Name: The Disturbing Reality of Cobalt Mining for Rechargeable Batteries
Uploaded: 2022-12-22T19:34:05.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Disturbing Reality of Cobalt Mining for Rechargeable Batteries' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-12-22. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Disturbing Reality of Cobalt Mining for Rechargeable Batteries' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-12-22. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- Please detail the journey that you went on
to write this book and why it's of concern to you.
- Yeah, okay.
Well, I started traveling to the Congo five years ago.
I've been doing research on slavery and child labor
for about 20 years, traveling all around the world
documenting slaves and child laborers, human trafficking.
And this came across my radar maybe seven years ago.
People started talking in the field about cobalt,
cobalt's in the batteries, it's in the Congo,
the conditions are horrible, and I had no idea.
I'd never heard of this.
So I started planning to take trips to get down there.
And I took my first trip back in 2018.
My plan was I thought I would try to lay the groundwork
to do some academic research.
And the things I saw there were so appalling
and heart-wrenching and urgent that I changed my approach.
I thought people need to know about this.
I need to write a book.
And so I started planning more trips
and I just kept going back.
And the reason this is important, Joe,
and we can dig into this in more depth.
Throughout the whole history of slavery, I mean,
I'm going back centuries, never, never in human history
has there been more suffering that generated more profit
and was linked to the lives of more people around the world ever,
ever in history than what's happening in the Congo right now.
And the reason I say that is this, the cobalt
that's being mined in the Congo is in every single lithium-ion
rechargeable battery manufactured in the world today, every smartphone,
every tablet, every laptop, and crucially, every electric vehicle.
So you and I, we can't function on a day-to-day basis without cobalt.
And three-fourths of the supply is coming out of the Congo.
And it's being mined in appalling, heart-wrenching, dangerous conditions.
And so that's why people need to know, because by and large,
the world doesn't know what's happening in the Congo.
It's something that people sort of know peripherally that, you know,
they call them conflict minerals and, you know,
they know that they're coming from an area of the world that's very poor.
But I don't think people are aware of how horrible it is.
There have been some documentaries that have been done on it,
and they're all terrifying.
Yeah, so conflict minerals was phase one, and that's actually not cobalt.
What is the term, what does it refer to, conflict minerals?
So conflict minerals, also called the 3TG minerals, are tin, tungsten, tantalum,
and gold.
And those are in the eastern Congo.
And that catastrophe started around the year 2000, late 1990s, 2000.
Shortly after the Rwandan genocide.
The militia has moved in, and eastern Congo is sitting on some of the largest
reserves in the world,
of those 3TG minerals, especially tantalum.
And those are all used in microprocessors.
And you can think back to, you know, around the year 2000,
mobile phones first started coming out and gaining traction.
I still remember my little StarTAC flip phone that I had from Motorola.
You remember that?
Sure.
And all that supply was coming out of eastern Congo.
In the Congo, militias and warlords were forcing the local population at gunpoint,
machete point to dig this stuff out.
And it was flowing up into the formal supply chain, into mostly those first
generation cell
phones.
And that became known as conflict minerals.
And cobalt started later.
Cobalt really took off about 10, 12 years ago.
And it's in another part of the country.
In the mining provinces in the southeast of the Congo.
And cobalt took off because it started to be used in lithium ion batteries to
maximize
their charge and stability.
And it just so happens that the Congo, just as it was sitting on more than half
the world's
reserves of coltan, and of course, a lot of gold and diamonds and other things,
is sitting
on more cobalt than the rest of the planet combined.
And it's in a small little patch of the Congo, southeastern corner, a part that
used to be
called Katanga.
And before anybody knew what was happening, Chinese government, Chinese mining
companies
took control of almost all the big mines.
And the local population has been displaced, is under duress, and they dig in
absolutely subhuman,
gut-wrenching conditions for a dollar a day, feeding cobalt up the supply chain
into all
the phones, all the tablets, and especially electric cars.
And we're looking at a video now.
Jamie, what is this?
The mines?
This is video.
So I think so.
This is so crazy to see.
