Channel Seven’s Spotlight digging for dirt on clean energy ignores fundamental facts and basic journalistic standards | Temperature Check

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.

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Spotlight 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.”

A Seven spokesperson said the claim about the Hornsdale battery was based on a 2017 Amnesty report which had given Tesla, the battery supplier, a low assessment of the company’s efforts to keep human rights abuses out of its cobalt supply chain.

The spokesperson added: “It is impossible to say without any doubt that any battery manufactured with cobalt from the DRC does not contain cobalt mined with child labour or through human rights abuses, because China is not transparent about its supply chains and actively conceals them.”

Tarkine under threat?

In another segment, Bartlett travelled to the Tarkine rainforest in Tasmania to tell viewers they would be shocked to hear a Chinese company, MMG, was operating a zinc, copper and lead mine “smack bang in the middle” of the precious wilderness.

But the mine in question has been in operation since 1936 and was bought by Chinese interests in 2009.

Bartlett covered the company’s controversial plans to build a dam for the mine’s waste tailings in the middle of the Tarkine, interviewing the veteran environmentalist Bob Brown.

“It’s virgin rainforest to be sacrificed on the altar of renewable energy,” Bartlett said.

But what Bartlett didn’t say was that two months ago the company proposed an alternative location for the dam, outside the Tarkine – a step Brown’s foundation has said it will not fight.

MMG outlined this in a statement to the program, saying it had “no current plans” to progress the site in the Tarkine.

But that key information was apparently deemed not important enough to make the broadcast.

A Seven spokesperson said it had conducted the interview with Bob Brown after the announcement that alternative sites were being looked at, but that MMG had not withdrawn it’s application for the Tarkine site. The spokesperson did not say why this was not explained to viewers.

Elsewhere in the show, Bartlett took a helicopter ride with Steven Nowakowski, an environmentalist and known critic of renewable energy who branded clearing for a Queensland windfarm “criminal behaviour”.

He heard from farmers calling renewables companies “turkeys” and claiming renewable energy was toxic.

The Clean Energy Council – which represents the renewables industry in Australia – was not approached for comment for the show.

Other than a tetchy exchange with the federal energy minister, Chris Bowen, in the final minutes of the show – Spotlight screened not a single counterbalance in 50 minutes.

After claiming in a press conference to be trying to ask Bowen “open and honest questions”, Bartlett wrote an accompanying article in which he claimed the minister and his colleagues were ideologues over renewables and were guilty of “the kind of zealotry usually reserved for religious extremists.”

“Indeed,” wrote Bartlett, “the mad mullahs of the Iranian regime would be hard pressed to be more single minded and lacking in balance.”

When asked about the program’s lack of balance, a Seven spokesperson said the program made repeated approaches to Bowen who, they claimed, was the “minister responsible for all of the issues addressed in our documentary.”