Children sieve mud, workers drop down claustrophobic hand-cut mine shafts, men grimace while others carve out rock with chisels in bare feet to recover cobalt “for our renewable green dream”.
These were the dramatic scenes from the Democratic Republic of Congo in a “special investigation” from Channel Seven’s Spotlight program, aired in prime-time on Sunday evening.
What followed was an all-out attack on Australia’s renewable energy and battery storage boom, where efforts to break away from fossil fuels were cast as a morally bankrupt endeavour that was trashing rainforests while being enslaved to China.
But the 50-minute report – travelling to the DRC, Zambia, Broken Hill and Tasmania – failed to communicate key facts and ignored the basic journalistic practice of balance and rights of reply.
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia emailSpotlight 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.
The conditions on screen are truly awful and also well documented (other journalists, including from Al Jazeera and the Washington Post, have been to the same mine) but there were two big problems with Spotlight’s attempt to link every battery to these appalling conditions.
First, Bartlett visited an artisanal mine where the work is done by hand.
According to research from the US Geological Survey, in 2020 about 90% of the cobalt produced in Congo did not come from these mines but from industrialised mining (a process that has other problems, including claims of forced evictions).
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.
Bartlett made only one concrete claim linking so called “blood cobalt” to a specific Australian project.
Standing in front of the Hornsdale big battery in South Australia, Bartlett said: “According to Amnesty International, this almost certainly contains blood cobalt, from the Congo.”
Temperature Check asked Amnesty International about this claim.
The group’s international campaigner in Australia, Nikita White, says: “We have reviewed our materials on cobalt mining and as far as we’re aware Amnesty International Australia has not made any specific connection between the mining practices in the DRC and the company that operates the Hornsdale battery. We also do not generally use the term ‘blood cobalt’.
“Amnesty has repeatedly raised concerns about human rights abuses in relation to cobalt mining, but we also documented our concerns about the extensive human rights impacts of fossil fuel extraction and of climate change itself, and maintain that governments should commit to a just energy transition that prioritises human rights.”
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