The Trouble With Cobalt | Answers With Joe

Damn, I didn't expect to randomly learn what Kobolds actually are when I clicked this. I was waaay the hell off.

How would you be setting people straight by telling them that if we go 100% EV we have enough lithium for 30 years? That is a scary stat that would indicate we shouldn't be switching to EVs.. am I missing something?

Remind People to Hit the Like button, I myself watched dozens and dozens of your videos and forgot, I try to remember now

I do not agree with the summary of A Good Place, Hollywood enjoys to simplify life. It does not work this way. Do not wish to offend but it is deeper than this simple reasoning. Best to all.

MarketWatch… this channel which is premised on scientific method… is citing… marketwatch. I’ve just realized that Joe is an absolute joke. This channel is marketing waaaaay more than science. MarketWatch, he actually cited MarketWatch ….😊

I absolutely hate everything becoming batterized. Useless, wasteful, inefficient. I want corded remotes and controllers. NO ONE RECYCLES BATTERIES EITHER.

Oh and oil is naturally lost and such "spills" exceed anything anthropogenic. I literally have a '75 Popular Science where they discuss creating petroleum from cyanobacteria farms.... 🤔. Millions of years eh?

Without Man this planet was on the brink of death from lack of CO2, just 20 PPM above C3 plant death.

Is unfair to asociate a mineral to the exploitation of the miners. The exploitation could surely disappear with proper laws and instilling some other motivation apart from greed in the industry.

I hate that they have to work there, but I also hate that they would lose their source of income. What is the solution to help them?

Joe...how about making a video on whether it is possible to have a civilisation that doesn't inherently is adversarial within itself (groups vs groups but cooperative)

Thank you, Joe Scott for informing me about this

If you have PETA, blood diamonds, so blood cobalt fits the craze.

"Only 0.6g of lithium in each cell" ya but they have 7,104 cells per tesla, or roughly 9.4lbs of lithium per battery pack.

Suddenly that deceptive math seems a little more damning.

Sh-nay-behrg, not Sch-nee-burg ("Snow Mountain")

Can you make the theme music quieter? It really jumps out above the rest of the audio.

There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism

Joe right now in the city where I live there is an outdoor air quality warning again. Not good for my motivation to continue do my own landscaping today at age 66 after going through a lot like most other people do too before managing somehow to be reaching age 66. So it is going to have to wait no matter how many people are as result going to accuse me of having ADHD or whatever else they want to call me too whenever seeing only dirt where my front lawn should be. Well at least it isn't a lot of tall weeds. No in this cold climate in the city which used to be called the "Gateway to the North" I don't live in a city the size of Singapore or New York. After early this morning we were told the air quality was great. Maybe we are all in this city too being lied to about needing both gas powered vehicles and needing to get on time to manufacturing facilities among residential areas? While crooks here just love to steal catalytic converters off of cars and while quite a few car owners here some over the age of 80 too don't believe we have an air pollution problem nor is according to them any such thing as global warming. Could explain how large our cemeteries for people born here are already who cannot afford a front drive garage or an air conditioned air tight vehicle along with subscriptions to the opera and to indoor hockey games too are already for a city this size too.

We are pathetic hypocrites to stand by and buy the products that use child slave labor. It’s so sickening. I was gonna buy a Tesla 5-6 years ago but I just happen to “discover” the degree of this problem and it’s not just Cobalt, it’s other raw materials that are mined in Africa and Asia.,

to make this Transition, we would need between 8-15 times the current raw materials to manufacture the final product, cats, batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, and Billions or Trillions of additional copper to rebuild much of the grid in the US and I assume it’s the same in other western countries.

