Much as I enjoyed listening to King Charle’s classic British intonations from yesterday, nothing beats a good Australian accent for my listening pleasure.
Anyway, Australian Broadcasting did a take down of rival Channel 7’s recent repetition of tired, obsolete and misleading stories about cobalt in batteries.
The default technology for stationary battery storage, and even most EVs these days, is Lithium Iron Phosphate, which contains no cobalt.
Also worth remembering that one historically large use for cobalt has been in refining gasoline, but I don’t recall anyone on in the Right Wing echo chamber being much upset about that until EVs starting giving serious. competition to combustion vehicles.
The other part of the fake concern about cobalt is that lots of other materials were sourced in ways now viewed as bad ethically – diamonds are one notable example – and the problems got fixed by requiring buyers trace their material chain to ethical producers. Heck, just a tiny bit over 100 years ago, coal mines in the US employed boys right in the mines.
It’s the same as how nobody ever heard much about “tire pollution” until some funded pressure group noticed an EV was heavier than the equivalent gas vehicle – suddenly it became a cause. Yet they never mention that tractor-trailer rigs have more tire, more weight and wear. And never, ever a suggestion that part of the right thing to do to address tire pollution would be to shrink the size of the vehicles people barrel around in these days.