The Trump administration’s push for electric vehicles may risk being tainted by links to forced labor. The Labor Department has added batteries to a list of products that may be made with materials produced with child or forced labor, based on the fact many rely on cobalt, a mineral mined mainly by children in the Democratic Republic of Congo. That’s a blow to the clean energy industry and could add fuel to critics of the White House’s climate policies.
The move will likely prompt a wave of scrutiny of battery and car maker relationships with suppliers in China’s restive Xinjiang region. For example, Republican congressional leaders have launched a probe into Ford’s agreement to license technology from Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., or CATL, to help build a $3.5 billion plant in Michigan. The chairpersons of the House Select Committee on China and the House Ways and Means Committee want to know whether Ford’s deal makes it reliant on a supplier with connections to human rights abuses in Xinjiang.
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E.V. battery manufacturers are pursuing a broad strategy to mitigate their risks, from diversifying supply chains and building more factories in regions that are less subject to controversies to adopting digital “passports” for each unit of lithium-ion batteries. Such passports would include data on each battery’s origin, manufacturing, and usage over its life cycle. They would provide a layer of transparency that could help disentangle a battery’s supply chain from issues like the use of cobalt and nickel, which are in short supply and expensive to buy.
In addition to the Xinjiang move, the Labor Department’s move to add batteries to its list of products containing materials that have been known to be made with child or forced labor could lead to more detentions at the border by customs agents, who are required to block imports of goods that have been imported using forced labor. Until now, enforcement of a year-old U.S. law that bans the import of goods made in Xinjiang, China’s far-west Xinjiang province, has focused mainly on solar panels, tomatoes, and cotton apparel. But now components that may include lithium-ion batteries, tires, and significant automobile raw materials, aluminum, and steel are being subjected to detentions, according to a document seen by Reuters and agency statistics and sources.
The Xinjiang-related moves by the Labor Department, Customs and Immigration Services, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, and the State Department’s Office of Immigration and Naturalization are likely to have a broad ripple effect that could threaten the growth of the global E.V. market. E.V.s are already facing a series of hurdles in the United States, including a federal tax credit for buyers that requires that they be made with 80 percent North American-sourced and 100 percent domestically manufactured or assembled parts to qualify. That could slow the E.V. market even further, as it is already struggling to compete with gas-powered cars that are more affordable and easier to drive.