Tag Archives: child labor

Get Real, Bloomberg, Climate Change Is No Child Labor ‘Threat Multiplier,’ Climate Policies Are

From ClimateRealism

By Linnea Lueken

A recent Bloomberg article describes a new tool that scores companies based on how much they rely on child labor, which the news outlet claims is exacerbated by climate change. This is false. While weather disasters can force people into desperate circumstances, extreme weather is not getting worse. Further, it is much more likely that the increasingly forced energy transition to renewable energy technologies in the name of stopping climate change is a much more direct child labor threat multiplier.

In the article, titled “Climate Change Poses a Child Labor ‘Threat Multiplier’,” Bloomberg describes the new tool is an AI-driven index that it refers to as “a newly developed quantitative approach may help raise its prominence as an environmental, social, and governance issue.” This corporate speak means that it is supposed be used to pressure companies that rely on high amounts of child labor anywhere in their supply chain.

The article goes off the rails when Bloomberg cites an International Labour Organization study that claimed climate change is a “threat multiplier” for child labor, because poverty forces people to rely on their children to help work and earn money for the family.

Bloomberg insists that “[a]s environmental disasters push more people into poverty, families are forced to pull children from school and put them to work in farm and field,” citing child labor due to bad weather in Cambodia, Tanzania, Uganda, Pakistan, and “a similar dynamic is unfolding in Peru, Ethiopia, Nepal, and Ivory Coast[.]”

The problem is, climate change is not causing more frequent or intense extreme weather conditions and the poverty rate has fallen considerably over the past few decades of modest warming.

As explained in Climate at a Glance: Deaths from Extreme Weather, real world data show no significant increase in extreme weather over the last 100 years. What’s more, data show that certain types of extreme weather, like extreme cold conditions, have declined, and so have human deaths associated with weather or climate related disasters. While deaths are not a direct and perfect analog to the destruction of crops or homes, they do show that the peril associated with extreme weather in general is declining –due to advancements in technologies, and the fact that the weather simply isn’t getting worse.

Even in the case of Africa, although the media has recently run plenty of articles claiming that climate change is devastating a variety of crops this year, it’s not clear that climate change is actually making the weather or even crop production worse.

In the case of West Africa, for example, which is directly referenced by Bloomberg’s post by mentioning the Ivory Coast, Climate Realism has already shown, here, that bad harvests of cocoa due to weather this year were mostly driven by the naturally occurring El Niño conditions, not climate change. When crop production data is looked at over a longer period, it becomes clear that the average trend over time is towards increasing crop production, not catastrophe. (See figure below)

Bloomberg is also wrong to claim climate change is driving rising poverty globally, and pushing more people into using children as laborers. Poverty has been on a multi-decade decline, especially during the periods with the most warming. According to data from the U.S. Agency of International Development, poverty levels dropped from 43 percent of the global population in the 1990s, to just 21 percent by 2011.

World Bank data likewise show the share of the population living in extreme poverty around the world has been dropping. (See figure below)

Future projections by groups like the Brookings Institution project that this trend in declining extreme poverty will continue, (see Figure below) and organizations like the United Nations, U.S. government, World Bank and others target 2030 as the year extreme poverty may be driven down to “global zero.”

Various projections for the prospect of ending extreme poverty by 2030. The y-axis represents the percentage of people living in extreme poverty worldwide. Via Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty

The real driver of child labor, other than lingering poverty in general, is the increasing demand for materials, often materials demanded for green energy technologies, found in third-world countries that are currently responsible for a lot of child labor. A prime example is, cobalt used for lithium-ion batteries, more of which is needed for things like electric vehicles, than phones or laptops. A 2018 report says each EV battery needs over 30 pounds of cobalt, and predicted that the cobalt demand would skyrocket as electric vehicle sales (pushed by climate mandates) increased.

According to Humantraffickingsearch.org, the world’s largest cobalt producer is the Democratic Republic of Congo, about 60 percent of global production. The DRC is known for using child labor in “artesian” cobalt production.

Bloomberg gets partial credit for a single paragraph in which the writer acknowledges that materials vital for “climate transition commodities” also use child labor, which the founder of the company that created the index said might surprise some investors.

“For example, an asset manager may be unaware of the true extent of child-labor risk for certain climate-transition commodities, such as tin used in solar panels, lithium for batteries or even sugarcane used for some forms of renewable energy,” they write.