This is the bottom of the supply chain of your iPhone, of your Tesla, of your
Samsung.
I mean, I'm just naming those companies.
It's all of them, right?
All of them.
We're not just picking on them.
And here's what you need to know, Joe, about this video.
I was the first outsider to get into this mine.
And that's why it's just a really short video that I was able to take.
This is an industrial cobalt mine where there's not supposed to be one artisanal
miner.
Now that's the term used for people who are just digging by hand, as opposed to
tractors
and excavators.
There's not supposed to be one here.
That's what the story is told at the top of the chain.
This mine, and I can name it, it's called shibara.
There's not supposed to be one artisanal miner here, according to the consumer-facing
tech
companies and EV companies buying this cobalt.
Lo and behold, I walk into this place and this is what I see.
There's more than 15,000 human beings crammed into that pit, digging by hand.
And if you have sound, you hear the mallets, you hear the shouting, you hear
the grunts.
It's a massive humanity.
You might expect to see a scene like this.
So there's a term that gets used, clean cobalt.
There's no clean cobalt.
It's not real.
No.
No.
It's all marketing.
It's all PR.
It's a fiction.
Just like that place.
There's not supposed to be any artisanal mining there.
It's all done industrially.
That's the story told at the top of the chain.
And people assume, people I mean the marketing teams at big tech and EV
companies assume,
well, who's going to go down there and actually walk into the place and grab a
video that shows
no, it's actually all raw human force that is clanking that cobalt out of the
ground.
So there's no clean cobalt.
There's not a single company on planet earth that makes a device that has a
rechargeable
battery in it that can reliably and justifiably claim that their cobalt isn't
coming from
sources like that.
And that's the truth that needs to get out there.
That's the truth people need to understand because this is a story that goes
back generations.
There's these fictions told at the top of the chain about what conditions are
like at
the bottom and truth seekers have to go find that truth and enlighten
civilization so that
people get agitated about it and want to do something about it.
So there's no clean cobalt.
Let's just make that totally abundantly clear.
And anyone that claims otherwise is either peddling in falsehoods or is recklessly
ignorant
of the truth.
Are there any industrialized cobalt mines that use machinery and don't use
slavery and
don't use child labor and don't use these people that live in unimaginable
poverty?
I've never seen one.
And I've been to almost all the major industrial cobalt mines.
Here's why I say that.
Number one, they all or almost all will have scenes like that on them.
Thousands of individuals clanking away for a dollar or two a day.
They don't have safety equipment.
All that stuff, that cobalt's toxic, toxic to breathe and they're breathing it
in all
day.
No masks.
No masks.
No filtration systems.
No gloves.
Half those guys are in flip flops, all right?
So almost all the industrial mines will have scenes like that.
So that's number one.
They'll say there are no artisanal miners there.
No children there.
And if you like zoom in, you'll see that amongst that sea of humanity, there
are thousands of
kids, teenage boys in this case, because that requires a certain amount of
force to clank
away in that pit.
Number two.
There are hundreds of other artisanal mining sites scattered in the mining
provinces outside
of industrial mines, the artisanal miners in the industrial mines, and then
just on the
other side of the fence, there'll be a sea of humanity digging there as well,
because it's
not like at the fence, the ore body stops.
There's copper, cobalt, other things outside as well.
So there'll be hundreds of sites where there are hundreds of thousands of
people across the
mining provinces digging.
All that production is sold right back to the industrial mining companies.
So it enters their supply chain as well.
And then so they take what they extract with industrial equipment, artisanal
miners inside
the mine, artisanal miners, including children outside the mine.
It all gets dumped together into the same batch of acids to process and then
flows up the chain.
And again, no one can reasonably claim that their cobalt, even if they say that
industrial mine,
totally clean.
Don't believe what Siddharth is saying.
That's a made up fake video.
They can't demonstrate reliably that all the other cobalt being dug up by kids
in thousands
of sites across the mining provinces isn't also flowing into their supply chain.
Is there another source of cobalt in the world that's ethically supplied?
So last year, so 2021 is the last year there's data, about 72%, almost three
fourths of the world's
supply of cobalt came out of a small patch of the Congo.
