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ianai
gregwebs
This is just cobalt and not all the other resources required for electrification. The dramatic increase in cobalt supply seems to be mostly a side effect of increased mining for other minerals that are still in greater demand (Nickel). Otherwise it wouldn't be profitable. Meanwhile battery makers have figured out how to use less cobalt since it has a specialized role.
There's still no supply for the lithium shortage (the lag time is a minimum of 7 years to open a new lithium mine) but we are waiting to see if sodium batteries will come to the rescue now.
bartislartfast
Surely there must be a similar lag time for production of Sodium Batteries?
yetihehe
For Sodium Batteries maybe yes, but we already have so much of sodium chloride that we just sprinkle it on roads in winter.
tgsovlerkhgsel
This is also a great example for why capitalism is so successful. It's not perfect, but a centrally planned system would, in practice, react much more slowly and/or less accurately.
_hypx
Capitalism works because it can find an alternative to the resource that is running out. Something centrally planned systems struggle with. And a big reason why centrally planned systems fail is because they are usually ruled by conservative men who cannot imagine a world without said resource. Meanwhile, a capitalist system will “creatively destroy” the old way of doing things and replace it with a new one. Ironically, people who cheer on capitalism often struggle with accepting the new way.
TulliusCicero
Markets tend to be results oriented in a way that governments tend not to be.
Of course, sometimes that result involves exploiting the shit out of workers and destroying the environment along the way, but by God they'll get the thing done if said thing makes them money.
Slava_Propanei
[dead]
Llamamoe
I wish it was more commonly understood that capitalism's success lies precisely in the fact that it's a decentralized, self-regulating system robust against the failure of individual nodes, and has very little to do with the "capital" part of it, which if anything appears to drive wealth inequality more than anything else.
jojobas
In fact failure of individual nodes is almost required, just as the slowest antelope needs to feed the lions so that the antelopes as a whole become faster.
pharmakom
This is basically what Hayek is all about.
pbhjpbhj
Isn't that market-based finance?
It appears that can be entirely divorced from capitalism.
Just because we have demand driven resource exploitation doesn't mean that all of the profit has to be provided to a small over-class.
Indeed, wouldn't it create a greater ability to follow demand if the wealth were evenly distributed?
(We might ask if making the human race into the perfect resource-exploiting parasite is going to work well for us long term, but that is a very obvious limitation that diverges from the current discussion.)
johnnymorgan
Love this comment, I'm listening to wealth of Nations audiobook and this is a main point that jumps out.
He uses the phrase "perfect liberty" to describe the ideal version of a market and also understands this will never be equally applied or possible with all markets.
It's an amazing piece of work and I'm really enjoying the audio book as it reads more like a lecture and is very pleasant to listen too.
nicoburns
Indeed concentration of wealth/capital constitutes the very same centralisation of power that planned economies have.
Jensson
Wealth inequality is the overhead cost of running capitalism. It isn't a very large cost given the cost of all alternative systems we have tried, especially since regulations can greatly reduce the wealth inequality without losing the benefits of capitalism.
xwdv
Is central planning the only alternative to capitalist decentralized systems? How could you have some other decentralized system without capital?
pastacacioepepe
That's not capitalism you're talking about then. Capitalism has everything to do with capital.
7sidedmarble
I think it's short sighted to picture a 'centrally' planned economy as the only alternative to capitalism. I'm not an expert, but if you read Marx directly, he didn't say much about the structure of what proletarian ownership would look like. I think it's safe to say market structures.m can coexist with democratic ownership of the economy: see unions, coops, etc.
euroderf
I would say also that managerial incentives can co-exist with democratic ownership of the economy, and that this could ensure some level of creative destruction.
tdehnel
“democratic ownership of the economy” cute way of saying socialism. But if people in the democracy don’t want to own the economy then it’s not democratic.
Same critique of so-called “Democratic socialism”. If it’s socialism, it’s not democracy.
hobobaggins
Coops, yes, but those are essentially groups of independent producers, while unions are much more in keeping with Marxism. To the point, I haven't seen any actual examples of modern unions that are anything but a drag on production. Perhaps you can mention one?
