Cobalt & child labor: Is there really only bad news?
No. There is a lot of really good news. But what's being reported is the shocking bad-news-only version intended — once again — to smear electric cars.
Thanks for reading my newsletter that separates reality from bullshit in pop culture, of which today’s edition is a prime example: biased reporting to paint a complicated issue in a negative light instead of an accurate one. Bad understanding of problems lead to bad solutions. Monday editions are free; Tuesday and Thursday editions are for paid subscribers only.
Yes, lithium-ion batteries use cobalt. And cobalt has historically come from "artisanal" mines — a pleasant sounding word for mines where the work is done manually, all too often by child laborers making horrible wages.
I watching a news program on PBS the other day, and before posting this, I searched all over to find a link to an online version as a reference for you, but I couldn't — apologies for that, but you’ve probably seen a similar report yourself. The guest was telling of the horrors of this situation. She did mention one point that I almost never hear anyone make, and that’s great: that supply chain auditors are a part of the picture. These are third parties who make sure there are no child laborers (or other violations) in the supply chain for a given major buyer of cobalt, like Apple or Tesla, and a million others. However, she said that the auditing system is fatally flawed in that it has a conflict of interest: the auditors are employed by the mines themselves, and so of course they never report any violations.
At that point I'd had it, and needed to vent. This wasn't exactly misinformation; it was reporting the tiniest, worst segment of an industry as if it represented the whole, which is totally does not. And it was also omitting a lot of facts that put that bad news into perspective.
It is true that to learn to do things well, we have to do them badly at first. This was the case when humans first started to plant crops, it was the case when we first starting sending rockets into space, and it’s the case now when we’re just starting to figure out the best technologies for carbon-free driving. So of course there is bad news, and child labor is very bad news. This TV news guest was not the first person to ever consider these problems, surprisingly, and a lot of progress has been made of which she is apparently unaware.
Here are the bullet points she omitted:
The use of cobalt in batteries at all has a very bleak outlook — have a look at this report — and within a few years demand will be a fraction of what it is now. Even this only considers existing battery technologies; many new technologies are on the horizon with zero cobalt and superior energy density.