Regardless how stringent climate policies are, or how rapidly we move from internal combustion to electric vehicles, increasing battery needs around the world presage a huge increase in demand for cobalt.

Right now, as Ronald Stein and Todd Royal demonstrate in their book Clean Energy Exploitations, most of the world’s cobalt comes from mines with very low environmental protection standards and huge human rights problems—child and slave labor in highly toxic settings, sometimes at the point of a gun.

That’s why I welcome news that an underground cobalt mine is set to begin operations later this year near Salmon, Idaho.

Here in America, cobalt mining will have to meet stringent environmental and labor standards. At the same time, it will reduce our dependence, and that of countries to which we export it, on hostile foreign states for this strategically vital mineral.

Let’s hope this is not the sole but the first of many steps to renew and enlarge mining in America.

For decades, we’ve short sightedly pushed mining out of America, thinking we were protecting nature. But nature’s in other countries, too, and when mining moves from places with strong environmental and human-rights protections to places with weak or none, nature and people suffer. So, for people and for the planet, this makes sense.

Photo, Middle Fork of the Salmon River, Frank Church Wilderness, Idaho Primitive Area, by Danny Grizzle on Unsplash.