UncleMeat
Capitalism is not the same thing as a market economy. You can have a market economy where businesses are incentivized to innovate and create business plans that fit an effective niche without separating ownership from labor.
And although there are clear examples where market economies are nimble, there are also clear examples where market economies are fragile or don't actually produce outcomes that are best for customers or society. A health insurance company that puts most of its innovation effort into finding creative ways to refuse to pay out to its customers while obfuscating this outcome is a natural thing in a market economy.
WalterBright
> A health insurance company that puts most of its innovation effort into finding creative ways to refuse to pay out to its customers while obfuscating this outcome is a natural thing in a market economy.
Health insurance companies in the US are more or less run by the regulators these days. Obamacare has seen to that, driving out of Washington state all health care providers for self-employed people but one.
I have all my other insurance with one company. Their premiums are higher than average. But the times I needed them, they were there with the money and even legal help. They're worth the higher premiums. It's the free market at work.
bumby
>react much more slowly and/or less accurately.
I’m not making an anti-capitalist point, but I don’t know how well that point holds because it seems like the same case can be made for the other side.
For example, the financial markets were slow to react to information in 2006-2007 until we had already driven off the cliff. Some would say the same about climate change etc.
It seems to me that a hybrid system is actually the best as balancing that risk.
ianai
Regulation. You want regulation. And some social safety nets like social security, health care. Etc.
Edit-also the reason you don’t immediately think of the word “regulation” is for the last 40+ years anyone suggesting regulation has been ran from public life as a communist or nazi. But regulation absolutely is just applying the usual legal system to the market to make sure the market stays within acceptable and safe bounds.
MobiusHorizons
Market driven economies react to incentives. Regulation is one way to influence those incentives, but it’s usually slow moving (hard to put in place, hard to change or remove)
A lot of the incentives in the us market are very short term in nature, especially in publicly held companies. It seems like this leads to companies following hype cycles right off of cliffs even when it’s not hard to see problems.
steveBK123
If you think our housing bubble in the capitalist west was crazy.. wait until you read about the ongoing one in central planned China...
cma
Would this cobalt stuff have reacted more quickly without the subsidies?
ajuc
The reason solar power was growing so fast last 2 decades was mostly EU and German central planning. Not to say that central planning is better in general, but reaction speed isn't inherently better in capitalism. One common problem is capitalism getting stuck in chicken and egg dillema - central planning had advantage there. Granularity of adjustment is the main advantage of capitalism. And some kind of hybrid is the most efficient.
fires10
It's almost like we need a hybrid model. Some things centrally planned and some things left more free.
pfdietz
They may have gotten the ball rolling around 2009, but today the EU accounts for only a small portion of solar installs. In 2022, the EU was about 15% of the global solar new installations.
Now, in wind, Europe is still leading.
undefined
cinntaile
Subsidies don't really count as central planning. It's a way to nudge market participants in a certain direction but they still have autonomy.
meling
I wonder if some of the more scarce materials needed for EVs will turn out to be like the peak oil concern in the 80s… once a material becomes important enough human ingenuity seems to find ways.
aylmao
I think this characterization should be accompanied by three thoughts:
- In the scale of human history, we haven't used oil at industrial scales that long; roughly 170 years our of, say ~12000 years since the Neolithic Revolution [1]. In those 12000 years, there's times we have have "made it" past resource shortage, but there's also times it has all come burning down. We don't always find ways past problems.
- It's a rather romanticized characterization to call "human ingenuity" what saved us from "peak oil". Yes, there was a lot of ingenuity and tech involved, but there were also some nasty politics, disastrous wars and terrible environmental impact from new extraction sites/techniques. Economic pressure doesn't only make us smarter, it also makes us more ruthless.
