Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff. This is the story. Each week
Speaker 1: on Wednesdays, we bring you an in depth interview with
Speaker 1: someone who has a front row seat to the most
Speaker 1: fascinating things happening in and around tech, and today we're
Speaker 1: joined by Nicholas Nyakos. Nakos is a journalist who writes
Speaker 1: the publications like The New Yorker, The Nation, and The
Speaker 1: New York Times, covering everything from the war in Ukraine
Speaker 1: to most recently, the clean energy transition. But as new
Speaker 1: Orkos tells us, there are many outstanding questions about just
Speaker 1: how clean the battery powered world really is.
Speaker 2: You know, in the same way that automobiles in the
Speaker 2: nineteen twenties, with these wonderful, shiny, beautiful things, people weren't
Speaker 2: really asking where does the crude oil come from? Where
Speaker 2: are the resources that we need to go into these
Speaker 2: cars come from.
Speaker 1: Neokos is working on a book called The Elements of
Speaker 1: Power about the natural resources required to power our electric future,
Speaker 1: specifically the hidden costs of extracting minerals like cobalt, which
Speaker 1: remains a critical element in the technology we use to
Speaker 1: run our lives.
Speaker 2: Mining is incredibly destructive. You tear up the ground and
Speaker 2: you pollute the rivers, and you try and smoke into
Speaker 2: the sky and so on, and then these people that
Speaker 2: are left with nothing but holes in the ground.
Speaker 1: Essentially, time and again, Neocos discovered that the country's riches
Speaker 1: in these resources rarely reap the benefits of their abundance,
Speaker 1: and the battle for geopolitical advantage is a constant theme
Speaker 1: in his reporting.
Speaker 2: Oftentimes the people who are profiting are not the local communities.
Speaker 2: And I thought it was necessary for the wild to
Speaker 2: think a little bit more more deeply about that, and
Speaker 2: a little bit more more about how, for example, certain
Speaker 2: actors like the Chinese and these big Chinese companies which
Speaker 2: we really know very little about, have such a choke
Speaker 2: hold on this supply chain.
Speaker 1: And so a few years ago Nioko set off to
Speaker 1: do just that, show the world the impact of our
Speaker 1: growing reliance on battery metals, which led him to the
Speaker 1: southern capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lubumbashi.
Speaker 2: So Lummbashi Katanga province a sort of ground zero for
Speaker 2: this new energy sector. About seventy percent of the world's
Speaker 2: cobalt or comes from the southern Democratic Republic of Congo,
Speaker 2: and cobolt is important because it's used in the cathode
Speaker 2: of lithium ion batteries. Lithium ion batteries are the batteries
Speaker 2: that power our devices. Our cell phones are TESLA cars,
Speaker 2: and cobalt is essentially one of the ingredients that is
Speaker 2: necessary to create this kind of energy density that is
Speaker 2: required for especially small devices. Yeah, so many things like
Speaker 2: cell phones would be much bulkier and probably have many
Speaker 2: fewer capabilities because just to get that kind of energy density,
Speaker 2: there's no technology that really allows that at the moment
Speaker 2: that's not lithium own batteries. There are some technologies that
Speaker 2: are being developed now that you know, in ten years
Speaker 2: time will hopefully be wonderful clean batteries, but at the
Speaker 2: moment we don't know anything else that will do the
Speaker 2: job of a lithium own battery as well as a
Speaker 2: lithium ian battery.
Speaker 1: So talk about the Chinese presence as you saw it
Speaker 1: in Congo.
Speaker 2: So there are two types of mining in Congo. There's
Speaker 2: artismal mining and industrial mining, and artismal mining is one
Speaker 2: in which there are most abuses. I'm not saying that
Speaker 2: abuses from industrial mining don't exist, but the artismal mining
Speaker 2: is where there are a lot of children working, where
Speaker 2: there are people working without safety equipment, where there are
Speaker 2: pregnant women washing minerals, and where people are really working
Speaker 2: in the worst condition. The Chinese have a big presence
Speaker 2: in both sectors basically, and some companies even straddle the
Speaker 2: artisanal and industrial sectors. There's Huaiyu, which was started by
Speaker 2: a guy called Chen Huehua, and he's basically built this
Speaker 2: company by actually going out to Congo and buying some
Speaker 2: minerals that have been mined in some of the worst conditions,
Speaker 2: basically and built this huge company which is now a
Speaker 2: supplier to Apple and a supplier to many of the
Speaker 2: tech companies around the world.