Bloomberg’s writer seemed to miss the fact that while it is true that poverty drives much of the world’s worst child labor exploitation, in most places it is allowed to flourish due to government corruption, limited private property rights, a lack of child labor protections, and, increasingly, the demand for green energy technologies. Child labor is not being caused or exacerbated by climate change. One good way to ensure that child labor continues is by increasing the demand for solar panels and other “green” technologies that rely on mining in extremely poor areas, and by refusing those poorer countries the ability to develop using cheap and reliable fossil fuel energy. Bloomberg turned what could have been a powerful expose of the use of child labor in the creation of modern technologies, into another false, “climate change causes everything” narrative.

The EV market hits the brakes as sales hit a speed bump!

From CFACT

By Ronald Stein

Mandating a change to EV ownership and further financial austerity onto those who can least afford it is facing a rebellion from those who need transportation. The problem is that manufacturers are loading up the “supply chain” with EVs on dealer lots, but they’re not seeing the “demand” for EVs coming from the public.

The current EV ownership profiles are reflected in the oligarchic elite owners are that they are:

  • Highly educated.
  • Highly compensated.
  • Multi-car families.
  • Low mileage requirements for the families’ second car, i.e., the EV.
  • Reside in a “temperate” climate like CA. or FL. Almost 40% of EVs are in CA., and CA. has 6 times as many EVs as FL.

Unlike the profile of current EV owners, the owners of internal combustion engine vehicles are dramatically different from most potential EV vehicle owners.

  • Many are single-car owners.
  • Most of the potential car buyers are not as highly educated,
  • Nor as highly compensated as the elite EV owners.
  • Mandating a change to EV ownership and forced austerity may face a rebellion from those who need affordable vehicle transportation.

EV sales are beginning to hit a speed bump.

  • Hertz, previously an eager early adopter of fleet electrification, announced a big sell-off of EVs.
  • Ford’s electric vehicle business lost nearly $4.7 billion in 2023 and could lose another $5 billion in 2024; thus, Ford slashed EV production, having earlier pulled back on planned battery factories.
  • Unsold new EVs are piling up on dealer lots, spurring aggressive discounting.
  • “No one wants to buy used EVs,” as Fortune reports, leaving EV used-car values in free fall.

According to one industry executive, the situation “has the potential to destroy billions” of dollars in value for auto firms.

1 – By law, the credit in the Inflation Reduction Act is supposedly available only when purchasing vehicles built with materials sourced primarily in the U.S.

2 – However, nearly all battery materials are currently foreign-made and will remain so for ages.

3 – An Inflation Reduction Act exception allowing credit for leased vehicles built with foreign materials. Evidently, the pen is mightier than the miner.

4 – Thus, leasing has soared to over half of all EV sales in America, as leasing is the only way to capture the federal $7,500 tax credit for most EVs.

The American government provides incentives and tax deductions to transition society to EVs, but those incentives are financial incentives for the continuation of Child Labor and Ecological Destruction “Elsewhere.” Is it ethical and moral to provide financial support to developing countries that are mining for exotic minerals and metals to build EV batteries for Americans?

The putative EV revolution is stalling for three main reasons, and not because of “dead robots” or the other road bumps in recent news. What will happen is that:

  1. We’ll run out of money to subsidize the common folk.
  2. We’ll run out of copper and other foreign-sourced special metals.
  3. Car drivers will run out of patience in putting up with inconveniences.

International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that global gasoline consumption in 2023 blew past the pre-lockdown 2019 peak, even with roughly 30 million EVs on the world’s roads, up from near zero a decade ago. The primary reason may be that EVs are mainly 2nd vehicles with low mileage vs the high mileage workhorse vehicles that are internal combustion engines.

The CO2 emissions arising from building an EV before it gets driven revolve around a simple fact: a typical EV battery weighs about 1,000 pounds. That half-ton battery is made from a wide range of minerals, including copper, nickel, aluminum, graphite, and lithium. Accessing those minerals requires digging up and processing some 250 tons of earth per vehicle, mostly in poorer developing countries with minimal labor laws and environmental regulations.

The battery pack is a complex electrochemical system made from hundreds or thousands of parts, including sensors, safety systems, cooling or heating systems, and a boatload of power electronics.

The underlying material requirements from developing countries are the single constraint that will cause the EV to stall out before other factors kick in. All the world’s mines, both currently operating and planned, can supply only a small fraction of the 700 percent to 4,000 percent increase in various minerals like copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, and other rare earth elements that are essential components in many of today’s rapidly growing electricity technologies that will be needed to meet the wildly ambitious EV goals.