- Overall, is this what we want? Perhaps the peak oil predictions of the 80s would've been a better outcome; we'd live in a world with less "stuff", yeah, but also perhaps fewer problems? Thinking about the current transition to EVs: do we want to replace all gas cars with them, or is the better outcome that cars be expensive, and we opt for more efficient modes of transportation like public transit or walking? Our economic system means human ingenuity and ruthlessness finds a way to scale production, since profit incentives align with that. Perhaps though the better ingenuity would be not to find "more", but use what we've got in a better way.
[1] I chose the Neolithic Revolution since that's arguably when our mindset shifted from "following resources" and adapting to what we find, to settling down and producing what we need instead. Thus I'd assume this is where the concern of how we manage our resources became more akin what we find ourselves in now. We weren't going anywhere— we had to figure out how to keep the land from decertifying, our water from running out, etc.
roenxi
Weren't the predictions in the 80s largely accurate? As I recall the only big miss was shale oil [0] and if it follows a bell curve then the sharp initial spike up is a bad sign for its longevity. I recall that the cost of producing shale oil gave the fields questionable economics too.
We could easily be looking at a huge amount of war and suffering in the near future as global peak oil hits and there are no new horizons being developed. Fringe quacks, like the US Energy Information Administration or Shell [1], have models that say in the worst case we could be hitting the peak right as early as this year if we are unlucky.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OilProductionTightTotalHu...
kergonath
> Weren't the predictions in the 80s largely accurate?
Yes, they were. There is some uncertainty because of more or less accurate estimates, fields that turned out to have more gas or oil than expected and marginal technology improvements. Also, oil producing countries love to play with supply, which results in fluctuations that obscure the larger trend if you don’t pay attention. But all of this changes the time scale, not the trends. Oil fields inevitably reach their maximum and decline one after the other. As oil and gas are not created over the time scales we need, there also has to be a global maximum. After that, decline can be longer or shorter, and well managed or not, but it is unavoidable.
ben_w
I think how accurate it is depends on what exactly you want to know about.
On a small scale, each well to each region, it seems to be quite accurate.
On a global scale however, it doesn’t seem to account for the changes in technology or the geopolitical pressures caused by oil shortages.
So, I used to be worried about it, but now I’m not. The main reason for my optimism here is that solar power seems to be following the best possible curve for replacing oil in energy production, while Elon Musk‘s personal fantasy about going to Mars happens to have a pre-requisite of the development of industrial scale CO2-to-methane conversion, and methane can be converted into longer chains for the other stuff oil is useful for e.g. plastics.
However, there will still be global and national political concerns as the transition to renewables radically changes the economies of the world – Russia OPEC, all the oil rig workers (and coal miners because it isn’t just oil), and so on.
esperent
> In those 12000 years, there's times we have have "made it" past resource shortage, but there's also times it has all come burning down. We don't always find ways past problems.
This seems like a good counterargument, however on thinking it over I don't think it's valid. For most of those 12,000 years we didn't have any way to share knowledge except verbal and basic stick figure paintings. The amount of time that we've had the scientific method is even shorter, and the amount of time since the industrial revolution tinier again.
Based on that chain of thought, I don't think it's valid to draw historical comparisons beyond the last 500 years or so. Perhaps not even the last 100 years.
Faced with a truly civilization threatening resource shortage in the next decade or century, we could literally move asteroids to solve it. With that in mind, can you really claim it's valid to compare ourselves to neolithic hunter gatherers and say we face the same kind of existential risks over resources?
aylmao
> This seems like a good counterargument, however on thinking it over I don't think it's valid.
I'm not really presenting it as a counterargument, just a thought, because at the end of the day we're talking about predicting wether we can find future solutions to future problems.
> Based on that chain of thought, I don't think it's valid to draw historical comparisons beyond the last 500 years or so. Perhaps not even the last 100 years.
If I were presenting this as a rigorous counterargument, I'd go beyond what you allude; it's not 500, or 100 years of history that we can draw on to predict what will happen in the future. It's 0. We haven't had problems like the ones that will come, we don't know what the theoretical solutions could be, and we don't know wether we'd be able to implement any of those theoretical solutions.
We could get lucky and metaphorically "draw heads" from now until eternity, and pointing out that in the past we've sometimes "drawn tails" can't disprove it, you're right.
