It's air pollution from abusive smelting, not so much the mining.
Actually a great many stories in newspapers are plants. Papers today are looking for free content. Someone is kiting a stock option, sends out a press release. Front-running the gullible.
Until someone repeals the laws of supply and demand elasticities, there will never be a cobalt shortage. It will never contribute meaningfully to the price of an auto. If it did, it would be replaced, just like png replaced gif when the patent trolls came around to collect royalties.
Remember the phony chromium shortage? The Ruskies were buying up the world's supplies (in the Congo, circa 1965). We would no longer be able to plate shiny chrome on our steel car bumpers leading to societal collapse.
Remember the phony silicon shortage? It had to come from this special beach in Coos Bay, Oregon. We're gonna run out of sand.
Remember the phony lithium shortage? The millions of hectares of open-air playas and millions of cubic km of salt beds in the western US vanished overnight. Along with all the salt in the sea.
Remember the phony rare earth element shortage? We're gonna have to go back to rotary dial phones unless the wilderness protection act is repealed.
Remember those viseroij tulips? Now there was a commodity that actually couldn't keep up with demand (because it was a fungus rather than a genetic variant):
Tulip mania (Dutch: tulpenmanie) was a period in the Dutch Golden Age during which contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637.
It is generally considered the first recorded speculative bubble... In many ways, the tulip mania was more of a hitherto unknown socio-economic phenomenon than a significant economic crisis. And historically, it had no critical influence on the prosperity of the Dutch Republic, the world's leading economic and financial power in the 17th century. wiki