(Skype ringing) - Hey.
- Hey. - Is that one of those fancy
coffee cups that stays warm? - It heats it from the bottom. - [Johnny] That's my friend Cleo who is a newly independent journalist making stuff on YouTube. - An I'm gonna call it "Huge, if true." - There aren't a lot of
journalists/YouTubers out there, and now that there's another one, I'm gonna ask for her help. Okay, so I wanna show you a map. Do you see this map?
- Yes. - [Johnny] This is the Congo. It's this giant country in Central Africa that used to be called Zaire. And what's crazy about this
that I've never seen before is if you map all of the mines in Congo, it looks like this.
- Wow. - [Johnny] And all of
these are the cobalt mines. - Cobalt?
- [Johnny] Cobalt. Yes, cobalt, it's a thing that used to not be important at all but it's now very important and that's what I'm sort
of fixating on right here. These are cobalt mines and 15 of them are run by China. - I know where this is going. - But wait, this isn't another just China moves into Africa story. I've made a video on that. This story feels bigger, like we're going through some shift in how we make and use energy. - We are going to transition
this country into the future. - Which means reusing new materials, new materials like cobalt. So the question is, who's gonna control these
new valuable minerals in the future and how will they use that control? - Oh, because cobalt is
in electric car batteries and a bunch of other stuff? - Yes, bingo, electric car batteries, the thing that everyone
is racing to figure out and make more of. - I mean, look at this chart of the demand for EVs over time, like it's just exploding. So the reason I'm showing you all of this is because you're a technology person, you think about this stuff, and you tend to have a more
sort of optimistic view than I do on a lot of the future, and I kind of want that perspective here. Because what I see here
is just another instance of a big superpower, China, racing into an underdeveloped
country to steal its resources so that it can control the supply chain. And, to be honest, I thought the clean energy
revolution would look, I don't know, different,
different than this. (baby crying)
I wasn't expecting this. - I really do think that it can. I think that there's a world in which there's a green energy revolution that doesn't look like the same old story of all the other fossil fuels and minerals that we've mined before. I don't think it's gonna be easy but I think there are ways to pull it off. - I like her optimism. - Well, let's get into it. I wanna show you what I've
learned here on cobalt 'cause I've sort of
been down a rabbit hole on the cobalt China situation. And then I want to have a discussion about what this means
for the future of energy. - Let's do it. - [Reporter] The children
were mining cobalt in the Democratic
Republic of Congo, or DRC. - [Reporter] Cobalt is one of the world's most coveted resources. Its value has nearly
tripled over the past year. - [Reporter] This most
precious of minerals is often extracted and sorted by tiny- - [Reporter] The Chinese traders
here bought all the cobalt and sold it mainly to one Chinese company. - Okay, hold on one second, I need to thank today's
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sponsoring this video. Let's get back to it. So, first let's understand what cobalt is. It's this blue mineral that's
become really important in the past few years. I mean, just look at the
price of cobalt since 2010. It's like popped off
in these last few years because of one thing. - [Reporter] Electric cars
are expected to double the world's demand for
cobalt by the year 2025. - I wanna continue to
explain cobalt and China and all of that, but first we have to understand the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This massive country
in the middle of Africa that honestly should be one of the richest countries on Earth because it is sitting on top
of so many valuable resources. Unfortunately, this is a place that for centuries has not been able to actually take advantage of this wealth because it has been pillaged by outsiders. Whether that's the people
being literally stolen and shipped across the
Atlantic as forced labor, or this brutal Belgian king who came in and forced the Congolese people to work, to harvest rubber, or more recently the blood diamond rush. I mean, this place has
been pillaged for years because of its resources. So, here we are in 2022. The new hot commodity is not rubber or diamonds, it's cobalt, this blue mineral that used to be just for making ceramics turn blue, that's what it was used before, but now it has a really useful purpose in the growing world of electric vehicles. - [Reporter] Electric vehicles. - A lot of people love Tesla. - [Reporter] This is
the EV sales forecast. - Electric vehicles are the future. - So, I know something about how electric car batteries are made. I kind of know the
things that go into them. How did a substance
that made ceramics blue end up being so important
to electric car batteries? - [Johnny] Well, at first,
lithium is the main ingredient and that was the most important. But as more and more car companies are trying to make their cars go longer and further without exploding, cobalt is this amazing material that helps regulate the heat
and volatility of an EV. - So cobalt is super important for electric cars to be
able to go long distances without needing to recharge or exploding? - Absolutely, we're in this phase where every car company is competing on these sort of nuanced
marginal improvements, like my car can go 400
kilometers, mine can go 410, and so cobalt is becoming
more and more important for these long range features
that are becoming important in this cut-throat competition. It turns out that the Congo has 70% of the world's cobalt. I'm not kidding when I say this
place is like resource rich. - You're rich.
