The following is a guest article by Mark P. Mills.

If you want to know what’s being unleashed by the rush to mandate electric cars for a so-called clean-energy transition, read “Cobalt Red.” It will leave you almost as shaken as its author, Siddharth Kara, who braved lawless militia and state-backed soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo as he visited the fountainheads of the world’s lithium-battery supply chain.

Mr. Kara, a professor of human trafficking and modern slavery at Nottingham University and a senior fellow at Harvard’s School of Public Health, labels himself an activist. His journeys through the Congo’s jungles and mines [… led to his witnessing] the shocking labor and environmental practices that the world papers over with, as the author writes, “vacant statements on zero-tolerance policies and other hollow PR” in pursuit of cobalt.

Why cobalt? Because today’s smartphones, laptops, leaf blowers, toys, and so much more owe their revolutionary portability to the advent of cobalt-infused lithium batteries. …

The heart of Mr. Kara’s mission is to document the use of artisanal mining—that is, human digging and toting by manual, brute force rather than using trucks and backhoes. You’re halfway through the book before Mr. Kara’s bombshell: The artisanal share of the Congo’s output, often dismissed as negligible, may exceed 30%. … In place after place he visited, whether with official escorts or by surreptitious entry, what he saw was “a hellscape of craters and tunnels, patrolled by maniacs with guns.” It was a “lunar wasteland,” a “devastated landscape” that “resembled a battlefield after an aerial bombardment.” [Read the rest in The Wall Street Journal.]