Extract from ABC News
It's a sign of the times.
Electric car manufacturer Tesla became the world's most valuable carmaker last week, overtaking Toyota, despite never having made an annual profit.
In the past 12 months, Tesla shares have surged over 400 per cent to reach a market value of $US210 billion ($302 billion).
In July last year, its share price was $US233. Last week, it closed at $US1,208.
According to the financial firm Refinitiv, Tesla is now trading at 69 times its estimated 2022 earnings.
What's behind the eye-watering rally?
A broader improvement in the tech sector has helped.
A report that Tesla sold 11,095 Shanghai-made Model 3 vehicles in China in May, more than triple the number sold in April, has helped too.
But Tesla's financial update last week was the spur. It showed the company just achieved its best first quarter for production and deliveries in its history, despite the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Long-term forecasts for demand for electric vehicles would also be very supportive because they're staggering.
According to BloombergNEF, global sales of new cars with an internal combustion engine, which run on oil and diesel, peaked in 2017 and are "in permanent decline".
But sales of electric vehicles are forecast to grow dramatically in the coming decades.
It said electric vehicle sales could hit 10 per cent of global passenger vehicle sales by 2025, rising to 28 per cent in 2030 and 58 per cent in 2040.
There's so much room for growth in electric vehicles it's hard to fathom — just like the scale of the global transition to renewable energy generally.
Electric cars the 'green' option, but they present their own issues
In fact, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) released a report on the topic last month, telling the world to prepare for electric vehicles.
It said a global transition was underway to decarbonise energy and transport systems, and as the importance of oil as a source of energy receded, demand for lithium-ion batteries would grow rapidly.
This would create its own problems, it said, because the mining industries extracting the key materials needed for rechargeable batteries — lithium, graphite, manganese and cobalt — caused unique environmental and social consequences.
It said there was an "urgent need" to address them to ensure the transition to a low-carbon energy system was done sustainably and ethically.
But the bulk of the 72-page report was spent explaining the economics of battery manufacturing and supply chains.
It dedicated one page to the social and environmental problems associated with lithium-ion batteries.
Nevertheless, the problems were serious.
"Most of the cobalt supplied to global markets originates from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), of which 20 per cent comes from artisanal mines where child labour and human rights issues have been identified," the report warned.
"The children are exposed to multiple physical risks and psychological violations and abuse, only to earn a meagre income to support their families."
That figure of 40,000 children came from a UNICEF report from eight years ago.
Lauren Armistead, an Amnesty International researcher, told the ABC in 2018 the figure was probably a severe underestimate now, given the rise in global demand for cobalt since then.
The UNCTAD report also failed to mention that tech companies have been put under scrutiny in recent years to clean up their supply chains.
In December, for instance, five of the world's largest tech companies (Apple, Alphabet, Dell, Microsoft and Tesla) were accused in a federal class-action lawsuit filed in Washington DC of "knowingly benefiting from, and aiding and abetting, the cruel and brutal use of young children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to mine cobalt".
It was the first lawsuit of its kind.
It was filed on behalf of 14 Congolese families whose children were killed or maimed while mining cobalt supplied to those companies.
An amended complaint was filed last month, with new details of the defendants' supply chain connections.
That type of pressure for change has had an effect on tech and auto companies.
Tesla says it is trying to eliminate cobalt from its products
It's hard to keep up with the mindset of Tesla's chief executive Elon Musk on the best of days, but in 2018 he said Tesla's next generation of batteries would contain no cobalt.
Last month, Tesla's 2019 impact report explained how much effort the company had gone through recently to source ethical cobalt from the DRC.
It said it supported sourcing from the DRC "where we can be assured that minerals, including cobalt, are coming from mines that meet our social and environmental standards".
A senior adviser at the OECD in Paris, Tyler Gillard, was reported saying Tesla's disclosures were "a positive step towards recognising the reality of copper and cobalt supply chains on the ground".
A week later, the Financial Times reported global mining giant Glencore, which has operations in Australia, had signed a deal with Tesla to supply cobalt from its mines in the DRC to Tesla's new Shanghai Gigafactory and Berlin plant.
The Times said the deal would increase Tesla's reliance on cobalt from the DRC but would also allow Tesla to control supply from Glencore's mines to where the mineral was processed in China.
The UNCTAD report mentioned none of this.
It just said the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo recognised "the issue of child labour" and "it is expected that by 2025 child labour will be eliminated from the mines".
Regarding lithium mining, the UNCTAD report focused on problems in South America.
"Indigenous communities that have lived in the Andean region of Chile, Bolivia and Argentina (which holds more than half the world's supply of lithium beneath its salt flats) for centuries must contend with miners for access to communal land and water," it said.
"The mining industry depends on a large amount of groundwater in one of the driest desert regions in the world to pump out brines from drilled wells.
"In Chile's Salar de Atacama, lithium and other mining activities consumed 65 per cent of the region's water. That is having a big impact on local farmers — who grow quinoa and herd llamas — in an area where some communities already must get water driven in from elsewhere."
It relied on a two-year-old article from Wired magazine for that information.
The dirty truth about mining
When the UNCTAD report was released, some right-wing websites seized on it as proof of the disastrous environmental and social consequences of renewable energy.
That's mining. It's a filthy business.
There are attempts to limit the damage from mining: environmental, social and cultural.
Think of the disasters that have plagued the oil and gas industries since their inception.
Even recently, a report from Stakeholder Democracy Network (SDN), an international resource watchdog, found oil refineries in western Europe have been sourcing high-quality crude from the Niger delta, blending it with toxic chemicals to make high-sulphur fuels that exceed Europe's pollution limits by hundreds of times, and selling it back to Nigeria's poorly regulated market.
That "official" fuel, which is sold in bowsers, is so toxic it's more polluting than unofficial black-market fuel sold in the country.
Nigeria has some of the worst air pollution in the world.
According to the State of Global Air database, it has recorded over 110,000 premature deaths annually for decades, attributable to air pollution.
That's just one small story from the oil industry recently. One that barely made a ripple.
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