The Dark Side of Congo’s Cobalt Rush | Hacker News Reader

The Dark Side of Congo’s Cobalt Rush

newyorker.com

It baffles me that "poor people being mistreated by large corporations" is such a non-story for American media, while "poor people being mistreated by large corporations that make EVs or iPhones" is such a recurring theme, to the extent that it seems it's the iPhones or the EVs that are the issue, rather than the mistreatment.

The optimistic take is that the author is trying to motivate the people who already care about "saving the planet" to also care about exploited workers, though I would have hoped for more constructive suggestions on how to help if that was the case.

The pessimistic take is that this is just a long form essay version of a YouTube thumbnail with a shocked face on it, randomly pressing emotional buttons to attract attention and using any random psychological lever that seems to work.

If this article interested you, I'd recommend the 2011 documentary, Empire of Dust about Chinese engineers working to build roads in the Congo for their mines in this area. Fascinating look at the human side of this from both the Chinese and Congolese perspective:

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2148945/

> Lao Yang and Eddy both work for a company called CREC (Chinese Railway Engineering Company). They have just set up camp near the remote mining town of Kolwezi in the Katanga province of the RDC. The goal of the company i..

I suppose the thing with EVs and iPhones is that the contrast is right there, you can draw a pretty solid line between extremely poor and unfortunate people extracting raw materials and extremely wealthy using the finished product. It's also a link that, I think, a lot of people still aren't quite aware of. There's not a Blood Diamond for cobalt, as far as I know.

Yes, and many of the target readers are emotionally connected in that they are customers who use the finished product.

A lot, more than you think, of poor people in poor countries also own smartphones whose manufacture is facilitated by Coltan extraction.

So, to you, if you are wealthy, you see it as extreme, but in reality the extreme does not exist for a very large proportion of the population.

The areas in the DRC where these precious metals are mined were already fraught with violence. Artisanal mining draws local militias who in turn prey upon the farmers/miners living in the region. I agree the media seems to be targeting companies associated with "digital minerals" but it could be due to the absolute level of suffering that is found in the area. Or, more likely, "slave children" mining for phones resonates with viewers more than "slave children" sewing your T-shirts. I mean, hearing about the exploitation of children in the textile industry is not that exciting anymore. Or, chocolate... Or....

The hand wringing about batteries blows my mind, it's like everybody forgot about Shell Nigeria. Anyone should be able to see that this has nothing to do with technology or rare earth metals, it's simply a pattern of exploitation.

The phrase "Congo's Cobalt Rush" seems to presage mostly dark side to me.

well you never know how many shades of dark there can be..

If you're interested in learning a little more about the Congo's history, I highly recommend Michela Wrong's book In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo. Ignore the sensationalized title and apparently cliche reference to Heart of Darkness, the writing is much smarter than that. She wrote it shortly after Mobutu's death in 1997, after living in the country for several years. You might also know her from a more recent book about Paul Kagame [1].

Perhaps surprisingly, the least sympathetic characters post-independence in In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz might be the World Bank and IMF employees.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Disturb_(book)

And further along this path, if you really want to be saddened / depressed / disgusted, there's King Leopold's Ghost.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004KZOWEG

Yeah, I'm genuinely surprised at how little stain there is on Belgium's international reputation as a result of this. I guess part of it is that the Belgian people themselves had relatively little to do with it while it was happening, and that the affected individuals largely don't speak English, but in terms of "a country goes out and messes up millions of other people for terrible reasons", it's ... up there.

> Perhaps surprisingly, the least sympathetic characters post-independence in In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz might be the World Bank and IMF employees.

Could you elaborate?