Speaker 1: And I mean, are there China towns in Congo's the
Speaker 1: what's the relationship between Chinese people working in Congo and Congolese.
Speaker 2: So the Congolese scholar Jamatnngoi Chimbambe says that there are
Speaker 2: no formal China towns in Congo. And he's right when
Speaker 2: you say that. It's mainly these kind of campuses of
Speaker 2: people who are working and they seem to be following
Speaker 2: the playbook of former colonial powers. It's quite interesting. Just
Speaker 2: if you look at like the house construction model for
Speaker 2: Chinese workers in Congo. You know, beforehand they were living
Speaker 2: in dormitories, they were living kind of in these pretty
Speaker 2: squalid conditions. And if you look at Belgian colonialists, I
Speaker 2: guess they were living in tents and they were also
Speaker 2: living in pretty bad conditions. And then they start to
Speaker 2: build their houses. The Chinese have also started to build
Speaker 2: their houses, and now they're building what they call garden
Speaker 2: style houses, these kind of bungalows, which in many ways
Speaker 2: recall the kind of like the architecture of Belgian colonialism,
Speaker 2: which also had these like garden bungalows that you see
Speaker 2: all over the place in Congo, which is very surreal
Speaker 2: because you're going through, you know, the bush and suddenly
Speaker 2: you see you come across something that wouldn't look out
Speaker 2: of place just outside Brussels.
Speaker 1: So is China in your view of colonial power in DLC.
Speaker 2: I think colonial power means a very different thing to
Speaker 2: what it did one hundred years ago, but I do
Speaker 2: think that there are similarities.
Speaker 1: But how much of the cobalt supply coming from DC
Speaker 1: is controlled by China or Chinese businesses?
Speaker 2: So they are by last count, eighteen large industrial mines
Speaker 2: in DRC, and all of them but two are controlled
Speaker 2: by Chinese link companies. So it's a huge amount of
Speaker 2: a huge amount of congress cobald We'll never really know
Speaker 2: one hundred percent full figures because there's a lot of
Speaker 2: legal cobalt that comes out of the country, but a
Speaker 2: lot of that that is controlled by the Chinese as.
Speaker 1: Well, and it's not just a supply of cobalds. You
Speaker 1: chart the evolution of BYD basically from an outsourced battery
Speaker 1: manufacture for the Japanese consumer electronics industry to the driving
Speaker 1: innovator in battery technology and EVS today in a very
Speaker 1: short period.
Speaker 2: Yes, BYD and CAATL these are the two kind of
Speaker 2: big companies that dominate the Chinese battery making sphere. BYD
Speaker 2: is producing thirty percent of Apples iPads and they have
Speaker 2: ten thousand researchers working on battery technology for Apple and
Speaker 2: one hundred thousand other employees. Now there aren't ten thousand
Speaker 2: battery researchers in Western Europe. I mean, it's it's completely
Speaker 2: crazy the amount of resources that they're putting into this industry.
Speaker 2: And this is something that's been led from very much
Speaker 2: the top of the Chinese Communist Party and BYD is
Speaker 2: particularly interesting to me because I think that they have
Speaker 2: been very very good about creating cars and focusing on
Speaker 2: being an auto manufacturer, and it's not something that we
Speaker 2: see here in the US. Well there are very few,
Speaker 2: but you're starting to see it in Europe. I mean,
Speaker 2: there's amazing video of Musk laughing at at Bads in
Speaker 2: twenty eleven and just being like, come on, have you
Speaker 2: seen their car? Like, come on, it's never going to
Speaker 2: be competitor to Tesla. This company has now taken over
Speaker 2: from Tesla in terms of EV sales globally, and Musk
Speaker 2: acknowledged this, and Muscle has acknowledged this.
Speaker 1: Yes, but this is now not just harder work and
Speaker 1: more work, but more intellectual capital.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, yes, I think that's the big differentiation now. And
Speaker 2: it's also not copying anymore. The Chinese are driving forward
Speaker 2: battery technology and there's this idea that in the West,
Speaker 2: and I actually think it's a slightly complacent way of
Speaker 2: looking at things that in the West the education system
Speaker 2: is so much better, and you know, in Japan we've
Speaker 2: got better scientists, and the Japanese think this as well,
Speaker 2: by the way, but the Chinese have so many more
Speaker 2: people working on this stuff, and maybe ninety percent of
Speaker 2: them are not like incredible research scientists, but then you
Speaker 2: have a ten percent of them who really really are
Speaker 2: pushing the envelope.
