(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,
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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)