And then there's like three percent Russia, three percent Australia, three
percent Morocco.
You know, there's everyone else is three percent.
And I don't know what the conditions are there.
I imagine in Australia, mining follows standards of dignity and decency and
labor and sustainability
and so on.
But there's not enough cobalt outside of the Congo to meet demand.
And demand projections are four or five, six hundred percent increase in cobalt
demand in
the next decade or two, primarily being driven by adoption of electric vehicles.
Each battery pack in an EV requires up to 10 kilograms of refined cobalt.
That's a thousand times what's required for a smartphone.
So huge demand as the world transitions from internal combustion engines to
electric vehicles, which
is a net good thing, except for the people in the Congo.
So there's not enough other cobalt out there.
Even if all the non-Congo cobalt was perfectly sourced, there's not enough
other cobalt out
there to meet demand.
These companies that we talked about that use all this stuff, whether it's
electric vehicle
companies or cell phone manufacturers, obviously they're aware of this.
Yes.
No question.
They have to be.
They made any attempts to mitigate this in any way.
The truth, Joe, is no, not sufficient efforts.
Most of what is done is PR statements, marketing.
All these companies will say we have zero tolerance policies on child labor.
We ensure standards of dignity and human rights for every member of our supply
chain down to
the mining level.
They'll all say this down to the mining level.
And they say it.
And they may throw some money at the odd NGO or coalition or alliance that's
meant to be
working on these things.
Everything's actually happening on the ground.
And that's what my book will demonstrate, you know, as I take the reader on the
journey
from place to place, mind to mind.
There's this fiction that exists outside of the Congo of what companies are
doing and what
the conditions are like.
And then there's the reality underneath those layers of obfuscation.
There's the reality.
There's the truth on the ground.
And not one company, not one business alliance, not one entity up the chain is
doing remotely
enough to ensure that the dignity and human rights of the people of the Congo,
not to mention
the environment, because all the mining companies are just polluting and clear
cutting forests
to build and expand mines.
They're not doing nearly enough to respect the people and earth of the Congo
while we outside
enjoy our, you know, renewable gadget-driven lifestyles.

The Disturbing Reality of Cobalt Mining for Rechargeable Batteries

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- Please detail the journey that you went on
to write this book and why it's of concern to you.
- Yeah, okay.
Well, I started traveling to the Congo five years ago.
I've been doing research on slavery and child labor
for about 20 years, traveling all around the world
documenting slaves and child laborers, human trafficking.
And this came across my radar maybe seven years ago.
People started talking in the field about cobalt,
cobalt's in the batteries, it's in the Congo,
the conditions are horrible, and I had no idea.
I'd never heard of this.
So I started planning to take trips to get down there.
And I took my first trip back in 2018.
My plan was I thought I would try to lay the groundwork
to do some academic research.
And the things I saw there were so appalling
and heart-wrenching and urgent that I changed my approach.
I thought people need to know about this.
I need to write a book.
And so I started planning more trips
and I just kept going back.
And the reason this is important, Joe,
and we can dig into this in more depth.
Throughout the whole history of slavery, I mean,
I'm going back centuries, never, never in human history
has there been more suffering that generated more profit
and was linked to the lives of more people around the world ever,
ever in history than what's happening in the Congo right now.
And the reason I say that is this, the cobalt
that's being mined in the Congo is in every single lithium-ion
rechargeable battery manufactured in the world today, every smartphone,
every tablet, every laptop, and crucially, every electric vehicle.
So you and I, we can't function on a day-to-day basis without cobalt.
And three-fourths of the supply is coming out of the Congo.
And it's being mined in appalling, heart-wrenching, dangerous conditions.
And so that's why people need to know, because by and large,
the world doesn't know what's happening in the Congo.
It's something that people sort of know peripherally that, you know,
they call them conflict minerals and, you know,
they know that they're coming from an area of the world that's very poor.
But I don't think people are aware of how horrible it is.
There have been some documentaries that have been done on it,
and they're all terrifying.
