Best battery tech ever made: lithium-ion. Born in the 70s. Barely made any progress in 40 years compared to computers that they power. Cobalt is ideal for cathode.
Biggest Cobalt producer? Congo, with 60% of the world’s production. Demand for cobalt is exploding with electric cars and phones and laptops supposed to last a full day.
You have to read this article to understand the insanity. We are, as usual, fucking black people over. An entire, huge ass African country is being destroyed in every way for that lithium-ion tech.
All tech companies are full of shit and hiding behind weak laws and questionable suppliers who in turn don’t care and make kids dig rocks to extract the precious metal. Tech companies know that if cobalt was actually extracted ethically –no children, decent pay, Congolese companies and not Asian holdings- it would probably cost ten times more which would make our battery-hungry electronics unaffordable for 99% of us.
It’s unreal: we have a country with its people crawling under the earth in their own houses to find some precious mineral to sell. And before that, Europe fucked Congo over for about 150 years. Belgium did unimaginable awful things there for over 50 years.
And now that this country has the luck to have something to offer to the world and capitalize on it? We fuck them over as hard as possible as if they didn’t have had enough. Battery technology is ultra hard to make better, if in four decades we barely made any progress, it’s not going to happen. Which is why cobalt will still be extracted, Congo will get fucked more and tons of people will die for that. I’m so disgusted to be honest.