All I'm saying is we've failed plenty in the past, so it's worth considering that perhaps we could fail in the future too. We are more capable, though the problems are bigger. We could get lucky, but we could also get unlucky. We don't know.
> Faced with a truly civilization threatening resource shortage in the next decade or century, we could literally move asteroids to solve it. With that in mind, can you really claim it's valid to compare ourselves to neolithic hunter gatherers and say we face the same kind of existential risks over resources?
Here I need to point out two things:
- Until it's done, having the capacity to mine asteroids will only be theoretical.
- Yes— even if we manage to move asteroids. I think it'll be valid comparison for as long as we exist.
We are living beings in an environment. We can use energy in clever ways to gain the resources we need to survive and perhaps grow in that environment. The demand for resources and the supply we can access might grow as our population, complexity, and capabilities grow, but we'll forever be grappling this core mechanic of survival: we need to make sure we don't run out of X, else we risk all this we've built to come crashing down.
One thing I brought fourth on my third point in that original comment is that perhaps the solution to this timeless question isn't always in the supply of resources. Perhaps we shouldn't always figure out how to get more of X, and instead figure out how we can need less of it. But I'm going now beyond what you just asked me in your comment, sorry.
codeflo
> In those 12000 years, there's times we have have "made it" past resource shortage, but there's also times it has all come burning down. We don't always find ways past problems.
Peak tin is a conspiracy theory, and everyone who worries about the Sea Peoples is a warmongering racist.
JumpCrisscross
> everyone who worries about the Sea Peoples is a warmongering racist
If the climate and seismic disasters which appear to have displaced the Sea Peoples hadn’t happened, isn’t it plausible that peak tin wouldn’t have happened? There was plenty of tin on Iberia and the British Isles.
Kamq
> Perhaps the peak oil predictions of the 80s would've been a better outcome; we'd live in a world with less "stuff", yeah, but also perhaps fewer problems?
I don't think this follows, especially with your previous statement that:
> Economic pressure doesn't only make us smarter, it also makes us more ruthless.
It seems like the increased economic pressure of competing for less stuff would force people to be vastly more ruthless than they were in the 80s, which presumably would result in more problems.
AtlasBarfed
Doesn't really matter much for the majority of the BEV revolution, that is going to be LFP and Sodium Ion batteries for the vast majority of cars, especially when LFP hits 230-250 wh/kg and really especially once sodium ion hits 200 wh/kg.
Cobalt/Nickel chemistries will be for luxury cars, long range vehicles, tractor trailers, until the sulfur chemistries take over in probably 5-8 years (although I hope a lot sooner).
So this is kind of good news, but really isn't the meat of the BEV revolution.
ObviousHumanGPT
CATL's 210Wh/kg LMFP cells are already in volume production for a major automotive customer.
I would expect that customer to disclose shipping product in a March investor event.
AtlasBarfed
The 200-215 wh/kg LF*P chems are in mass production! 160 wh/kg sodium ion this year as well!
I was referring to their roadmap chemistries that they are next targeting for mass production, that will likely underlie what I call the "third phase" of BEVs. The first was the earlier prototypes and Model S/X era of Tesla. The Model 3 heralded the second phase, where most carmakers actually started trying at BEV products. Third phase is where the ICE cannot compete pricewise and BEVs are the clear choice when buying a new car.
200-210 wh/kg should do 400 mile cars if they have to . the 160 wh/kg sodium ion though, that should be a 200-300 mile car, eventually drop to $40/kwh... that will be the city car revolution, a technology for several billion BEVs.
Exciting times. Of course the US government is hopelessly behind.
pfdietz
Hmm. Who has an investor day on March 1? I wonder...
zeroonetwothree
That’s the beauty of economics
msla
Given how much the oil companies knew about climate change even then, Peak Oil was effectively always nonsense: The people who knew always realized we'd hit hard climate limits long before we'd "run out" of oil like some childish "Mad Max" fantasy. Of course, I wonder how many authors simply failed to understand the OPEC embargo, or the concept of an "embargo" in general.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/12/exxon-clima...
meltyness
Agreed, auto fuel is more abundant than ever. Consider EVs, Ethanol, LNG, hybrids doubling and tripling efficiency.