- So this is becoming a bigger and bigger issue, but guess who read the tea
leaves like 20 years ago and started investing in
cobalt mines in the Congo? - China.
- China. Yes, obviously. China. - [Reporter] The Democratic
Republic of Congo struck a big deal with Beijing. - [Reporter] Chinese traders
here bought all the cobalt and sold it mainly to one Chinese company. - This is where I start to get pessimistic about the whole green energy revolution, and let me tell you why. I made this video a while back about how China has
been rushing into Africa to build up a bunch of infrastructure and to win the hearts of African nations, but also to kind of assert
control and leverage over them. But as a part of all of this
Chinese investment in Africa, China has been pouring
loads of money into mines, specifically focusing on the DRC where all these minerals are. And again, this is like the early 2000s. They set up all of these mines and started mining and processing cobalt. - If you look at a chart of EV demand, it goes way up in the 2000s. How did they know, like, why would China show
up and start mining cobalt if it wasn't particularly valuable yet? - Yeah, and that's a
really important question, and the answer just sort of blew my mind. The first one is easy, which is that cobalt became
useful for other things, like cellphone batteries
and things like that, so there already was
some decent demand there. But it's also because of
how China's economy works. Because China is a communist country where the state and the
economy are intertwined, they have different incentives
than the capitalist West. Like, in our economy, we have independent corporations who focus on delivering short-term
profits to shareholders. In China, they can take longterm bets. They can say, like, in 20 years we think that this is
gonna be really valuable so we're gonna pour
tons of money into this because we don't need to
deliver profits next quarter, we can deliver profits in 20 years. So it gives them this unique
ability to make big bets that could potentially be huge, and in this case it was
the absolute best bet they could have made. - We hit the jackpot here! - So all of this explains
why China controls 15 out of the 19 cobalt mines in the DRC. - Okay, so you got electric
vehicles demand going up, cobalt is necessary for electric vehicles, and then you've got China
with their foresight buying up all of these mines in the Congo to control the supply of cobalt which we're gonna need for EVs. - Yes, that is exactly right. And this gets into the strategy and the geopolitics of all of this. There's this one quote from an expert that Politico interviewed. He says that "China is not
processing all of that cobalt "to export it to the United States "to support your electric
vehicle revolution. "They're gonna make cheap cars themselves "and the best that you can hope for "is that they'll export
those cheap cars to you." Like, it's just so clear
that they're doing this to control what they see as
a massive burgeoning market that they wanna have a corner
on, and they're doing it. And here we go with why
I feel so disappointed as I learn about all of this. Here you have China racing to
control this valuable mineral so that they can have leverage and power as the world transitions
to cleaner energy. Oh, and not to mention
that as China shows up and does all of this cobalt mining, you'll see no regard for worker safety, you'll see super dangerous mines, you'll see children
doing back-breaking work, you have people routinely
dying on the job. And perhaps the biggest
contradiction of all is that this is a finite
resource once again. Oh, and the process of mining
and refining this stuff is the same old story of
deforestation, polluted rivers, and just general exploitation. I mean, I thought the
sustainable green revolution was going to be like
clean and just for people. I thought electric cars
would actually mean a cleaner way of doing business, like a cleaner future. But instead we're seeing the
same old Earth destroying great power resource race that got us here in the first place. - You good?
