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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

> It is important to remember that we are currently extracting megatons of fossil

Extracting oil doesn't leave the total devastation behind it as extracting cobalt does [1]. A several orders of magnitude increase in that sort of abomination that I linked to doesn't have anything to do with "saving the planet", it's all politics and money. There's also the whole "child labor" thing [2] but let's assume that countries like Congo will sort it out sometimes in the next 10-20 years, they most probably won't, but there's always hope.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2013-02...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/dec/16/a...

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Desulphurisation is required to turn the extracted oil into something that can be used in a car. That process requires cobalt. So yeah the dirty cobalt business is directly supported by oil-based cars as well. However, I think catalyst use vs. battery use of cobalt is roughly 1:5 so your point remains valid (it's used more in batteries than in desulphurisation). Unfortunately I cannot find free statistics to support this 1:5 ratio which is from memory, maybe someone else can supply a link.

1:5 in what? I mean if it takes five times the cobalt to manufacture a kilogram of battery compared to a kilogram of gasoline, that sounds like a point in favour of EVs. You can only use that gasoline once after all, whereas the lithium could serve the full vehicle lifetime.

I'm not going to defend the damage mining like this does, but it seems unfair to say oil is any better [0]. In my opinion, oil causes much more damage and is harder to contain.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills

I agree about harder to contain, that's why that oil pipeline that was supposed to pass through the middle of an industrialised country was cancelled [1], that was a political move by definition, while cobalt mines and the like, because they mostly "happen" in the middle of Africa, are just seen as "doesn't really affect me -> it isn't really that important".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline#Phase_4_(can...

Today, one of the major uses of Cobalt is removing sulfur from gasoline. Somehow that never comes up in the "child labor!!" arguments against electric cars.

Wow, a pit mine. What an a-bom-i-na-tion!

https://www.google.com/maps/place/coalmining/@50.9809314,6.4...

Yes, pit-mines are abominations, as are coal pit-mines. I was comparing cobalt mining with oil extraction.

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