Unreported World investigates the dirty business of cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The mineral is fuelling the planet’s green revolution, but at what cost?
Around seventy percent of the world’s cobalt is mined in the Central African country, mostly from the southern Katanga area, thought to be one of the ten most polluted places on earth. Reporter Jamal Osman travels to Kolwezi, a city dependent on supplying Cobalt, a critical component for electric cars and rechargeable batteries. Residents are employed by large multinational companies, or in smaller, and more dangerous artisanal mines. We meet the men who clamber down dark weaving airless tunnels to extract cobalt for as little as $150 per month. But is the paycheck worth the health risks that doctors have uncovered?
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Yeah, not watching a propaganda video that is encouraging not going green. Tarnish mining operations, not the idea of going green.
Going green is a massive umbrella term that includes things like EVs, but also planting trees, reducing waste, recycling, walking instead of driving, public transit. This is just an inflammatory clickbait title.
EVs aren’t even really going green. They are less destructive than ICEVs, but they’re still awful for the environment.
Yes yes the merits can be debated left and right, it doesn’t change my point that they’re tarnishing the entire idea of going green.
Look, this one thing you can do to go green is bad! So you might as well not do anything!
Yeah I was agreeing with you.
This is literally oil company propaganda. Oil extraction is an absolutely massive humanitarian cost that dwarfs all the cobalt mines in existence.
Cobalt extraction in DRC is an inexcusable humanitarian cost as well. I don’t deny that.
But oil companies like to run the line that evironmentalism and exploitation of labor are going hand in hand. The truth is that exploitation and capitalism are the bedfellows and cause here. Just as they are on a much larger scale with oil. Environmentalism has nothing to do with it. Greed, racism, a long history of oppression, and the psychopaths who run our world are to blame. Not “going green”.
A proper title and focus of this film would be " Making Money: The toxic cost of capitalism and greed".