- Yeah, my rant is over, I'm sorry, this has
gotten me really worked up and I'm ready to chill out now. - You need to chill. - When I used to imagine
a clean energy future, I had this image in my head, right, of that moment in every
sci-fi where they go, like, "Once we lived in harmony." ♪ People lived in harmony ♪ - And there's Wakanda and
there's that one Chobani ad where everyone is using technology and living in a beautiful farm. Record scratch, freeze frame, here we are in the real world where right now it totally is the same old story of exploitation and harm to the environment
in different ways and harm to people. I think one thing that's
important to realize is that when we talk
about a cleaner future we're specifically talking about less CO2, and so though it conjures up all of these images of
clean in other ways, it's on us to do that also. There's nothing about the technology that inherently will bring that about. - Oh dear, what can we do? - We have a few things that we can do. The first is we can change
the kinds of batteries that we're using. There's a lot of development
in new kinds of batteries, one of them is a lithium-iron battery, not a lithium-ion battery,
there's an extra R in there. And that battery uses
different kinds of minerals, it doesn't use any cobalt. That might help this specific example but the reality is that
most of these minerals have their own stories of exploitation, so it's not...
- It's not great. - So here's where I start
to feel pretty optimistic. There's a big difference between
fossil fuels and minerals. You're right that the difference
between electric vehicles and gas combustion vehicles is that one uses fossil fuels and the other we're swapping
up fossil fuels for minerals, but there's a big difference between fossil fuels and minerals, namely fossil fuels are being incinerated every time that we drive. If we're using more
minerals to power our cars, we also have the opportunity to get a lot better at recycling. This shows how much we already recycle. This is end-of-life recycling
rates for select metals in electric car batteries. - [Johnny] Hm, oh, so
we're already recycling a lot of these materials,
including cobalt, like it's almost 40%. - Yes, and the other thing
to keep in mind here is you don't need to recycle
these minerals and metals in cars themselves. You can have a clean energy future where we're recycling metals and minerals from batteries that store
wind and solar energy into electric cars that are then re-recycled back out into other forms of storage and batteries. - Interesting, okay, wow, yeah, that is like an optimistic
view of batteries 'cause it just feels so finite but if the lifespan is
dramatically higher, that becomes a much more useful and less resource-intensive proposition. - There's also one more possibility, and I think the people will call me a little bit high in the sky here but I'm okay with that. I think it's possible
that it may not just be about fixing the problem with cars, but also about fixing the problem of cars. There's a high-tech version of this where self-driving cars, there's some research and speculation that they might reduce the amount of cars that we're using in total. There's also a lower-tech version of this where we just invest
more in public transport. That might sound unsexy but
it really does seem to me like the most promising option. I think also if you zoom out for a second and think about why we
care about climate change, yes, we care about animals and we care about the planet itself, but we also care a lot
about human suffering. One of the reasons why so many people care about climate change is because it will cause human suffering, it already is. And so if you take this story and you look at the human
suffering caused by mining and you then say, oh, we're not gonna try
and solve this problem, we're just, what, gonna let
more climate change happen? We have to solve these
things at the same time because both will hurt
more people, basically. - Yeah, that's a really good point. I think if there's two major takeaways that I take from your research into this is like, number one, a greener future is not inherently a cleaner, more idealistic, happy future, it's just a less CO2 future, which is like, again, obvious, it's so obvious when you say it like that and make that differentiation, but I had those so deeply bound together. But I think the more important idea is like even though I
have a pessimistic view of great power rivalry, there's not an option here. Like, there's no scenario in
which throwing up my hands and being like the world is effed is gonna do anything. And in fact it's the easier
way out in a lot of ways. And so it's good to know that
there is real work being done to try to solve this and that it's not just bound
to go down the same route. - In my mind, this story
isn't a cleaner future is just as bad. It's a cleaner future is a cleaner future, with problems that we still have to solve. (gentle music)
Advantages of electric cars over cars. Pollute air a little less, are less expensive to use.
And that's it.
Advantages over bycicles: none, except if you are 4 dtuck in the desert with bad public transportation.
Fuck petroleum, fuck lithium, fuck cars, fuck LNG fuel.
https://i.imgur.com/mF9S4nE.png
Most of the problems with cars is they are cars, not the engine used to move them.
Longshot on seeing this. The Congo only has 3-4x the amount of minable cobalt the US does... yet no one ever talks about domestic mining in North America for any REMs. I'm pretty sure this is the best answer to sooo many issues, unless you're a straight up depopulationist not wanting to take mitigating action. We have enough rare earth metals in relatively unpopulated areas. This is important for energy security, would help the economy bringing jobs here... and would bring it into more regulated countries with a less exploitable population, making it better for the environment. Can we start moving this focus to our legislators? Anyone disagree... I could be wrong at least partially and know there are initial problems getting through federal, state and local laws that NIMBY could change at any second.