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 … [Read more...]