the narrator’s reliability.

That observation does not discredit or diminish the importance of the account of artisanal mining in Cobalt Red. To the contrary: it’s a place to start engaging with the book and the inherent difficulties of Kara’s project. I’m still grappling with it, and taking some notes to illustrate the point, so I am not going to address it right now.

For the moment, and by way of wrapping up the discussion of Mutoshi, I’ll point out that Kara fails to mention that the Mutoshi pilot was shut down “just a few months” after his September 2019 visit in response to the Covid-19 pandemic (as Baumann-Pauly notes). Kara attributes its closure instead to a failure of “will,” which he casts as a betrayal: the withdrawal of CHEMAF or Chemicals of Africa from the pilot program. I hope to have more to say about all this at some point soon.