Try to imagine a wealthy, privileged white person being carried through the streets on a litter borne on the backs of starving black children. Your average green-left “progressive” would have fifty fits.
Yet this is, metaphorically, just what the climate-bothering green left do, every time they get behind the wheel of their smugmobiles. If Jacinda Ardern had her way, New Zealanders by the thousands would be exploiting the slave labour of African children – while despoiling their environment.
A new report from the United Nations has laid bare some of the ethical problems posed by the supply of rare-earth materials necessary to produce battery-powered vehicles.
Let’s be clear here: this isn’t ‘someone else’s problem’. The Greens are very vocal about Western “exploitation”. Greta Thunberg scowls and shrieks that “people are dying” in the third world, because of climate change (spoiler: they aren’t). The left are almost universally dedicated to “boycotting and divesting” Israeli products and companies. Animal activists castigate anyone who buys a dog farmed from a puppy mill.
The left leave no doubt: to benefit from alleged suffering, however distantly, is morally equal to inflicting it in the first place.
So what exactly goes into an EV?
We reported back in 2018 how children work in the cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is home to 50 per cent of the world’s cobalt, but the UN’s report details how significant an issue this is, claiming roughly 40,000 children work “in extremely dangerous conditions, with inadequate safety equipment, for very little money in the mines in Southern Katanga.”
These children earn meagre wages despite being exposed to physical dangers, as well as “psychological violations and abuse”, the report claims. The UN says child labour in cobalt mining is “widespread”, while other issues include sulfuric acid build-up in abandoned mines, which can pollute local water supplies, while miners risk breathing in uranium dust when digging.
Despite face-saving efforts by car makers, cobalt remains the mainstay of the batteries that are essential to EVs.
So is lithium.
As with cobalt, each battery pack requires several kilograms of the material. The majority (58 per cent) of lithium comes from Chile, where the UN says in some areas 65 per cent of the water supply is used in lithium and other mining activities. This leads to the “forced migration of populations from villages and the abandonment of ancestral settlements” thanks to “water scarcity and an increasingly erratic water supply”, the report warns.
Lithium mining also brings “ecosystem degradation and landscape damage”, according to the UN, while miners breathing lithium dust risk pulmonary oedemas [sic].
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Let’s be absolutely clear, then: if you drive an EV, you’re a horrible person.
You’re profiting from the exploitation of black child labour.
You’re reaping the benefit of brutality, disease and death in the world’s poorest people.
You’re choosing to inflict devastating ecological carnage in developing countries.
How dare you, indeed.
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