Speaker 1: I believe you spent some time trying to figure out
Speaker 1: if there were locals who were benefiting from cobalt mining
Speaker 1: in the country, and in looking into it, you ran
Speaker 1: in some trouble while hunting down at lead.
Speaker 2: The interview that I had lined up was I had
Speaker 2: been speaking to some civil society people who said that
Speaker 2: there were connections between the cobalt minds and this sort
Speaker 2: of former rebel who has once again kind of gone
Speaker 2: on the run in opposition to the current government in Congo.
Speaker 2: He's a guy called Jadeon, and so I thought that
Speaker 2: it was very interesting if at least some of the
Speaker 2: cobalt that was going into our devices was controlled by
Speaker 2: this guy, who was, by all accounts a pretty brutal warlord.
Speaker 2: I wasn't even meeting by Jadion. I was meeting with
Speaker 2: his representatives. So I'm sitting in the restaurant of the
Speaker 2: Hotel Bagadougou, and we're sitting there and then suddenly it's
Speaker 2: sort of odd. There are these people wearing Chinese football
Speaker 2: team shirts who come in and they're offering to sell
Speaker 2: these sort of plastic radios, and then all hell breaks loose.
Speaker 2: This guy sort of grabs me by the shoulder and says,
Speaker 2: come with me. I'm saying I need to speak to
Speaker 2: my translator. He's got my passports. He drags me out
Speaker 2: into the sunlight, essentially, and there are seven trucks of
Speaker 2: soldiers pushing away a crowd of people who are screaming
Speaker 2: and yelling, and somehow it's become some sort of mini
Speaker 2: protests that's happening outside, and that doesn't seem very normal
Speaker 2: in America. But whenever there's a big police action, there's
Speaker 2: a big crowd that gathers in that part of the world.
Speaker 2: The next thing I know, I'm being put on a
Speaker 2: plane and they've confiscated all of my devices. They've taken
Speaker 2: my laptop, my phone and all that stuff. But they'd
Speaker 2: also tried to take my pens. Luckily, I had one
Speaker 2: buried in a bunch of crap that I had at
Speaker 2: the bottom of my pocket. So I take this pen.
Speaker 2: I go to the bathroom and write two notes. I'd
Speaker 2: seen a guy who might might have been I don't
Speaker 2: really want to identify him, because you know, he did
Speaker 2: a great service to me, and I don't want to
Speaker 2: put him in danger. But there was a guy who,
Speaker 2: for whatever reason, looked like somebody who might be able
Speaker 2: to raise the issue through the appropriate channels. I actually
Speaker 2: shake this guy's hand and I pass it to him
Speaker 2: in that way. Two days later, I get somebody knocking
Speaker 2: on my cell and I've been held in solitary confinement
Speaker 2: and they said the Americans know, which is obviously a
Speaker 2: sort of great relief. Then the next day after that
Speaker 2: is a Sunday, and I'm just sort of kept in
Speaker 2: my room all day and I start sort of going
Speaker 2: a bit mad. And then the day after that, I
Speaker 2: wake up quite early and I am finally bundled onto
Speaker 2: a plane to Paris.
Speaker 1: So to this day, what's your best explanation, why do
Speaker 1: you think this happened? So?
Speaker 2: I think this happened because basically, powerful people who control
Speaker 2: the very fundaments of the supply chain trying to stop people, journalists,
Speaker 2: people with questions actually finding out who's profiting of it.
Speaker 2: Because there's this thing that happened to me over and
Speaker 2: again and reporting this book which is being stymied by
Speaker 2: people who are in power in order to protect their
Speaker 2: own interests.
Speaker 1: After the break, we discussed how America is responding to
Speaker 1: China's dominance over the cobalt supply chain. Stay with us.
Speaker 1: So you've testified before Congress here in the US. What
Speaker 1: is the US response both to the supply chain issue
Speaker 1: of China controlling sixteen out of eighteen of the major
Speaker 1: cobalt mines in Congo and then secondly to this extraordinary
Speaker 1: rush of battery innovation that's happening in China.
