Assaults and Batteries

Nicolas Niarchos digs up the hidden costs behind your rechargeables.

By Tim Hirschel-BurnsFebruary 24, 2026

• Politics

• Economics and Finance

THERE’S A GOOD chance the smartphone in your pocket contains cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Though the material only makes up a few grams in each rechargeable phone battery, Congo’s cobalt industry operates at a massive scale. It is the largest producer in the world.

While rechargeable battery technology is not new—Sony first used a lithium-ion battery in a camcorder in 1991—the shift to a renewably powered world has demanded far more battery use, especially with the rapid growth of the electric vehicle industry. EVs need a vessel to store their charge, and lithium-ion batteries provide the answer, requiring about 1,000 times as much cobalt as a phone.

The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth, a new book by journalist Nicolas Niarchos, paints a semi-apocalyptic vision of that cobalt’s origins: corrupt bargains between politicians and foreign companies, displacement and environmental destruction, cave-ins that bury miners alive. The book comes as part of a surge of interest in the unsavory trade-offs behind the energy transition (other notable members of this emerging genre include Thea Riofrancos’s Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism from last year and Siddharth Kara’s Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives from 2022). As Niarchos puts it, the energy transition exchanges “cleaner power at home for pollution and suffering elsewhere.”

It is a pertinent question: how to balance the harms of a fossil-powered world with the harms of a renewably powered world? But it is also a question that can float in the ether without an object of address. Is it the UN Conference of the Parties process, which—even before the United States, the world’s biggest historic emitter, withdrew in January—was far better at setting climate targets than figuring out how to achieve them? Is it OPEC, or some imagined equivalent of critical minerals producers? Is it the Chinese government, the actor driving renewable energy expansion more than anyone else? To imagine the global energy transition as a devil’s bargain implies that we live in a world organized enough to present Satan with a collective negotiating position.

If we ever did sit down for collective moral reflection, though, we would see that a rapid energy transition is imperative, and that a more ethical version of it is possible. But this is not our reality: The Elements of Power portrays an energy transition more akin to an amoral free-for-all. The bodies that could—at least in theory—coordinate a just global response to climate change are now being hollowed out and discarded. The US government can’t decide whether it is fighting for or against climate change. What’s left is a world where China has planned its way to renewable energy dominance, cobalt mining companies and corrupt politicians jockey for their slice of the pie, and no one ever stops to ask whether any of this is fair to those with tools in hand. In Niarchos’s coverage, everything comes down to power—and those with the least of it are the ones digging up the elements.

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The Elements of Power does not devote much time to telling us how the world should approach the energy transition. Instead, it is jam-packed with deep reporting on the battery supply chain. This work came at real personal risk: in July 2022, the Congolese government detained Niarchos and his colleague Jeef Kazadi Kamwanga, and kicked Niarchos out of the country soon after.

Some of Niarchos’s reporting will be revelatory to expert audiences. It is also delivered at such density that it can be difficult to discern what lessons he would like us to take. Still, The Elements of Power provides an important informational base for analyzing the energy transition.

Niarchos’s book touches on other critical minerals such as nickel and lithium, and chapters take place in a diversity of locations, from Indonesia to Idaho. But the bulk of The Elements of Power is about two things: battery technology and Congolese cobalt. Because the DR Congo produces around 70 percent of the world’s cobalt—a far greater portion of global supply than even Saudi Arabia’s share of the world’s oil—the country is central to the battery supply chain.

While the rush for cobalt is more recent, the Congo has long been a site of rapacious and brutal extraction. King Leopold II of Belgium ran it as his personal colony, maiming and murdering rubber harvesters. Independence leader Patrice Lumumba became the country’s first democratically elected prime minister in 1960, but a secessionist movement in the mineral-rich southern region of Katanga preoccupied much of his short tenure. Joseph-Désiré Mobutu soon overthrew Lumumba and handed him over to Katangan troops to be murdered—with crucial financial, logistical, and technical support from the United States and Belgium. The breakdown of Mobutu’s rule in the 1990s sparked a series of conflicts that were the world’s deadliest since World War II, and they still rage in parts of the country’s east. Warring parties have often used the Congo’s mineral resources to fund themselves.

The evolution of battery technology gave the DR Congo an added degree of global importance. Niarchos’s history of batteries starts over a century ago, when electric vehicles seemed poised for takeoff. The first car to hit 100 kilometers per hour was electric. Even Henry Ford’s wife, Clara, drove an electric vehicle. 

EVs faded into the background as the internal combustion engine won out, but oil supply fears and the OPEC crisis sparked renewed interest in electric vehicles in the 1960s and ’70s. Exxon scientist M. Stanley Whittingham made important advances, but these batteries’ unfortunate tendency to light on fire held back the possibility of large-scale utilization, and Exxon eventually lost interest. The creation of the lithium-ion battery in Japan in the 1980s changed the game: Akira Yoshino, Whittingham, and John B. Goodenough would later win a Nobel Prize for their contributions. A key component of this breakthrough? Cobalt.

Previously an afterthought among the Congo’s mineral riches, cobalt has since assumed extraordinary value, in turn raising the stakes of Congo’s already extractive economy. Niarchos details a constant churn of politicians and foreign companies coming to mining agreements only to double-cross each other later; Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler, sanctioned in 2017 by the US Treasury Department for corrupt business practices—including more than $100 million in bribes—is rarely far from the negotiations.