Well we should only figure western countries because much of Asia is gonna do jack, like China, India and then throw in Africa. How much of the world population is that? What 50 percent? More? And they haven’t committed to do anything. They went to build up and develop their countries and get their population out of poverty. Those poor nations don’t give a flying Duck about the environment, what they are concerned with is getting their families next meal and trying to stay alive, and given any choice they aren’t gonna pick solar panels over cheap portable power dense fossil fuels. I wish that wasn’t the case but this FANTASY LAND THINKING like a bunch of children disconnected from the physical limits of this world and the labor force.

Don’t worry reality is a coming and soon. My concern is that much damage will already have been done by the time Mr. Reality has to pay a serious visit to the western countries…..

With that amount of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, their people should've life quality similar to what we have here in Canada with free healthcare and "free" education like us.

I dont care how many kids died to make my cell phone. Neither does my counrty because they allow them to be sold. Neither does the Congo. So who cares

'There is no ethical consumption under capitalism'

If you’re looking for the opposite of a light beach read, King Leopold’s Ghost tackles many of these historical issues - though that book focuses mainly on the rubber trade at the time, the injustices suffered by the Congolese population are numerous and unthinkable.

I remember thinking “boy, people are missing a lot of hands in these pictures.” And the materials they were harvesting could easily cost them fingers and hands on their own. But sometimes that causes was a little more… artificial, i.e. forced amputation for failure to meet a quota, as Joe reminded us just now.

Losing a hand (and typically your dominant hand first) makes it that much harder to meet the next quota, but makes the worker desperate, since having one hand is a dire hardship, but having zero will likely result in your death. There’s a brutal logic to this, but ultimately of course it’s founded on treating a labor force as chattel.

Any updates on this?

Only 14. I've seen this myself and it's not identity politics. It's gross. We who have money benefit and neither know nor care. But when you see it in real life, it makes you sick. For you I understand that you can't understand the real human cost. You, like anyone where you come from don't see it. You don't see the bloody fingers or the people doing the mining. By hand. These aren't reports, it's me, seeing it. Now. Not historically but now. And what you call tribes in Rwanda- no. That is not the case - please stop, this is not and was only the way the Belgians described the culture here.
You need to be better informed. Whoever wrote this for you is terribly informed and don't rely on Harvard. Just like your merch. Where does that come from? Of course you'll block me.

I understand the reasoning behind not wanting to use child labor for mining. But taking that industry away from an already impoverished population doesn't seem like the right move. It is clearly their only source of income otherwise they would do something else.
Maybe a better move would be providing the people in those communities with the proper modern technology to safely mine these minerals & properly training the adults in those communities how to use that technology. Then they can keep the industry alive that feeds so many but make it safer and less reliant on child & forced labor. The output from the mines would increase too, and inevitably increase wages, given that an ethical person or company is running the show.
Obviously someone would need to supply the equipment and that's a whole other issue in itself but I find it a more plausible answer to this problem rather than completely leaving the population with no source of income. And if cobalt is so expensive then the investment of giving them the equipment they need would pay off in the long run.

There are people who were not concerned about the horrors of toxicity but are concerned about batteries??
At one time no one questioned whether or not there was enough oil to go around. As if that is the primary issue.
Love your videos but the issues seem kind of blurred in this one.

Miserable working conditions aren't new it's been around since the beginning of the human evolution, but let's look at the conditions surrounding the picking of fruit and vegetables by migrant farm workers the conditions they deal with most people are either appalled by it or don't want to think about it while eating their vegetarian pizza but the simple truth is the farm owners know that nobody but the poor and desperate will do it and the lower wages that they pay does keep prices down simply because if say a 20 something American were picking the price of your burrito supreme would more likely double, being that we can barely support the feeding of the planets population having that part of the infrastructure is quite important so the same rules apply to the cobalt situation although people wouldn't necessarily die if they didn't have a tablet or cell phone

If you were going to go after someone in a lawsuit it makes sense to go after the billion dollar company than the mining company

Mabutu reminds me of Eddie Murphy 🤣

Why don't these companies just own the mining company and supply the slaves with better equipment to raise efficiency to compensate for the slightly better work environment? Just have a puppet company own the company that owns the mining company so that they aren't associated with the mining scumpany and hell they are are it build a high end apartment building with luxury amenities such as toilets and running water even electricity if the tenents pay for it. The scumpany could also be a slumlord. Just keep it barely above human rights violation level of shit. They can even pay rent and electric with their mining paychecks 😅 Why does this sound familiar? 🤣

One of the under-discussed issues in Africa (especially the DRC) is the fact that most transportation infrastructure has been built along old colonial infrastructure (I.e. largely costal and designed explicitly for most easily extracting and exporting natural resources).