Speaker 2: In December twenty twenty four, President Biden went to Angola
Speaker 2: to promote something called the Lubito Corridor, which is a
Speaker 2: railroad that is based on old railroad actually built by
Speaker 2: British entrepreneur to bring out mineral's mind by the Belgians
Speaker 2: from Congo. And basically what the US government is hoping
Speaker 2: to do is to rejuvenate this railroad and rejuvenate this
Speaker 2: corridor as a form of minerals leaving through Angola to
Speaker 2: go to the west rather than to go to the east.
Speaker 2: The problem is that the Chinese built that railroad. They
Speaker 2: basically they rebuilt that railroad fifteen years ago and as
Speaker 2: much as it's wonderful that DC is now able to
Speaker 2: export its copper towards the US. The US doesn't have
Speaker 2: any processing facilities for copper and cobalt. That might change,
Speaker 2: but it's incredibly environmentally taxing to have these facilities, and
Speaker 2: so that's one of the questions. Do people want cobalt
Speaker 2: processing facilities in the US. That has to be asked
Speaker 2: if we're going to have this idea of the Lobito Corridor.
Speaker 2: I think, to be honest that the US has responded
Speaker 2: to this Chinese dominance of the supply chain with mainly
Speaker 2: hand ringing. I mean, it's definitely been on the agenda
Speaker 2: of certain people on Capitol Hill. There has been some
Speaker 2: really sort of vigorous debate about this, and when I testified,
Speaker 2: there were a lot of people knew quite a bit
Speaker 2: about this, but mainly it seems to be something that
Speaker 2: has taken on a certain inevitability and has complained about
Speaker 2: and not really addressed. And the question is can Congress
Speaker 2: address it? You know, the US doesn't have state run
Speaker 2: enterprises that can do the type of things that the
Speaker 2: Chinese state round enterprises can do. They can't provide funding
Speaker 2: in the same way that the Bank of China can
Speaker 2: to a company like China Malibdin and that wants to
Speaker 2: go and take over the biggest cobalt mine in the
Speaker 2: southern DRC. So I think it's it's it's also to
Speaker 2: do with the limitations of the system that we live
Speaker 2: in at the moment. So I don't think it's been
Speaker 2: handled particularly well. But it's also hard to imagine a
Speaker 2: way of handling this better on the political front.
Speaker 1: There's an old expression, men in glass houses shouldn't for rocks. Obviously,
Speaker 1: one of the big stories in tech has been a
Speaker 1: US led export controls on chips to China, powering the
Speaker 1: most powerful AI systems. Is there a risk of a
Speaker 1: Chinese response when it comes to cobalt or even batteries themselves.
Speaker 2: Yes, there's a big risk of Chinese response, And actually
Speaker 2: in December twenty twenty four there was a export ban
Speaker 2: of rare earth metals from China to the US. And
Speaker 2: so this kind of tip for tat tariffs and bands
Speaker 2: looks like it will escalate. The only question is that
Speaker 2: if China were to say and we're not going to
Speaker 2: export lithium ion batteries or finished battery precursor materials to
Speaker 2: the US or entities affiliated with the US. There's also
Speaker 2: many many ways in which that can be got around
Speaker 2: by US companies. How much battery money we talked about
Speaker 2: sixteen of eighteen minds. What percentage of global lithium I
Speaker 2: battery manufacturing or battery processing. It's something between seventy and
Speaker 2: eighty percent is a large, large percentage. In China, I
Speaker 2: think it goes up to ninety for some minerals. Career
Speaker 2: is also very big on this, and Japan has kind
Speaker 2: of completely lost lost the ball. Indonesia does a bit
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 1: And what about the US are the opportunities to mine
Speaker 1: natural resources here?
Speaker 2: One of the projects that has seen more success has
Speaker 2: been the renovation of a mine for zinc and lead
Speaker 2: in the Silver Valley in Idaho. The Silver Valley is
Speaker 2: a part of Idaho that has traditionally seen huge amounts
Speaker 2: of mining. It was one of the wealthiest places in
Speaker 2: the US back in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties,
Speaker 2: and just as these sort of prospectors came in on
Speaker 2: the back of this gold rush and remained a very
Speaker 2: wealthy part of the US until the mine started getting
Speaker 2: shut down. And when you go to those communities you
Speaker 2: see that there is that there are voices for mining
Speaker 2: and against mining, and many people feel conflicted about it.
