We must keep our wheels turning

That our oil supplies are dwindling, and burning fuel pollutes our air is not in question; yet we demand that our wheeled lifestyle goes on unhindered. We have been promised that as long as our wheels keep turning, all will be well.

In Katanga D.R.C., hand dug mines dot the landscape, where cobalt mining is as common as farming.

We have decided that oil is bad for us, so we need an alternative motive power. What could be better than electricity? Clean, easy to access, non- polluting. We can use electricity to drive ourselves into a bright clean future with no adverse effects on ourselves or our environment.

But our drive to electrification has shifted our environmental problems elsewhere. Electric vehicles need batteries. Big batteries. And batteries need cobalt, and right now our car batteries are consuming around 100,000 tonnes of cobalt annually. Demand for it has grown by 13%p.a. for the last ten years, and is still rising.

And the biggest source of cobalt? Africa, with half the world’s supply sourced in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The price of cobalt,at $80,000 a tonne, is forecast to double in the next five years.

It is the latest source of energy to be turned into cash, and it has been estimated that between 20% and 30%…