AtlasBarfed
It will be oversupplied. But I posit that the oil/gas industry is built on large scale facilities that may not survive seeing demand drop by 30-50%.
I believe this will trigger a "reverse economies of scale" where gas will get more expensive and less profitable from the drop in demand making large refining facilities and the like less profitable. Which will cause closures, and further inefficiencies, and a downward spiral.
What I most hope is that the tar sands and fracking oil becomes fundamentally noncompetitive, and what is left is the remaining conventional extraction reserves.
I also hope it starves every petro-authoritarian state. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, etc.
But that's still a decade away, a lot can happen.
thriftwy
Russia by the means of its territory may process and export any kind of raw material. Whether it is oil, gas, coal, iron ore, steel, nickel, wheat, cooking oil, lumber.
_hypx
Peak oil will be "solved" by humanity moving away from oil. It is not solved by drilling for more oil, even though it allows for a temporary reprieve.
My personal opinion will be that shortages on battery related materials will be solved by going to hydrogen cars. Replace a finite resource with a practically infinite one.
JumpCrisscross
> personal opinion will be that shortages on battery related materials will be solved by going to hydrogen cars
Fuel cells often use platinum (anode) and nickel (cathode).
ben_w
Which is unimportant, because unlike the oil we don’t set fire to the platinum and nickel.
_hypx
Those are not necessary. Solid oxide fuel cells use neither. In the long run, PEM fuel cells likely will use neither too, or very little (on the order of grams per fuel cell).
narrator
Hydrogen will be necessary for air travel too.
neltnerb
If you're assuming hydrogen is green, you may as well assume you can simply make jet-fuel equivalent biochemicals. Right now most of the hydrogen comes from natural gas, so that's not so helpful. But fertilizers that might make biochemicals come from hydrogen that comes from natural gas.
And like hydrogen, with lots of infrastructure costs, shipping biological feedstocks and fertilizers around also causes emissions and lowers energy returns.
I would not bet on hydrogen for air travel, unless you mean lighter than air craft then maybe with careful design. For planes there's enough existing bio-based options that are simply liquids and much easier to handle. Batteries probably make more sense than liquid fuel in a car if you're assuming the liquid fuel comes from renewables.
If that's the case you might as well use the starting energy (electricity) and use it directly rather than converting to liquids and then back again.
Gwypaas
Air travel is looking at synthetic aviation fuel. Currently costs ~2x to fossil.
ObviousHumanGPT
New NCA and NCMA batteries are using less than a tenth of the cobalt of old NCA chemistries in old Tesla and Nissan Leaf vehicles, and more than half of electric vehicles being built today use a LFP or LMFP chemistry with no cobalt or nickel at all.
Cobalt demand could be met almost entirely by recycling batteries at end of life.
tjoff
How does this affect longevity? And how can you know that whatever mix you ended up with in your car will work long term?
specialist
This Volts episode is a good overview. Focus is on lithium, of course. But same calculus applies to all the elements; Cost of recycling vs mining, alongside policies over supply chain, environmental impact, etc.
"The state of the lithium-ion battery recycling market - A conversation with battery analyst Yayoi Sekine of BNEF." [2022/12/09] https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-state-of-the-lithium-ion-battery...
My impression, after listening, is that recycling is ramping up asap. And the industry is so young that the eventual shape and size is hard to predict. Also, much governmental investment is needed to accelerate innovation.
ObviousHumanGPT
JB Straubel's (Tesla cofounder) new company Redwood Materials has developed a pyro-metallurgical and hydro-metallurgical process to separate most of the valuable materials. Dunno about the logistics or economics of getting the vehicle batteries to processing centers.