Sure. Maybe the easiest way to sum it up is that I saw them as the most callow actors in the story. Even Mobutu is working under real constraints, he has a whole class of people to keep happy, or else the security apparatus around him will fall and he and his family will go with it, and Congolese politics seem febrile and complex in the best of times. I mean, he's certainly a bad guy. But somehow the badness of his western enablers is worse, because they come from orderly, well-off, educated places, and throughout the book they just seem uninterested in actually understanding the country that they're supposed to be experts on. There's a little section Wrong writes about how promotion in these organizations is often a function of just getting aid out and caring a lot less about what said aid actually does, and nearly all of the elite western characters insist after the fact that, actually, none of what happened is their fault, even as Wrong writes about what seem to be, uh, rather less than diligent efforts to actually assess the effectiveness of their methods.

I think it's worth pointing out that at least for EV batteries, this is a trade-off. Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries don't contain cobalt or nickel. We could be building cars with LFP cells, they just would be heavier and/or have shorter range.

LFP is getting better. I think recent cells tend to be in the 150 Wh/kg ballpark, which isn't bad. In the short term I expect we'll probably see LFP in trucks and busses and low and medium-end EVs. Or maybe some new battery technology will come along and the whole trade-off will be moot.

(I think Tesla is already using or planning to use LFP cells from CATL in some of their model 3s. I'm not sure if that's just for the China market or if they're going to use LFP for US models.)

FWIW, I use LFP batteries for my motorcycles and hobbyist needs. Their durability is spectacular, and it is very convenient that they can match the charging voltages for 12V automotive lead-acid systems without any kind of expensive interface.

Of course, this is completely different than using them for large-scale battery packs. Just pointing out that they are already in use in specialty niches today.

I'm using LFP cells in an EV conversion I'm working on.

I could have gotten better range by using used Tesla modules, but then I would have had to deal with liquid cooling, and the modules were an awkward size that didn't really fit conveniently where I wanted to put them. Plus LFP cells are a lot harder to accidentally catch on fire.

175Wh/kg cells were on the market for a few years, and I myself held those in my hands.

There were many claims of LFP at above 200Wh/kg (which is already better than commodity NCM,) but I never seen those with my own eyes.

> I think recent cells tend to be in the 150 Wh/kg ballpark, which isn't bad.

Even better:

https://insideevs.com/news/481770/guoxuan-210-whkg-lfp-batte...

Those sub $100/kWh cells that made the news a while ago are were all LFP.

Wow, that's awesome.

(I hope political and business leaders in the U.S. and Europe see this and interpret it as "uh oh, we need to get our act together on LFP manufacturing before Chinese companies own the whole market" sort of a situation. I think in the U.S. we're too hyper-fixated on making luxury supercars. If we want EVs to eventually replace almost all gas vehicles, that's going to mean figuring out how to make them without using significant amounts of expensive and rare minerals. New technologies may come along, but for now that means using LFP cells.)

This isn't a dark side. It's the other side of the same coin and we try to tuck it away, keep it under the rug, hide it from light.

> side of the same coin and we try to tuck it away, keep it under the rug, hide it from light

if only there were a phrase synonymous with side of a coin hidden from light

Guns, Money, and Cellphones (June 11, 2001):

https://web.archive.org/web/20010813152613/http://www.thesta...

The article is split into 5 pages, but is worth reading, if only to see how little anything has changed in the 20 years this has been a well-known issue.

Funny factoid, if you have an EV, you might be unknowingly using Cuban cobalt, especially if the EV came with claims of "conflict minerals free."

US is somehow closing eyes on that, despite Cuba being sanctioned to the brim by them themselves.

Sherritt International's operations in Cuba are well-known, and their cobalt products are not sold in the United States.

No, it is sold to China, and then the trace naturally vanishes.

Then a Chinese broker comes to an EV battery materials co., and says we have a conflict cobalt for you from Congo, and a conflict free one from "somewhere else."

Sad. Cuban cobalt is definitely not conflict free.

Will you please elaborate? This is interesting and I, and I assume many others, am pretty ignorant with respect to the goings on in Cuba.

I would assume any hard labor mining with chemical exposure/pollution intensive task is not conflict free.

