[skybrian]

The structural issue is abstraction caused by complicated supply chains. The public interface is what the consumer can easily see about the product like the user experience, branding, and the final purchase price, but it's supported by lots of hidden infrastructure associated the manufacture of every part embedded into the product, along with any services provided supporting the user experience.

Labeling laws are one way to try to make the hidden details of implementation public at the cost of more complex decision-making for consumers. Sometimes large companies can police the supply chain themselves, so that from a consumer perspective, avoiding exploitation becomes part of the brand.

A carbon tax attempts to bundle climate change costs into prices without changing the public API at all. This seems like the most thorough way to make sure every buyer at all levels of the supply chain takes this environmental cost into account in their decision-making, whether they are specifically thinking about it or not.

So it seems the best way to avoid this issue would be for cobalt based on child labor to be unavailable for purchase and a second-best way would be to make sure it's more expensive so that buyers within the supply chain will automatically avoid that dependency.

When we get to the point where consumers need to step in and do the decision-making because nobody else will then this is probably the most inefficient way to do it, but it seems the supply chain won't do it unless they are pushed into it?