Yeah, so conflict minerals was phase one, and that's actually not cobalt.
What is the term, what does it refer to, conflict minerals?
So conflict minerals, also called the 3TG minerals, are tin, tungsten, tantalum,
and gold.
And those are in the eastern Congo.
And that catastrophe started around the year 2000, late 1990s, 2000.
Shortly after the Rwandan genocide.
The militia has moved in, and eastern Congo is sitting on some of the largest
reserves in the world,
of those 3TG minerals, especially tantalum.
And those are all used in microprocessors.
And you can think back to, you know, around the year 2000,
mobile phones first started coming out and gaining traction.
I still remember my little StarTAC flip phone that I had from Motorola.
You remember that?
Sure.
And all that supply was coming out of eastern Congo.
In the Congo, militias and warlords were forcing the local population at gunpoint,
machete point to dig this stuff out.
And it was flowing up into the formal supply chain, into mostly those first
generation cell
phones.
And that became known as conflict minerals.
And cobalt started later.
Cobalt really took off about 10, 12 years ago.
And it's in another part of the country.
In the mining provinces in the southeast of the Congo.
And cobalt took off because it started to be used in lithium ion batteries to
maximize
their charge and stability.
And it just so happens that the Congo, just as it was sitting on more than half
the world's
reserves of coltan, and of course, a lot of gold and diamonds and other things,
is sitting
on more cobalt than the rest of the planet combined.
And it's in a small little patch of the Congo, southeastern corner, a part that
used to be
called Katanga.
And before anybody knew what was happening, Chinese government, Chinese mining
companies
took control of almost all the big mines.
And the local population has been displaced, is under duress, and they dig in
absolutely subhuman,
gut-wrenching conditions for a dollar a day, feeding cobalt up the supply chain
into all
the phones, all the tablets, and especially electric cars.
And we're looking at a video now.
Jamie, what is this?
The mines?
This is video.
So I think so.
This is so crazy to see.
This is the bottom of the supply chain of your iPhone, of your Tesla, of your
Samsung.
I mean, I'm just naming those companies.
It's all of them, right?
All of them.
We're not just picking on them.
And here's what you need to know, Joe, about this video.
I was the first outsider to get into this mine.
And that's why it's just a really short video that I was able to take.
This is an industrial cobalt mine where there's not supposed to be one artisanal
miner.
Now that's the term used for people who are just digging by hand, as opposed to
tractors
and excavators.
There's not supposed to be one here.
That's what the story is told at the top of the chain.
This mine, and I can name it, it's called shibara.
There's not supposed to be one artisanal miner here, according to the consumer-facing
tech
companies and EV companies buying this cobalt.
Lo and behold, I walk into this place and this is what I see.
There's more than 15,000 human beings crammed into that pit, digging by hand.
And if you have sound, you hear the mallets, you hear the shouting, you hear
the grunts.
It's a massive humanity.
You might expect to see a scene like this.
So there's a term that gets used, clean cobalt.
There's no clean cobalt.
It's not real.
No.
No.
It's all marketing.
It's all PR.
It's a fiction.
Just like that place.
There's not supposed to be any artisanal mining there.
It's all done industrially.
That's the story told at the top of the chain.
And people assume, people I mean the marketing teams at big tech and EV
companies assume,
well, who's going to go down there and actually walk into the place and grab a
video that shows
no, it's actually all raw human force that is clanking that cobalt out of the
ground.
So there's no clean cobalt.
There's not a single company on planet earth that makes a device that has a
rechargeable
battery in it that can reliably and justifiably claim that their cobalt isn't
coming from
sources like that.
And that's the truth that needs to get out there.
That's the truth people need to understand because this is a story that goes
back generations.
There's these fictions told at the top of the chain about what conditions are
like at
the bottom and truth seekers have to go find that truth and enlighten
civilization so that
people get agitated about it and want to do something about it.
So there's no clean cobalt.
Let's just make that totally abundantly clear.
And anyone that claims otherwise is either peddling in falsehoods or is recklessly
ignorant
of the truth.
Are there any industrialized cobalt mines that use machinery and don't use
slavery and
don't use child labor and don't use these people that live in unimaginable
poverty?
