America's clean energy transition is long overdue for a harder conversation. Behind the solar panels, electric vehicles, and lithium-ion batteries powering the green economy lies a deeply troubling supply chain , one rooted in child labor, geopolitical dependence on China, and the machinery of modern slavery.
Ascend Consulting DC founder and CEO Anne Basham recently laid out the full scope of this crisis in a piece published by The Daily Signal. The argument is straightforward but urgent: as long as American clean energy policy relies on minerals extracted under exploitative conditions and processed through Chinese-controlled supply chains, we are not building a cleaner future , we are subsidizing a darker one.
The Cobalt Problem
At the center of the issue is cobalt, a critical mineral found in nearly every lithium-ion battery on the market. A significant portion of the world's cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where tens of thousands of children , some as young as six years old , work in dangerous, often deadly mining conditions for wages that rarely exceed a few dollars a day. These are not abstract statistics. They represent real children, laboring in toxic environments so that consumers in wealthy nations can charge their phones and drive electric cars.
Making matters worse, Chinese companies have come to dominate the industrial cobalt mining sector in Congo, and the minerals flow back to China for refining , much of it through the Xinjiang region, where the Uyghur population has been subjected to forced labor under what many governments and human rights organizations have characterized as genocidal conditions. China also controls the overwhelming majority of the world's rare earth element refining capacity, giving it extraordinary leverage over the industries of the future.
A National Security Dimension
This isn't only a human rights issue , it's a strategic vulnerability. When the supply chains underpinning American energy infrastructure run through an adversarial nation, that nation holds enormous power over U.S. economic and military resilience. Senior intelligence officials from both the U.S. and the United Kingdom have identified China as the foremost long-term threat to Western security. Dependence on Beijing-controlled mineral networks compounds that threat in ways that are difficult to unwind once entrenched.
Legislation as a First Step
Basham's piece highlights the One Big Beautiful Bill Act as a meaningful turning point , legislation designed to expand domestic energy production, invest in traceable and transparent supply chains, and reduce American reliance on adversarial nations for critical minerals. The goal is not to slow the clean energy transition, but to ensure it is built on a foundation consistent with American values: no forced labor, no child exploitation, no geopolitical vulnerability dressed up as progress.
Bipartisan voices in Congress have been raising alarms on this issue for years, and a growing chorus of lawmakers, human rights advocates, and national security experts agree that clean energy policy must reckon with its supply chain consequences.
The Core Principle
At Ascend, our work is grounded in the belief that human dignity and national security are inseparable. A future powered by renewable energy is worth pursuing , but not if it is built on the backs of trafficked children or funneled through the infrastructure of authoritarian regimes. The transition to clean energy must be clean in every sense of the word.
Read Anne Basham's full analysis in The Daily Signal here.