What’s Green About This?
Electric vehicles depend upon minerals we are increasingly prevented from mining here in the U.S..The minerals instead get produced in places of horror for children in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Electric vehicles depend upon minerals we are increasingly prevented from mining here in the U.S.. The minerals instead get produced in places of horror for children such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
The DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo] is the world’s biggest producer of cobalt, essential to the lithium-ion batteries that power cellphones, computers, EVs, and a host of devices. The silvery metal is stained with the blood of Congolese slaves, many of them children. Siddharth Kara, an expert on human trafficking and slavery, hopes to wake up the world to this 21st century horror with Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, his latest book, published in January….
The exploitation of the Congolese is an enormous travesty. Multinational corporations earn untold billions from selling cobalt, while the Congolese live in extreme poverty, suffering abuse, slavery, child labor, forced labor, debt bondage, human trafficking, and the poisoning of their soil and water. Children as young as six years work in mines to augment family income.
Miners earn $1-2 daily. More than 75% of Congolese live in poverty, 33% suffer from food insecurity; only 26% have access to clean water, 9% to electricity. Life expectancy is 60.7 years; in child mortality, the DCR ranks 11th from the bottom of the list.
Demand for cobalt is expected to grow 500% by 2050, and with the world fixated on electronic devices, the horrific injustice in Congo will continue. Miners, including children, work without protective equipment, crouched underground for hours breathing toxin-suffused air. Medical care is inadequate. Tunnel collapses and floodings are common; there is no counting the dead…
They in turn sell to industrial processors, joint ventures between Congo’s state-owned mining corporation and CCP-linked and -funded Chinese companies. The latter have gained advantage with low-ball bids, bringing in their own cheap labor, securing plants with military force, and operating without human rights considerations. The semi-refined cobalt they churn out is taken to commercial-grade refineries in China, since Congo cannot supply the electricity needed for the process. It was thus that in 2021, China produced 75% of the world’s refined cobalt.
Virtually selling the country to the Chinese, Congo’s leaders have allowed them to run riot like the earlier colonizers who conquered with arms. This time, the ravaging of the land and its people is worse. With hardly any environmental rules enforced, mining has killed agriculture, caused severe air and water pollution, and increased exposure to radioactivity. Armed guards patrol the cratered landscape, inflicting gratuitous violence and sexual assault to subdue the populace. They are joined in this by Congolese soldiers, who are known to run child labor groups, pocketing the wages and the proceeds of ore sales.
And, who are the primary beneficiaries of all this? Green energy grifters, virtue signaling EV owners and the Chinese Communist Party.
Being a former engineer for a large power company and having earned a Master of Science in Energy and the Environment, I had PV panels installed seven years ago, with my estimated payback of 15-17 years, . . the right thing for an eco-freak to do. Before they could be installed, we acquired a VW e-Golf electric car. The savings in gasoline alone took the solar system payback down to 3 1/2 years. So, we added a used Tesla Model S, P85, and that took the payback down to less than three years, which means we now get free power for household and transportation.
But that is not all: We do not need to go to gas stations, we fuel up at home at night with cheap baseload power. During the daytime, the PV system turns our meter backwards powering the neighborhood with clean local power, which we trade for the stuff to be used that night. If we paid for transportation fuel, the VW would cost us 4 cents/mile to drive, and the Tesla would cost 5 cents/mile at California off-peak power prices.
No oil changes are a real treat along with no leaks. And since it has an electric motor, it needs NO ENGINE MAINTENANCE at all. We do not go "gas up", or get tune-ups or emissions checks, have no transmission about which to worry, no complicated machined parts needing care.
THAT is what will sell the EV, and the real problem is not powering them, (the power companies have been working on and praying for the EV for a generation), the problem will be dealing with an economy which has had a large portion taken out of it. Too much of our economy is dependent on the needs of the internal combustion engine, from mechanics to emissions checkers to the folk who make oil filters, and all the folk who support them. I see a rush to EVs, (go drive one, and see), and the implications of this advance as an impending wave of dislocation for this society for which we must plan now.
This is the Capitalist part of going green, not by greenies like me, who want to change it. It is already changing with new types of batteries which use little or no cobalt.