I've never seen one.
And I've been to almost all the major industrial cobalt mines.
Here's why I say that.
Number one, they all or almost all will have scenes like that on them.
Thousands of individuals clanking away for a dollar or two a day.
They don't have safety equipment.
All that stuff, that cobalt's toxic, toxic to breathe and they're breathing it
in all
day.
No masks.
No masks.
No filtration systems.
No gloves.
Half those guys are in flip flops, all right?
So almost all the industrial mines will have scenes like that.
So that's number one.
They'll say there are no artisanal miners there.
No children there.
And if you like zoom in, you'll see that amongst that sea of humanity, there
are thousands of
kids, teenage boys in this case, because that requires a certain amount of
force to clank
away in that pit.
Number two.
There are hundreds of other artisanal mining sites scattered in the mining
provinces outside
of industrial mines, the artisanal miners in the industrial mines, and then
just on the
other side of the fence, there'll be a sea of humanity digging there as well,
because it's
not like at the fence, the ore body stops.
There's copper, cobalt, other things outside as well.
So there'll be hundreds of sites where there are hundreds of thousands of
people across the
mining provinces digging.
All that production is sold right back to the industrial mining companies.
So it enters their supply chain as well.
And then so they take what they extract with industrial equipment, artisanal
miners inside
the mine, artisanal miners, including children outside the mine.
It all gets dumped together into the same batch of acids to process and then
flows up the chain.
And again, no one can reasonably claim that their cobalt, even if they say that
industrial mine,
totally clean.
Don't believe what Siddharth is saying.
That's a made up fake video.
They can't demonstrate reliably that all the other cobalt being dug up by kids
in thousands
of sites across the mining provinces isn't also flowing into their supply chain.
Is there another source of cobalt in the world that's ethically supplied?
So last year, so 2021 is the last year there's data, about 72%, almost three
fourths of the world's
supply of cobalt came out of a small patch of the Congo.
And then there's like three percent Russia, three percent Australia, three
percent Morocco.
You know, there's everyone else is three percent.
And I don't know what the conditions are there.
I imagine in Australia, mining follows standards of dignity and decency and
labor and sustainability
and so on.
But there's not enough cobalt outside of the Congo to meet demand.
And demand projections are four or five, six hundred percent increase in cobalt
demand in
the next decade or two, primarily being driven by adoption of electric vehicles.
Each battery pack in an EV requires up to 10 kilograms of refined cobalt.
That's a thousand times what's required for a smartphone.
So huge demand as the world transitions from internal combustion engines to
electric vehicles, which
is a net good thing, except for the people in the Congo.
So there's not enough other cobalt out there.
Even if all the non-Congo cobalt was perfectly sourced, there's not enough
other cobalt out
there to meet demand.
These companies that we talked about that use all this stuff, whether it's
electric vehicle
companies or cell phone manufacturers, obviously they're aware of this.
Yes.
No question.
They have to be.
They made any attempts to mitigate this in any way.
The truth, Joe, is no, not sufficient efforts.
Most of what is done is PR statements, marketing.
All these companies will say we have zero tolerance policies on child labor.
We ensure standards of dignity and human rights for every member of our supply
chain down to
the mining level.
They'll all say this down to the mining level.
And they say it.
And they may throw some money at the odd NGO or coalition or alliance that's
meant to be
working on these things.
Everything's actually happening on the ground.
And that's what my book will demonstrate, you know, as I take the reader on the
journey
from place to place, mind to mind.
There's this fiction that exists outside of the Congo of what companies are
doing and what
the conditions are like.
And then there's the reality underneath those layers of obfuscation.
There's the reality.
There's the truth on the ground.
And not one company, not one business alliance, not one entity up the chain is
doing remotely
enough to ensure that the dignity and human rights of the people of the Congo,
not to mention
the environment, because all the mining companies are just polluting and clear
cutting forests
to build and expand mines.
They're not doing nearly enough to respect the people and earth of the Congo
while we outside
enjoy our, you know, renewable gadget-driven lif