Most sane countries have a lead acid battery recycling deposit to divert batteries from landfill. Might be a good idea to implement one for large lithium batteries as well.
ggm
Supply chain scarcity is not equal to relative abundance in the world. This is why the Ehrlich/Simons bet[0] came out the way it did.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
wnevets
> Ehrlich could have won if the bet had been for a different ten-year period.[5][6][7] Ehrlich wrote that the five metals in question had increased in price between the years 1950 and 1975.[3] Asset manager Jeremy Grantham wrote that if the Simon–Ehrlich wager had been for a longer period (from 1980 to 2011), then Simon would have lost on four of the five metals. He also noted that if the wager had been expanded to "all of the most important commodities," instead of just five metals, over that longer period of 1980 to 2011, then Simon would have lost "by a lot."[7]
Doesn't sound like a great bet to base anything on.
ggm
The idea behind the bet is stronger than the statistics of year shopping: the price of critical ingredients is subject to many changes, what was at stake was their availability expressed as price: Ehrlich argued for scarcity because of a flawed belief in exhaustion and limits to growth. Simon argued for supply chain dynamics, and had a strong sense the relative abundance of primary inputs was not the limiting factor.
Sure, the specific bet could be lost and won in different windows. But the actual underlying point remains: were not facing exhaustion of resources as a limit to economic growth and development as much as exhaustion of willingness to invest in exploration and development of sources.
"Oh God, there isn't enough cobalt or lithium for all the EV to be sold in the next 5 years" or "there isn't enough lithium for every car to be converted to EV" which are both variants of counterfactuals to actual rate of deployment, replacement of cars in the real world, the replacement of battery technology, new forms of battery chemistry, you name it PLUS extraction of new sources and discovery of new ore beds.
wnevets
> Sure, the specific bet could be lost and won in different windows. But the actual underlying point remains:
You are free to argue that but that is not why this bet turned out the way it did according to the quotes from the linked wiki. It sounds way more like a coin toss than any rule of the market
culi
> The idea behind the bet is stronger than the statistics of year shopping
But the fact that this bet could've easily been lost and Simon mostly got lucky is direct evidence against "the idea behind the bet"...
In the past 2 decades for example, the inflation-adjusted price of all 5 of these metals have increased.
zeroonetwothree
Obviously if they had made a different bet the result could have been different. That’s literally always true.
wnevets
Not if the argument is the market will always lower the cost of goods like metals over time. If that bet went 20 years instead of the 10 the price would have been higher. Would that have proved the other guy correct?
brigandish
I would take any bet against Ehrlich, he's been wrong so many times that it'd be like throwing away money not to bet against him.
leroman
Isn't there a bias built in due to products only launching if there was feasibility to begin with? The researchers had to believe this would be a viable direction as well as the industry.
undefined
justnotworthit
relevant book: https://www.superabundance.com/
cocoggu
"It has since waned as people spend less time staring at their screens: as demand for consumer electronics fell, so did that for cobalt."
Stop me if I'm wrong, but the article totally missed the fact that new car battery technologies are mostly cobalt free. I feel it better explains the lack of demand than the article explanation.
zaroth
Ok…
> Even a boom in electric vehicles has not been sufficient to counteract this, since manufacturers have done their best to reduce use of the formerly super-expensive metal.
joak
When a resource is scarce we can either dig for more or replace by something equivalent.
It was a time when there wasn't enough whales to light everyone. We killed (almost) all the whales before coming up with something else (oil)
pfdietz
Biological resources like that are exceptionally vulnerable because harvesting them reduces the rate of creation of replacement whales, in a vicious cycle.
cocoggu
Oops indeed not totally awake yet
photochemsyn
Yes, was going to say just this. E.g.
https://borates.today/lifepo4-batteries-vehicles/
>"These days, LiFePO4 batteries are found everywhere and have various applications, including use in boats, solar systems, and vehicles. LiFePO4 batteries are cobalt-free and less expensive than most alternatives. It is non-toxic and has a longer shelf life."
erikpukinskis
Right, and cobalt is a conflict mineral, which is partly why battery designers and researchers have been designing it out of batteries.
undefined
darth_avocado
It’s not abundant, just more kids working to dig it up.
hypertele-Xii
40% of Congo's population is below 15 years old. How are they supposed to run an economy without kids working?
phyphy
So economy is now a justification of slavery?
hypertele-Xii
So what happens to these millions of kids when you declare it illegal to pay them?
