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2023 m. vasario 2 d., ketvirtadienis

The Human Price of Cobalt

"Cobalt Red

By Siddharth Kara

(St. Martin's, 274 pages, $29.99)

If you want to know what's being unleashed by the rush to mandate electric cars for a so-called clean-energy transition, read "Cobalt Red." It will leave you almost as shaken as its author, Siddharth Kara, who braved lawless militia and state-backed soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo as he visited the fountainheads of the world's lithium-battery supply chain.

Mr. Kara, a professor of human trafficking and modern slavery at Nottingham University and a senior fellow at Harvard's School of Public Health, labels himself an activist. His journeys through the Congo's jungles and mines are surprisingly reminiscent of the country's 19th-century explorers, as he treks where few others have dared and evokes the grandeur of a magnificent country -- all to witness the shocking labor and environmental practices that the world papers over with, as the author writes, "vacant statements on zero-tolerance policies and other hollow PR" in pursuit of cobalt.

Why cobalt? Because today's smartphones, laptops, leaf blowers, toys and so much more owe their revolutionary portability to the advent of cobalt-infused lithium batteries. Up until the late 1990s, the uses for cobalt -- in magnets, dyes, inks, chemical catalysts and little else -- required some 20 kilotons of the mineral a year, a relatively modest figure by mining standards and one that had remained little changed over the previous three decades. Then the first lithium decade vaulted annual cobalt demand to about 60 kilotons.

Three-fourths of that cobalt comes from the Congo, a market share that's more than double OPEC's claim on oil. Now comes the electric vehicle's half-ton battery, each one using thousands of smartphones' worth of minerals. Even at only 10% of global auto sales, electric vehicles have already pushed annual cobalt demand to 140 kilotons; it is expected to exceed 200 kilotons by 2026 as new battery factories come online and will explode from there when proposed EV mandates are supposed to kick in, many within the coming decade.

The heart of Mr. Kara's mission is to document the use of artisanal mining -- that is, human digging and toting by manual, brute force rather than using trucks and backhoes. You're halfway through the book before Mr. Kara's bombshell: The artisanal share of the Congo's output, often dismissed as negligible, may exceed 30%. As the author warns: "Do not be fooled by the word 'artisanal' " -- it's far from "pleasant mining activities conducted by skilled artisans." In place after place he visited, whether with official escorts or by surreptitious entry, what he saw was "a hellscape of craters and tunnels, patrolled by maniacs with guns." It was a "lunar wasteland," a "devastated landscape" that "resembled a battlefield after an aerial bombardment."

The reader senses that the author has been left shell-shocked, not from the aesthetic carnage but from seeing thousands of people mining by hand, hammer and shovel in vast open pits hundreds of feet deep, most of the pits arrayed with hand-dug tunnels. Mr. Kara reports visiting a typical mine where "more than three thousand women, children, and men shoveled, scraped, and scrounged . . . under a ferocious sun and a haze of dust." The book has no photographs, an understandable absence given the risks of using a camera with armed guards everywhere. Instead Mr. Kara captures the impact of artisanal mining through the powerful stories of the miners -- men, women and children -- that he has gleaned through interviews. It's often hard to read his descriptions of the miners' daily lives, the risks, accidents, promises unfulfilled and, too often, heart-wrenching tales of maimed or dead children.

As for the programs that claim to tag and track ostensibly child-free cobalt, Mr. Kara's compelling chronicle makes it clear that "there is no accurate way to disaggregate artisanal from industrial production" -- that is, to know whether the cobalt in any particular product came from an artisanal mine or not. And since more than 70% of the world's cobalt is refined in China, the commingling is impossible to unravel.

Mr. Kara spares no one from responsibility, from the Chinese firms that he sees everywhere in the country to the Congo's national and local governments. He calls out Western tech and car companies, as well as nongovernmental organizations, for their eager commitments to "international human rights norms" and "zero-tolerance policies on child labor." These commitments, the author argues, are at best unverified, perhaps even unverifiable. At one mining site that employed more than 10,000 artisanal miners, the author noticed a sign at the entrance that would have been laughable if it weren't so tragic: "Our values -- Transparent, dynamic, respectful, accountable, socially responsible."

Some will claim that, to reduce the harm Mr. Kara documents, cobalt demand can be reduced by recycling and modifying chemical formulations. But even assuming greater adoption of different chemistries and achieving a recycling nirvana, forecasts still show overall demand for cobalt soaring.

The lessons in "Cobalt Red" extend to dozens of other minerals. The path to energy-transition goals runs through all kinds of mines located around the globe, from Russia's Arctic to Brazil's Amazon forests, from Mozambique to Chile and beyond. 

