'modern-day slavery' in the Congo powers the rechargeable battery economy (2023) | Hacker News Reader

'modern-day slavery' in the Congo powers the rechargeable battery economy (2023)

npr.org

32 pointsTellusion8 comments

Why are reposting stories from 2023? Has cobalt come back in the news? As far as I know most battery producers have been shifting their battery chemistry to reduce the amount of cobalt. This should come as a relief to the readers of this article, right?

A point Kara also makes, which I think is too important to leave out, is that even when the supply chain gets fixed the damage has been done. The environment it has destroyed, the lives it has taken. Reparations are in order. Otherwise it’s just looting and leaving, we can’t call ourselves progressive as humans if we did not change our behaviour in the past 200 years.

I posted this in a previous thread about batteries, but it's still relevant.

Not to understate the terrible conditions of "Artisanal" mines, but the Cobalt Institute says "Due to market surplus, ASM [Artisinal and Small Mine] production has reached a record low, with ASM accounting for an estimated 2% of total cobalt supply from the DRC in 2024."[1] Which conflicts with the NPR article, "In his new book, Cobalt Red, Kara writes that much of the DRC's cobalt is being extracted by so-called 'artisanal' miners..."[2]

Unfortunately, nowhere in the NPR article does it give a hard number to compare like the Cobalt Institute, but as of 2024, JP Morgan analysis said "ASMs... contribute up to 30% of the DRC’s cobalt supply..."[3]

So, what can we do?

Mining and battery production don't require pseudo-slavery, so maybe the best answer is to work towards improved conditions in ASMs in the DRC, develop battery reuse/recycling, and searching for alternative sources of the conflict minerals so that the industy can vote with their wallet...

New to this comment: Even TFA says: "Kara acknowledges the important role cobalt plays in tech devices and in the transition to sustainable energy sources. Rather than renouncing cobalt entirely, he says people should focus on fixing the supply chain."

1: https://www.cobaltinstitute.org/responsible-sustainable-coba...

2: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893...

3: https://web.archive.org/web/20240704040321/https://am.jpmorg...

It still feels so disingenuous, too, that this keeps coming up for Cobalt, specifically. Cobalt had centuries of being "the useless junk that makes a pretty blue paint from our tin mines". These mines are certainly not mining just for Cobalt any more now that rechargeable batteries are an important thing to some cars. They are still mining tin, lead, diamonds, gold, etc and getting some amount of Cobalt out as a side hustle or "waste product".

Thanks for contributing this information to the thread, but the links are not working.

In a recent interview Kara mentioned that contacts reporting in the region itself tell a different story (he himself can’t go there anymore), not much has changed.

Rather reminiscent of when the Congo was being exploited for rubber. Thanks to Kara for bringing it to the world, he’s in good [1] company [2].

[1] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Crime of Congo” 1909

[2] Mark Twain, “King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule” 1905

Why don't we enforce labor laws? Why is it legally permitted to do business with slavers?

Years of corporation-favoring jurisprudence. Our laws protect the interests of capital, not human rights.

A wise man once said, "Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation. It's just the promise of violence that's enacted, and the police are basically an occupying army."

See:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/supreme-court-narrows-...

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/u-s-supreme-court-...

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