Canvases By Peter 🇵🇸Liam Bartlett, pro-fossil-fuel reporter for channel seven's 'Spotlight' program dug for dirt on renewable energy. Here’s what he left out and got completely wrong..
"Spotlight reporter Liam Bartlett, who a decade ago spent two years working for Shell, reported from the Shabara mine in Congo’s Kolwezi region.
“Almost 80% of the world’s cobalt is mined in places like this,” said Bartlett, claiming cobalt was the mineral behind every battery – from electric vehicles to home batteries and the “monster” batteries being installed across Australia to store renewable energy.
.. but there were two big problems with Spotlight’s attempt to link every battery to these appalling conditions.
According to an industry group representing companies that produce cobalt, about 99% of the mineral is gathered as a by-product of mining other minerals, chiefly nickel and copper.
Spotlight focused on batteries for renewable energy, but about a third of all cobalt is used in laptops and smartphones. Other uses include jet engines, medical implants, car tyres and pigments.
A Seven spokesperson said “some estimates put the percentage of cobalt mined in artisanal mines at 30%” and that this ore was mixed with cobalt from industrial mines.
Second, there’s a problem with Bartlett’s claim that cobalt is in every battery.
“That’s not true,” says Prof Neeraj Sharma, a battery technology expert at the University of New South Wales.
Sharma says battery manufacturers have been moving away from using cobalt because it is toxic, expensive and “ethically fraught”.
Sharma says many electric vehicle companies and large battery manufacturers now use cobalt-free lithium iron phosphate (LFP) technology. He says last year about half of EV batteries and 90% of home and grid-scale batteries used cobalt-free technology.
None of this crucial context was presented to Spotlight’s viewers.
A Seven spokesperson said battery technology was evolving and was “essential to our renewable future” but did not say why this hadn’t been explained in the program.
Prof Susan Park, a renewables governance expert at the University of Sydney who reviewed the segment, says artisanal workers are in the region “because of extreme poverty”. To blame China for the abuses – as Bartlett did – “denies the agency of the Congolese government”, and the problem existed “well before Chinese companies became involved in cobalt”, she says."
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