Tesla’s reluctant commitment to cobalt., page-3

“Ethical cobal” has nothing to do with ethics – it is a smug indulgence of the feel-good variety for some, or a convenient pretext to justify clearing artisanal miners off tenements for others.

Elon Musk and Ivan Greenberg have a few things in common, and one of them is that both were born in Africa, and spent their formative years there. They know that there are millions of starving African families who would jump at the chance to position their families to be able to buy all the maize meal that they possibly could eat, and about a kilo of fish/meat that would cost about $10 a day. The do-gooders in wealthy countries imagine that families in the Congo would prefer to starve, rather than eke a living as self-employed cobalt miners. Greenberg would love to stop artisanal miners plundering Glencore's cobol tenements, but that sentiment is not based on ethics.

I was involved in a business that bought frozen meat and slinks (foetal calf skins) from a Government abattoir in Lobatse, Botswana. A German firm asked us if we could source the tufts of hair on the ears of slaughtered cattle – the hair was used to make artists' brushes. The abattoir manager arranged for the abattoir workers to slice the ears off slaughtered cattle, and these were given to African women to process on a piece-rate basis. The women sat on the ground under nearby trees with their young children, and they snipped off the tufts of hair, and bound them into miniature sheaves about an inch or so tall. I suspect that the ears ended up in stew

We regularly received small boxes of that hair by parcel post. The quantity was small, although with a good value-to-weight ratio, the parcels could economically be airfreighted to Germany. We handled the business as a goodwill gesture for PR reasons, and made near-zero profit. The abattoir made no profit either, but as it was set up to promote the Botswana cattle industry, allowing a few Batswana families to earn that little extra that made a meaningful difference to their lives was within its charter.

Many Australians, and other relatively wealthy populations, do not understand the African milieu. There are reasons to stop artisanal mining, but helping artisanal miners is not one of them. My parents lived in **erone when Botswana was called the The Bechuanaland Protectorate, and I was surprised to see children there tidying the streets under police supervision. They were substantially abandoned children jailed for their own survival who would be released when their family reclaimed them. In fact, a young boy of about four was abandoned at my parent's home, and he lived there for months, then vanished (probably collected by family when they were in a position to feed him).

Battery-grade nickel is a good place to be now, IMO. Being cheaper than Cobol, there is little attention devoted to developing battery technology that can go without it, whereas a great deal of focus is given to reducing cobol.