The Cuban regime is known for it's purges against dissidents, homosexuals as well as total censorship and confiscation of goods from it's citizens.

Cuba is Communist. Do some research about the actual conditions there. It's a slave pen and a hellhole.

Conflict free refers to active civil wars / use of non-punitive slave labour.

If you stretch the definition to include Cuba, I will happily stretch it to note that no minerals mined in the US are 'conflict-free', since every mine/pipeline/oil well of note has been built on the bones of a conflict between resource extractors, and communities/groups that they are negatively impacting.

Stretch it enough, and the term loses all meaning.

All labor in Cuba is slave labor. No, the suffering of slaves under communism is not comparable to hippies whining about pipelines.

Oh? All working people are forced to do particular work without pay in Cuba? This is news to me. Here I thought that people there work so that they can keep a roof over their heads, and so that they don't starve.

I'm also not sure where the ~400,000 Cubans who own or work for small, private businesses enter your world view. I guess their presence isn't compatible with your politics, so we will have to pretend they don't exist.

It's also news to me that only hippies have a problem with pipelines, I'd imagine that among other groups, Native Americans whose lands were stolen from them at gunpoint occasionally lodge a complaint or two about them.

People don't own land just because their ancestors occupied it. Do I have a claim to parts of England and Scotland?

Literally all land has been stolen at gunpoint in the past.

What we should be doing is progressing as a civilization, which requires private property and the freedom to erect infrastructure.

Of course, if you will defend the communist, totalitarian, authoritarian, dictatorship Cuba even for one second, there's probably no point in saying any of this to you.

Do you consider yourself a leftist or a progressive? Why do leftists and progressives support illiberal, authoritarian regimes?

The rest of your comment I'm not going to respond to.

What's the conflict in Cuba that is leading to conflict mining there. I'm familiar with the wars / slavery elsewhere but wasn't plugged in on cuba wars.

The dark side of modern prosperity is that it exists through exploitation of the poor. The EU is planning to make their own chip fabs to reduce dependency on Asia, but all that means is they will have to increase exploitation of South America and Africa.

We will happily exploit them and corrupt their governments, but reject "economical refugees" despite us being a major reason of their problems.

The uranium that built the first atomic bombs is said to have come from a Congolese mine.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200803-the-forgotten-mi...

>To be scared, you must first have means. - Odilon Kajumba Kilanga (a poor Congolese miner)

That's so sad.

Timely to note that Tesla is eliminating cobalt from battery production.

Have they made recent claims, or are you referring to the less ambitious plans described in the article?

> Last year, Tesla pledged to use lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, which do not contain cobalt, in some of its electric cars. Huayou stock plummeted. Still, Reuters noted, “it was not clear to what extent Tesla intends to use L.F.P. batteries,” and the company “has no plans to stop” using batteries that contain cobalt.

I think a good definition of Capitalism is displacing the cost of negative externalities in time and space as far away as possible from your profit centre.

You could perhaps define it as Politics-under-Capitalism.

Weren't we supposed to stop using darkness to mean something bad? Like not having blacklists anymore.

I don’t buy into NAACP propaganda so no for me.

Did the NAACP have anything to do with this at all? I rather get the impression that it's something WASPs in left-liberal tech companies and news outlets came up with. Which is why I'm surprised seeing this language in The New Yorker.

"Dark Side" is used here to describe something that cannot be easily seen or is not well known... as in "I cannot see because it's dark". What else would you call it... "un-light"?

It literally has nothing to do with race or skin color.

Curiously "whitewashing" is still used liberally, and specifically to mean "bad stuff that white people do".

Of course it doesn't have anything to do with skin colour either, but rather the metaphorical act of painting over flaws with cheap calcium hydroxide paint in order to hide them rather than actually fix them.

OK, that's fine, but let's not try to inject skin color issues into everything please. It serves no good purpose but to reduce people, and arguments, down to the color of some individual's skin - a trait that has nothing to do with the argument being put forth.

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