These deals have become increasingly geopolitically relevant as China and the United States vie for control of the market. The Elements of Power includes an impressive account of how China spent decades investing in battery technology research and incentivizing EV innovation. With minerals central to this supply chain, Chinese firms have expanded their role in the Congolese mining sector via direct acquisition, joint ventures, and major infrastructure projects like Belt and Road Initiative investments.

In contrast, the United States’ distraction and division has left it behind the curve. The Biden administration aimed to spark a green manufacturing revival at home, acknowledging the importance of foreign minerals to their domestic ends. But this attention was both late and half-hearted. The Lobito Corridor project—which would have refurbished a colonial-era railway to Angola with the dual promise of Congolese economic development and the facilitation of mineral exports—generated far more hype in DC think tanks than it did construction in the Congo.

For its part, the current Trump administration examined a situation where rapacious mining was enabling the expansion of renewable energy, and decided the only part they liked was the rapacious mining. In December, Trump engineered a peace deal between the DR Congo and Rwanda, which has done little to stop the violence in eastern Congo. Perhaps its true goal was to expand access to Congolese minerals, part of a critical minerals push that has shaped Trump’s engagement on Greenland, Ukraine, and more.

At the base of these global supply chains are the people who extract it from the ground, as Niarchos goes to impressive lengths to show. Most Congolese cobalt comes from mines that are modestly professional and industrialized, if still prone to severe abuses. But most Congolese people who are involved in the sector are classified as “artisanal miners.” (The French term “creuseur,” which translates as “digger,” is far less euphemistic.)

These artisanal miners work in horrifying conditions. Many are children. Miners are often barefoot. They generally use rudimentary instruments to chip away at mines that are themselves prone to collapse. But artisanal miners are there largely by choice (albeit extraordinarily constrained), with Congo’s extractive economy so devoid of alternative opportunities that they deem the perilous search for minerals to be their best option, a peril that bleeds beyond working hours: Niarchos details cases of diggers sneaking into official mines at night, sometimes after paying off security guards. The mining community of Kasulo, for example, became a pockmarked, structurally unsound mess as people caught up in the frenzy began digging tunnels underneath their own yards.

Despite various corporate initiatives that claim to reduce mining abuses, artisanally mined cobalt still makes its way into supply chains that one day spit out smartphones, drones, and electric vehicles.

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When faced with the most binary, crude choice, this version of the energy transition would still be far superior to a fossil-fueled world. Fossil-fuel extraction generates its own violence and pollution. (See Deepwater Horizon, Shell in Nigeria, and the US seizure of Venezuelan oil.) And a fossil-powered world simply demands far more extraction for the same amount of energy. Gasoline-powered cars and gas-heated homes require a continuous supply of fuel, whereas cobalt only needs to be extracted once to serve the life of a battery. Battery recycling—a feasible endeavor, if far from guaranteed—further reduces the need for extraction.

Most importantly, even if renewable energy depends on mining, its use does not have the catastrophic side effect of pushing humanity outside of the climatic conditions on which we have always depended. Climate change’s consequences fall most harshly on countries like the DR Congo: small contributors to climate change, with few means to respond to it, and situated in latitudes barely within the thresholds of habitability.

Of course, we do not face a binary choice between runaway climate change and an energy transition that leaves Congolese miners crushed in its wake. For one, reducing energy consumption would reduce the need for mining. Some steps to get there could even improve quality of life: walkable cities, more public transit, improved insulation. But ensuring decent standards of living will demand more mining, especially when much of the world still lacks energy for refrigeration, washing machines, and effective cooling.

Facing these circumstances, many call for prioritizing mining in developed countries over countries like the DR Congo—such onshoring also has significant geopolitical motivations. But this is more viable for some minerals than for others, and moving mining to developed countries would strip mineral-rich developing countries of what should be an opportunity for enormous profit.

Natural resource wealth is anything but a guaranteed ticket to development, but it can be done. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates rode their oil riches to (politically and socially regressive) prosperity, and Botswana’s effective management of its diamonds has made it one of the richest countries in Africa. In contrast, if the mining industry were to evacuate the DR Congo tomorrow, the country would be left with environmental degradation, mass unemployment, and a public budget starved of its biggest source of revenue.

In a humane energy transition, the DR Congo would increase domestic processing, rather than ship raw materials abroad with little benefit to its people. It would use the windfalls of its mineral riches to diversify its economy and expand social services. Overcoming mass corruption and atrocious working conditions would require the painstaking work of building effective supply chain verification schemes, expanding space for Congolese social movements, and ensuring consequences for the facilitators of corruption—many of whom work in glass office buildings in the world’s commercial capitals.

But here is the problem: we have developed an economy that is far more globalized than the mechanisms we have to govern it. If a humane energy transition would encompass enforcing child labor regulation in the Congo and tamping down American car culture and building solar farms in Bangladesh and clamping down on Swiss banks that stash corrupt mining proceeds, what bodies have anything remotely approaching the ability to coordinate it?

In this context, people of conscience are forced to compromise. Spew carbon into the atmosphere, or buy an EV containing ethically dubious cobalt? Take a short-haul flight knowing that your seat is responsible for more emissions than most Congolese people produce in a year, or spend many times longer sitting on one of the United States’ neglected trains?

One does not need to be in favor of abolishing national sovereignty to want international governance mechanisms commensurate with the extent of our global interconnection. If humanity is to break out of a trade-off between climate catastrophe and destructive mining—or even just to prevent climate catastrophe—we need to be able to act as something closer to a “we.”