Speaker 2: Idaho also has the biggest cobalt belt in the US,
Speaker 2: but for most of these critical metals, the US doesn't
Speaker 2: have a huge reserve of these cobalt, especially, so we'll
Speaker 2: still be relying on China for cobalt.
Speaker 1: We talked a lot about Democratic Republic of Congo, but
Speaker 1: talk about some of the other places where you've seen
Speaker 1: mining first hand.
Speaker 2: I have seen mining first hand for this book in Indonesia,
Speaker 2: and part of the reason that people are mining in
Speaker 2: Indonesia is because people are mining for nickel, which is
Speaker 2: to create lower cobalt cathods, but also cathodes that have
Speaker 2: specific energy density qualities that are more desirable for electric
Speaker 2: cars and a better safety profile than lithium cobal oxide,
Speaker 2: which is the oldest and kind of og lithium iron
Speaker 2: battery technology.
Speaker 1: What did you see when you were in Indonesia, I mean,
Speaker 1: what's the same and what's different in terms of how
Speaker 1: the mining industry affects people.
Speaker 2: What was similar was that you saw a similar political
Speaker 2: feeling of dispossession and you felt that people had been
Speaker 2: pushed off their land. You had the same stories of
Speaker 2: people being moved away from their farms, and you also
Speaker 2: had the same stories about water being polluted. What was
Speaker 2: different was that the conditions, while tough, were definitely not
Speaker 2: as brutal as some of the things in DRC that
Speaker 2: I'd seen, and the government did seem to be more
Speaker 2: involved in policing, and whatever corruption there might have been
Speaker 2: was not on a kind of you know, you didn't
Speaker 2: see a sort of low level and people trying to
Speaker 2: steal shipments and so on. It was much more to
Speaker 2: do with you know, large contracts being handed out by
Speaker 2: certain ministers and stuff like that. And that's actually what's
Speaker 2: interesting is that the history of Indonesia is a former
Speaker 2: Dutch colony. You have this kind of the similar historical
Speaker 2: situation where you move to a like decolonial leader right
Speaker 2: after decolonization who talks about sort of nationalizing everything, and
Speaker 2: then that person gets overthrown by somebody who is much
Speaker 2: more venal and starts selling off the nation's resources. So
Speaker 2: obviously no two places are exactly the same, but there's
Speaker 2: there were some interesting similarities basically between Indonesia and DRC.
Speaker 2: Although the conditions were much much better for the people
Speaker 2: who were that although they at the same time they
Speaker 2: weren't perfect.
Speaker 1: After the break, we look at some of the other
Speaker 1: natural resources being mined to fuel the energy revolution. Stay
Speaker 1: with us, Welcome back, Nick. You've covered conflict zones and
Speaker 1: wars all over the world. How do natural resources figure
Speaker 1: into these conflicts?
Speaker 2: So I traveled in two thousand and seventeen to report
Speaker 2: on the frozen conflict in the Western Sahara. And this
Speaker 2: was before I was focused on battery metals, and I
Speaker 2: was going down to interview some political activists in the
Speaker 2: town of Laune, which is the capital of the Western Sahara,
Speaker 2: which Morocco has occupied since nineteen seventy six and has
Speaker 2: taken over that country's phosphate resources. So I was interested
Speaker 2: in how much phosphates played into why Morocco was hanging
Speaker 2: on to Western Sahara, why they wanted Western Sahara. It's
Speaker 2: a much more complicated story to do with the way
Speaker 2: that the king sees his authority and these kind of
Speaker 2: pre colonial agreements with various different tribes in the Sahara,
Speaker 2: but phosphates does play into it. Ten percent of Morocco's
Speaker 2: phosphate comes from the Western Sahara. And basically the control
Speaker 2: of Western Sahara has allowed Morocco to have a sort
Speaker 2: of stranglehold on the world phosphate industry. Phosphates are mainly
Speaker 2: used as fertilizers, but now they're used in some of
Speaker 2: these lithimyon phosphate batteries, which are a cobalt free battery
Speaker 2: which has a much lower energy density than batteries that
Speaker 2: have cobolt in them.