The global production of copper, lithium, manganese, nickel and many more minerals will need to rise more than 1,000% in the next few years to supply all the electric vehicles, windmills and solar modules imagined or mandated. The author writes that some 45 million people are directly involved in artisanal mining globally. We await adventurers as brave as Mr. Kara to shine a light on those supply-chain realities too.

"Cobalt Red" concludes that the "exploitation of the poorest people of the Congo" is a "moral reversion." Amen.

---

Mr. Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is a partner at Montrose Lane, an energy-tech venture fund, and the author of "The Cloud Revolution."" [1]

1. The Human Price of Cobalt
Mills, Mark P.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 02 Feb 2023: A.15.

 

I. Šimonytė about our culture

 I. Šimonytė: The basis of our, Lithuanian Conservatives', culture is pedophilia and drugs. Therefore, Chekhov and Tchaikovsky make us vomit, we are immediately poisoned. 


I.Šimonytė apie mūsų kultūrą

I. Šimonytė: Mūsų, Lietuvos konservatorių, kultūros pagrindas yra pedofilija ir narkotikai. Todėl nuo Čechovo ir Čaikovskio mus vemti verčia, iškart apsinuodijame.


   

„OpenAI“ nustato 20 dolerių mėnesinį „ChatGPT“ abonento planą

„OpenAI pristato mokamą prenumeruojamą dirbtinio intelekto pokalbių roboto ChatGPT versiją.

 

     Naujoji prenumeratos paslauga vadinama „ChatGPT Plus“ ir turės 20 dolerių mėnesinį mokestį, trečiadienį paskelbė bendrovė. Prenumerata apima prieigą prie pokalbių roboto piko naudojimo metu. Dabartinė nemokama versija riboja paslaugas vartotojams tais laikotarpiais, kai naudojimas yra didelis.

 

     Prenumeratoriai taip pat gaus išankstinę prieigą prie naujų funkcijų ir patobulinimų bei greitesnį atsakymo laiką iš pokalbių roboto.

 

     Naujoji prenumeratos programa iš pradžių bus prieinama JAV, o vėliau bus išplėsta į kitas šalis, pranešė OpenAI. Suinteresuoti vartotojai gali užsiregistruoti prenumeratos paslaugos laukiančiųjų sąraše, pranešė bendrovė. „OpenAI“ artimiausiomis savaitėmis pradės kviesti žmones iš laukiančiųjų sąrašo.

 

     OpenAI ir toliau siūlys nemokamą prieigą prie ChatGPT. Prenumeratos paslauga padės palaikyti nemokamą prieigą prie pokalbių roboto, pranešė bendrovė. OpenAI taip pat tiria pigesnių planų ir verslo planų galimybes.

 

     „ChatGPT“ leidžia vartotojams įvesti klausimus robotui ir gauti rašytinius atsakymus, paremtus dirbtiniu intelektu. Jis netgi gali rašyti eilėraščius ir esė. Kai kurie pramonės stebėtojai teigė, kad „ChatGPT“ ateityje galėtų pasiūlyti potencialią alternatyvą dabartinėms paieškos sistemoms, nors bendrovė teigė, kad programos atsakymuose dažnai buvo faktinių klaidų.

 

     Praėjusį mėnesį „Microsoft Corp.“ teigė, kad investuos kelis milijardus dolerių į „OpenAI“, prieš tai investavusi 2019 ir 2021 m.“ [1]

 

1. OpenAI Sets $20 Monthly Subscriber Plan for ChatGPT
De Avila, Joseph.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 02 Feb 2023: B.4.

OpenAI Sets $20 Monthly Subscriber Plan for ChatGPT

"OpenAI is launching a paid subscription version of its artificial-intelligence chatbot ChatGPT.

The new subscription service is called ChatGPT Plus and will have a $20 monthly fee, the company announced Wednesday. The subscription includes access to the chatbot during peak usage times. The current free version limits service to users during periods when usage is high.

Subscribers will also get early access to new features and improvements and faster response times from the chatbot.

The new subscription program will initially be available in the U.S. and later expand to other countries, OpenAI said. Interested users can sign up for a wait list to the subscription service, the company said. OpenAI will begin inviting people over from the wait list in the coming weeks.

OpenAI will continue to offer free access to ChatGPT. The subscription service will help support free access for the chatbot, the company said. OpenAI is also exploring options for lower-cost plans and business plans.

ChatGPT allows users to type questions to the bot and receive written responses powered by artificial intelligence. It can even write poems and essays. Some industry observers have said ChatGPT could offer a potential alternative to current search engines in the future, though the company has said that the program's outputs often contained factual errors.

Last month, Microsoft Corp. said it would invest several billion dollars in OpenAI after previously investing in 2019 and 2021." [1]

1. OpenAI Sets $20 Monthly Subscriber Plan for ChatGPT
De Avila, Joseph.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 02 Feb 2023: B.4.