It’s striking just how thoroughly bourgeois is the climate change phenomenon, at every level from the Eton old boys behind Extinction Rebellion to the Greens-voting wealthy inner suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney. Climate change is the ultimate first-world problem, the almost exclusive preserve of the anxious middle-classes. The sort of people Eliot mocked as “Gumbie Cats”, “deeply concerned with the ways of the mice”, and whom Orwell derided as “that whole dreary tribe…flocking to the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat”.
What’s even more striking is that for all their self-proclaimed “compassion” and supposed concern for “the planet”, they don’t give a rat’s arse about the poorest people on it.
Almost every “climate change” proposal that obsesses the tiny minds of the Guardian-reading elite shafts the poor and benefits the wealthy. Government subsidies for “renewable energy” steal poor peoples’ taxes and reward middle-class homeowners. “Energy transition” sends electricity costs spiralling and forces poor people to choose between freezing or going broke. In Britain last year, more than 5000 lower-class electricity consumers paid the ultimate price for salving the green consciences of the middle classes.
But the biggest, dirtiest secret of the bourgeois eco-pharisees is nestled away in the hearts of their smug-mobiles, the electric cars, and in their beloved eco-crucifixes, wind turbines. The minerals in the batteries so essential to the “renewables” industry are often mined under horrendous conditions by child labourers. Forget “blood diamonds”, these are the blood-batteries.
For more than a decade the global digital revolution has been enabled by places like Kolwezi, a mining town dotted with small Chinese casinos and faded Belgian colonial bungalows. The world’s largest mining companies rub shoulders with miners who dig copper and cobalt out of the earth by hand with little or no safety protection.
It would be easy (and sometimes accurate) to blame “corporations”, but the reality is that the problem is as much caused by the perverse incentive given to the impoverished citizens of a country wracked by decades of war. A growing proportion of cobalt originating in the Congo is mined by “artisanal” miners: anyone who can grab a shovel and dig a hole.
Untraceable metal — from these informal miners — leaks into the global supply chain via refineries in China, ending up in batteries, cars and smartphones sold in the west […]The road into Kolwezi is dotted with dozens of corrugated-roofed depots with names like “Boss Wu” — traders who buy cobalt and copper from whoever is willing to sell to them. Most of that metal makes its way to China, where it enters the global battery supply chain.
In villages across the Congo, the discovery of deposits of cobalt triggers a modern-day gold rush.
The scale of the challenge can be vividly seen in the bustling village of Kasulo, on the outskirts of Kolwezi. In early 2014 residents discovered rich seams of cobalt beneath their houses. But after people started to dig in their gardens, cracks began to appear in the houses triggered by the mining frenzy.
“You would come out of your house and there’d be a big hole,” says one Chinese executive. There were regular deaths and injuries, and the local road had to be closed after tunnels were dug into its foundations.
Government and big companies will then try and convert these free-for-alls into something like an ordered, regulated activity. But even co-operative efforts become a source of tension, as miners become convinced that they are being ripped off.
Meanwhile, the dirty secret of the renewable industry fails to stir the consciences of EV-driving green elites.
“Emotionally an EV is supposed to be a good deed — you’re buying an EV you’re thinking you are saving the planet — the last thing you want to hear is that the car is not clean,” [Nicholas Garrett, chief executive of RCS Global] says.
.ft.com
It used to be said, in the days of the often-deadly industry of commercial whaling, that every lamp that burned in England held a drop of blood. Today, the same can be said of every battery in every EV, solar installation and smartphone.