Speaker 1: Are not so good for small devices, not so good.
Speaker 2: For small devices, not as powerful, not necessarily good for
Speaker 2: high performance electric vehicles, although that's debatable at this point
Speaker 2: because there's been a lot of advances in electric vehicle
Speaker 2: LFP batteries, and those batteries are seen as a way
Speaker 2: of moving away from cobalt, which is also quite expensive,
Speaker 2: and they're much cheaper and they're much safer as well,
Speaker 2: but they come with this sort of trade off that
Speaker 2: phosphates are necessary for agriculture. And Isaac Asimov, the great
Speaker 2: science fiction writer, talked about this sort of moment where
Speaker 2: population growth meets phosphate shortage and how that's the sort
Speaker 2: of stabilizing point of human civilization. So if we're using
Speaker 2: phosphates to power our cars and our batteries. We're going
Speaker 2: to hit that point much sooner.
Speaker 1: And not only that they mind in a conflict zone.
Speaker 2: Their mind in a conflict zone. Exactly so, the Western
Speaker 2: Sahara since twenty twenty one has been re embroiled in
Speaker 2: a conflict between Morocco and the Polysaria Front, which is
Speaker 2: a separatist movement backed by Algeria, Morocco's neighbor. So I
Speaker 2: wanted to point out that nothing, nothing comes for free. Basically,
Speaker 2: we might think that these LFP batteries as they're called,
Speaker 2: are these wonderful, you know, new technology, but actually, in
Speaker 2: the end of the day, those batteries also come with
Speaker 2: their trade offs.
Speaker 1: I'm curious what's the state of the research into alternatives
Speaker 1: to cobald and lithiumine batteries.
Speaker 2: So alternatives cobalt, there's sodium ion batteries, and sodium is
Speaker 2: a very very abundant element. The only problem is that
Speaker 2: they don't have the same energy density and probably will
Speaker 2: never have the same energy density as lithium ion batteries
Speaker 2: because sodium ions are larger than lithium ions. Basically, so
Speaker 2: the interesting thing about that is that you probably could
Speaker 2: have low range electric cars and maybe even medium range
Speaker 2: electric cars powered by the current technology. The Chinese have
Speaker 2: advanced on that front in leaps and bounds. There are,
Speaker 2: by the last count that I read, twenty five companies
Speaker 2: in China sort of fully producing sodium man batteries. There
Speaker 2: is I think one in France and one sort of
Speaker 2: Mark Cuban backed company in the US called Natrion. But
Speaker 2: it all feels a bit more like a science experiment
Speaker 2: in the West, whereas in China it's actually happening and
Speaker 2: it's actually there, and you can buy sodium mayan batteries,
Speaker 2: you know, from Ali Baba very easily. Then there's a
Speaker 2: little bit further out there sodium sulfur, which is actually
Speaker 2: a technology that was first pioneered by Ford in the
Speaker 2: nineteen sixties as a potential electric vehicle technology. Sodium sulfur
Speaker 2: actually could have a huge amount of energy density. The
Speaker 2: problem with the original sodium sulfur batteries was that they
Speaker 2: had to have molten cathodes, which was not practical to
Speaker 2: have in electric vehicles because you're have to have something
Speaker 2: like a molten hot thing in your car battery and
Speaker 2: obviously that would be very dangerous. And then there are
Speaker 2: you know, various other different types of battery technology that
Speaker 2: are being bandied around. People talk about silicon anodes and
Speaker 2: various different little tweaks that can be made to make
Speaker 2: the batteries more powerful and potentially less resource intensive. I
Speaker 2: think that that's probably the road that we're going down
Speaker 2: more visibly at the moment. And then the final thing
Speaker 2: that I just wanted to mention is hydrogen and fuel
Speaker 2: cell technologies. I think that those have been generally accepted
Speaker 2: for long distance things like trucking, and there are some
Speaker 2: taxi companies in Europe that are using hydrogen and fuel
Speaker 2: cell technology. Is the problem is that hydrogen is very,
Speaker 2: very energy intensive to convert. Usually you're converting a natural gas,
Speaker 2: so it's not necessarily a particularly environmental door of energy
Speaker 2: at the moment because you're just putting in so much
Speaker 2: energy to convert it into fuel. So for the moment,
Speaker 2: battery technology based on cobalts, based on nickel, based on
Speaker 2: phosphate seem to be the best options that we have.