Are you going to feed them and build schools?
That's what the economy is doing, in exchange for cobalt.
How much money have you personally donated to the children of Congo?
darth_avocado
That’s the way it always is isn’t it? Justifying bad things to make ourselves feel better than to try and fix it.
epgui
Anything can be justified by extraordinary circumstances. Even cannibalism. You're on a small boat with 10 people, and everyone will die if you don't eat the weakest. If you eat the weakest, 9 out of 10 people survive. Your move.
throw_m239339
> 40% of Congo's population is below 15 years old. How are they supposed to run an economy without kids working?
They don't "run their economy", it's a failed state, a no man's land ravaged by war which population is being exploited by corrupt multinationals that bribe gangs and warlords for security.
sumedh
Run the economy with the adults, pay a good wage and(or) get other adult immigrants from neighbouring countries.
undefined
_0w8t
Please do not bring kids. It is irrelevant here and can be even factually wrong.
In a poor country kinds are forced to do all kind of dangerous work. If not for cobalt they can be sent to fields and be subject for all chemicals used in modern agriculture. Or work in a sweatshop or in a factory with zero regulations about safety. The fact that they mine cobalt tells that this way more money can be earned than through other dangerous work.
I.e. the problem is that the country is poor. Fix that and kids will spent time in schools, not in mines.
foepys
Why not demand that there are no children working in the mines before buying the cobalt? Better throw good ecological standards and worker protections in there, too.
A supply chain is not a black box nobody can look into, even if quite a lot of corporations want you to believe that.
_0w8t
Because why not to demand that all safety regulations including a ban on child labor are followed in agriculture, manufacturing before buying agricultural or manufacturing products from poor countries?
Child labor there are just as terrible, yet most people do not care while reacting strongly on pictures of children mining cobalt. The pictures may well be produced by those who wants to put bad image on electrical cars, not because they cared about children.
The proper solution is to have a careful regulation that heavily tax products from countries with lower safety standards. But this is hard as that makes a lot of things more expensive.
darth_avocado
> Please do not bring kids
Ohh I absolutely have to. You just justified modern day child slavery. Here’s a radical idea about fixing the poverty: pay them wages that help them uplift from poverty for mining the cobalt. But that’s never happening because you and I will not pay 10k for an iPhone or a million for a Tesla, and that ultimately is where the exploitation starts.
JumpCrisscross
> will not pay 10k for an iPhone or a million for a Tesla
Australia is a massive cobalt, copper and nickel miner [1]. They do it profitably without kids. The cost of transporting ore out of the DRC probably dwarfs any labor savings from using kids.
Child labor in sub-Saharan African mines is a solvable problem. But it’s not a question of paying more, but engaging in a regional development effort with tinges of nation building of the sort Western voters are fatigued with. (I see no interest in the problem from China.)
nlitened
I don’t understand your point, is it some kind of sarcasm? You say that to stop child slavery, you would need to pay 10k for an iPhone, but you personally don’t want to pay that much, hence the slavery should continue to support your consumption habits.
Why are you bringing up child slavery then if you personally justify it?
pokepim
[dead]
aylmao
This is a bad excuse to not feel bad supporting industries that make heavy use of child labour. I'll break some things down:
> "Please do not bring kids. It is irrelevant here and can be even factually wrong."
We should absolutely bring up the kids, since this article talks about the scaling of an industry where the kids play a role in its cheapness. It's very much relevant to the conversation of the price of cobalt.
> "If not for cobalt they can be sent to fields and be subject for all chemicals used in modern agriculture. Or work in a sweatshop or in a factory with zero regulations about safety."
Mining cobalt is much more dangerous than agriculture; even "modern agriculture". Sweatshops come in all forms, some incredibly dangerous, very physically demanding and potentially toxic, like cobalt mining. I wouldn't say they're worse though. Saying so is not being too familiar with how terrible cobalt mining can be [1][2].