This is a big part of why it’s so difficult to foster a sense of national unity in the DRC. There are basically no actual paved roads that connect certain parts of the country to others, without needing to drive through multiple other countries.

From a military perspective, it makes it almost impossible to keep the peace, since neighboring countries aren’t about to allow military forces from Kinshasa to pass through their borders to allow them to reach the eastern regions of the country. From an economic and cultural perspective, it’s just as bad. Like, if you’re an American, imagine having to drive through Mexico to get from Houston to Austin, except there’s been no police presence along most of the route for basically forever.

Thanks Colonialism!

No more electric cars a that's what the f*** it means poor little kids digging down in the dirt and in mine they're going to die.

Electric Vehicles are not good for the environment. Fact

Long video, but totally worth the watch/listen!

Rule of thumb: ‘Never complain about a problem unless you can offer a solution’

Okay, you jest, but goblins are a REAL PROBLEM! Not the Spider-Man kind but real, nasty and small…very very small…but stout! (Really surprisingly STOUT!) all Cobalt aside, gremlins are a problem that most people will never admit even though the evidence is biting them in their snappy tight little yoga pants. I’ve tried to bring the gremlin problem to light for years now but I keep running into the problem of the AG’s (Anti-Gremliners). I leave you with this thought…remember back to the last time your car wouldn’t start and you tried everything…then it just started? Uh huh….GREMLINS!

Are Mark and zarko? Robots? They sound like Robots

500-1000 charges..i see a huge problem with disposing of battery components from all the electric cars fairly soon x)

what can be done about the child labor in the DRC?

Lithium Australia Is a company creating a circular resource chain as well. Building recycling Into production from the start.

Most sensible perspective on electrifying our industry I've heard

I’m surprised that you didn’t state that the western countries overthrew lumumba and had him assassinated

I consider myself plugged in to the mainstream conservative viewpoints. And nowhere have I heard actual environmental concerns about the various mines for the EV components. The issue was that supporters of EV’s were trying to claim that it was “cleaner” than sources like oil and coal. No one should really have a problem with R&D into EV’s. Just don’t pretend it’s currently the best option and that fossil fuels should be banned/stifled.
Also, specifically for America, we have decades if not centuries of fossil fuels available within our own borders alone. Not so with EV minerals. So trying to rely heavily on those imported minerals leave the US vulnerable to being taken advantage of.

For those who can't google, the current most efficient energy is still Nuclear by a mile.

Wait, wait, WAIT. So you are telling me that most, like 90% or more, Americans are NOT oppressed? What??? (sarcasm) This is just the tip of the old ice burg people. Slavery of all types including selling of Children is still a thriving way for people to do business. Part of the reasons America should tariff cheap imports. If it isn't so cheap people won't buy it. Then they will by the American made etc. and less of that crap will be imported. Unfortunate side effect of "green" is the fact many of the raw materials have to come from over seas as it's not available in North America or at least not found yet. But it would cost a fortune to mine here with all the regs and permits needed so why look?

little dark secret of my dear europe is: "oh.. so we can't do this dirty job in our country? no problem! we'll go somewhere else! china, africa, indonesia..." it's not just this, it's toxic colors in clothing, waste processing... you name it.

Recycled batteries??? Like the recycled plastic that gets shipped to 3rd world countries then dumped into the ocean? That recycling? Lmao