Indonesia’s nickel industry is dirty and dangerous. Over the past few years, the country’s leaders, backed by billions of dollars of Chinese investment, have tried to dominate the global market in a metal that is a core component of the batteries that go into electric vehicles. As the industry has expanded, it’s left huge scars on the landscapes, destroying forests and polluting waterways. In the smouldering factory cities on the island of Sulawesi, dozens of people have died in industrial accidents. When people have protested against the industry, they’ve often been met with force from the police or the military.
Stories about these incidents have often been presented as this being the cost of the green transition — an inevitable compromise if the global economy is to shift away from fossil fuels and avoid catastrophic climate change.
“Dust Money,” from New Lines Magazine and The Gecko Project, challenges that narrative. Rather than seeing the social and environmental damage from the nickel industry as an abstraction, we wanted to frame them as the consequences of political and economic decisions in Indonesia and along the electric vehicle supply chain — deliberate compromises, knowingly made by Indonesia’s political class and its supporters in industry.
Our story shows how Indonesia’s oligarchies have been able to use the smokescreen of a green transition to cement their control over the country’s politics, using their influence to rewrite the country’s laws to roll back civil liberties and human rights. As the right to protest and organise diminishes, miners and industrial companies have been able to cut corners and costs without the scrutiny of civil society, leading to environmental destruction and fatal accidents. Vast areas of critical rainforest have been rezoned for mining. Coal, long the source of wealth and power in Indonesia, has even been rebranded as a clean fuel.
To draw together these overlapping strands, New Lines and The Gecoko Project structured “Dust Money” as a narrative road trip through the physical frontiers of the nickel industry, travelling across Southeast and Central Sulawesi. Our team spent months on the ground, visiting mining sites and smelters, speaking with officials, workers, residents and activists, to capture a full picture of the nickel boom. We wanted to tell at human scale a story that spans thousands of kilometres, and connects impoverished communities clinging to their dwindling livelihoods on the fringes of Indonesian society, to luxury EVs rolling out of showrooms in the US and Europe.