It's worth noting though; one can't defend a terrible children's right abuse by claiming that "if they weren't being abused this way they'd be abused another". We don't know that, and it very much doesn't make it ok.
> "I.e. the problem is that the country is poor. Fix that and kids will spent time in schools, not in mines."
Yes, The DRC needs capital to develop and support its population. It's worth understanding the problem with a little more depth, since it's complex.
The DRC has about half of the reserves of one of an incredibly important resource [3]. That's a very significant amount of latent capital. It also has a chokehold on the market, accounting for about 70% of the world's cobalt production [4]. That's power.
One can't just say that The DRC "is poor"; it is being "kept poor" by internal conflict largely enabled and stirred by outsiders (I quickly found some examples from a few years back but there's way more: [5][6]). It's also victim to an international community that says and does nothing about this, because the international community benefits a lot from the poverty in The DRC.
That's why we should talk about the children. For years African analysts have noted that the USA cares about "liberating" countries human rights abuses in some parts of the world, yet is very confortable with tyrannical dictators in others [7]. I don't know how much the West would hurt its own economic interests based on public outcry, but we should absolutely acknowledge the fact this is not ok, and Western (in the very least) indifference plays a role in it.
[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/a394gp/smartphones-child-lab...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/commentisfree...
[3]: https://www.kitco.com/news/2022-02-17/The-world-s-largest-co...
[4]: https://investingnews.com/where-is-cobalt-mined/
[5]: https://youtu.be/tEOmI5bc3HU?t=68
_0w8t
I very much agree that many Western countries, not only US, are responsible for most African countries being poor via institutions like IMF and friends that fueled local corruption.
But I am not so sure about authoritarian regimes or tirany. South Korea and Taiwan 70 years ago were poorer that most African countries, have used child labor very extensively and had dictatorships when in Africa there were democracies at least on papers. Now these are the first world countries with working democracies. Even in China, when people became richer they started to care about environment and there were even protests again really bad pollution cases and there is much less child labor than 50 years ago. Yet Africa continues to be poor and use child labor extensively.
So perhaps some tyrannies are not so bad long-term.
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userbinator
but the lion’s share
I wonder if that was an intentional or unintentional pun.
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bawana
Capitalism is another word for ‘Only look at profit’. It is famous for short term management decisions that create hard-to-change and expensive infrastructure. Unexpected’externalities’ will always develop as human activity exceeds the environment’s ability to compensate for the disturbances we create in millenia old equilibria.
Capitalism is also only valid for voluntary transactions. Consider an event like illness- people do not choose to get sick. But we have put capitalism clothes on this beast.
Capitalism gaves us in the US ‘managed care’ , an administratively burdened healthcare system, and new burdens like corporate suites for healthcare with 7 figure salaries.
For example, corporate managers see empty beds in the hospital. They reduce staffing. Then there is a flood of illness clogging the ER. They need nurses in a hurry. They hire temp nurses (3 to 6 month minimum contract) that get paid double. The remaining staff nurses feel shafted. They quit and become traveling nurses too. The hospital goes from a 10 mill surplus to a 30 mill deficit. And the traveling nurses dont know where anything is so everything moves more slowly reducing throughput. Delays in Operating room (the major profit center) reduce case load further.
In such a system, a slow to change ‘centrally planned’ arrangement might actually be better
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There’s an observation in environmental economics about mining for resources acting similar to a banking instrument. As more resources are devoted to a scarce resource like cobalt more mines become economically viable. Most easily seen with oil where whole fields will shut or open with the movement of the price of oil. Forget the name of it, buts it’s yet another case of economic actors reacting to market incentives.
Just remember this the next time someone says something can’t be done because of the immediate inflexibility of supply to meet demand in a market. There’s almost always a lag time between start of production and demand for it. They might be uninformed or trying to misinform.
I suspect similar will hold true for charging infrastructure, solar panels, and other grid infrastructure. Wiring up new power plugs is not fundamentally new technology. Good time to be an electrician I suspect.