Speaker 2: Although these things do develop fairly quickly. I mean when
Speaker 2: I started this project in twenty eighteen, I mean people
Speaker 2: were just starting to talk about lifting my am phosphate
Speaker 2: batteries now they're in like fifty percent of electric cars.
Speaker 1: What was the driving question in your mind as you
Speaker 1: got on and off these planes all around the world, planes, boats, motorbikes.
Speaker 1: I mean, what were you was driving you.
Speaker 2: The motivating question? I mean, look, when I would get
Speaker 2: off at a place, I would often think, how is
Speaker 2: it possible that the world's new energy revolution can be
Speaker 2: based in this place where there's no drain going under
Speaker 2: the street, there's no electricity at night, there's no healths.
Speaker 2: And we're talking about electric vehicles and flying cars and
Speaker 2: things like that. And at the same time, you have
Speaker 2: these places which are entirely dejected and undeveloped and sometimes
Speaker 2: in a way beautifully undeveloped as well. You know, in
Speaker 2: the middle of Indonesia in the Milucu Islands, Like it's
Speaker 2: this green landscape of these beautiful islands that have been
Speaker 2: sort of untouched. Now they're being ripped to pieces in
Speaker 2: order to develop these these minds. So the question is like,
Speaker 2: how do you square that kind of destruction and that
Speaker 2: kind of deprivation with this ultra shiny, ultra modern world.
Speaker 1: You've seen incredible suffering reporting the supply chain. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: mass graves.
Speaker 2: Even I have seen I have seen incredible suffering reporting
Speaker 2: this story, and yeah, we saw mass graves in Congo.
Speaker 2: But what I realized is that it's you know, there
Speaker 2: are ways to do cobalt mining cleanly and ways to
Speaker 2: pay back to the countries that the minerals are mined from,
Speaker 2: but we're not doing that because we can do it
Speaker 2: more cheaply by cutting a lot of corners. And cutting
Speaker 2: those corners has huge effects down the supply chain. So
Speaker 2: you know, if everybody paid a little bit more for
Speaker 2: their iPhone, you could probably see much less suffering at
Speaker 2: the bottom of the supply chain and people better ammunerated.
Speaker 2: Then again, it's very very complicated to understand, like how
Speaker 2: that money would get back to people and so on.
Speaker 1: One of the quotes that stay with me from your
Speaker 1: book is a Japanese battery executive who said, to you,
Speaker 1: the issue is, in the end of the day, there's
Speaker 1: no good way to power industrial society. Yeah, do you agree.
Speaker 2: I agree with it to some extent, But I mean,
Speaker 2: I think when you speak to scientists and technologists, there's
Speaker 2: an incredible amount of hope because they feel like some
Speaker 2: of the problems that we're still experiencing in the supply
Speaker 2: chain have actually been solved. Like I had this wonderful
Speaker 2: conversation with a scientists who wanted to be off the record,
Speaker 2: and this scientist was saying to me, well, we've solved
Speaker 2: all these problems, We've sold all these problems, and we
Speaker 2: don't understand why it's there's still problems. But there's still
Speaker 2: problems because to do things in the old ways is
Speaker 2: still cheaper, and people are stuck in their ways of
Speaker 2: doing things, and the investments have been made, and so
Speaker 2: I think that people need to be a bit more flexible,
Speaker 2: and I think that legislation as well needs to reflect
Speaker 2: the fact that the technology is changing so quickly as well.
Speaker 1: That was Nicholas Niokos, author of the forthcoming book The
Speaker 1: Elements of Power for Tech Stuff. I'm Osvoloshin. This episode
Speaker 1: was produced by Eliza Dennis, Lizzie Jacobs, and Sina Ozaki.
Speaker 1: It was exact to produce by Me, Karen Price and
Speaker 1: Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katria norvelleve iHeart Podcasts. We
Speaker 1: recorded the conversation at Citybox. Jack Insley mixed this episode
Speaker 1: and Kyle Murdoch in our theme song join us on
Speaker 1: Friday for the weekend tech Karen and I will run
Speaker 1: through the tech headlines, including some you may have missed.
Speaker 1: Please rate, review, and reach out to us at tech
Speaker 1: Stuff Podcast at gmail dot com. We love hearing from you.