The rate of EV adoption is currently braking before there’s a battery-dominated future because, again, we’ll run out of money, copper, etc., and political tolerance for enriching other nations — especially China, where 50 percent to 90 percent of the critical materials are now controlled and produced and will be for years yet to come, no matter how lawmakers rewrite the sourcing regulations.

Again, the elites have bought them and will continue to buy them, BUT we’re running out of elites to buy EVs!

Please share this information with your friends to further enhance conversations about Energy Literacy, as Breezes and Sunshine cannot manufacture anything. Electricity CANNOT exist without crude oil!

This article originally appeared at America Out Loud

US Turns To Country Notorious For Child Labor And Unsafe Mines To Source Its EV Ambitions

From The DAILY CALLER

NICK POPE

CONTRIBUTOR

(Photo by Emmet Livingstone/AFP via Getty Images)

In order to facilitate electric vehicle (EV) production, the U.S. is seeking to spend taxpayer dollars to develop cobalt supply chains from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a country which is known for high prevalence of unsafe child labor in its mines, many of which are controlled by Chinese interests, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of Labor (DOL) are jointly committing $23 million in taxpayer funds to U.S. firms and other mining companies to integrate local Congolese operations and “artisanal” mines into their supply chains, as well as to improve labor standards for miners in the DRC, which are essentially nonexistent in most cases, according to the WSJ. Chinese-controlled interests dominate the DRC’s cobalt industry, refining about 75% of the global cobalt supply and manufacturing approximately 70% of the world’s lithium-ion batteries, which are cobalt-intensive products that power EVs.

Cobalt is one of the key materials needed to build batteries for EVs, a technology which the Biden administration is pursuing aggressively as a pillar of its sweeping climate agenda, according to the Cobalt Institute. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed stringent new tailpipe emissions standards in April which would effectively require American automobile manufacturers to have their new fleets be 67% EVs after model year 2032, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration unveiled a proposal to update the Corporate Average Fuel Economy requirements that would, if finalized, amount to “an EV mandate,” Dan Kish, senior fellow for the Institute for Energy Research, told the Daily Caller News Foundation at the time. (RELATED: Chinese EV Company Buys Up Michigan Land For Battery Factory Despite Public Backlash)

https://x.com/DailyCaller/status/1681333095872487426?s=20

Widespread adoption of EVs is set to facilitate the Biden administration’s goal of having the U.S. economy reach net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. The idea behind the spending is to incentivize American technology companies and auto manufacturers to invest in establishing safer and more ethical Congolese supply chains which will in turn bolster their businesses, but corporate concerns regarding security and governance in the country persist.

Nearly a third of the DRC’s cobalt is extracted by “artisanal” miners, meaning that the unearthed material and the mines it comes from are not contracted to any particular corporation, according to the WSJ. Western countries have historically tried to not rely on artisanal miners, who generally sell their ores to local merchants who then sell the product to corporations and refiners.

Hundreds of thousands of people labor as artisanal miners in the DRC, a figure which is much larger than the number of people employed by more established operations which utilize heavy machinery, according to the WSJ. There were about 40,000 children laboring in unsafe Congolese cobalt mines as of 2021, according to the Wilson Center.

Previous attempts by Western institutions, such as a Swiss company, to organize the DRC’s artisanal mining have so far resulted in failure, according to the WSJ.

Republican Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey introduced the Countering China’s Exploitation of Strategic Metals and Minerals and Child and Forced Labor in the Democratic Republic of Congo Act in June, which would prohibit the importation of all products containing cobalt and lithium extracted by child miners and victims of labor trafficking in the DRC if it becomes law.

The White House, USAID and DOL all did not respond immediately to requests for comment.

Carnage of Child Labor and Ecological Destruction “Elsewhere” acceptable to Wealthy Countries


From Watts Up With That?

Wealthy countries’ actions, to meet their emission goals, show little concern for the humanity atrocities and the environment degradation in “other” countries.

Published August 19, 2023, at the Heartland Institute https://heartland.org/opinion/carnage-of-child-labor-and-ecological-destruction-elsewhere-acceptable-to-wealthy-countries/

Ronald Stein  is an engineer, senior policy advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations.”

Global cobalt demand soared with the advent of cell phones and laptop computers. Cobalt improves battery performance, extends driving range and reduces fire risks. Now, cobalt, lithium, and other materials are exploding with the arrival of electric vehicles in tandem with government EV mandates and subsidies.

All that electrical transformation equipment will require billions of tons of cobalt, lithium, copper, nickel, graphite, iron, aluminum, rare earths, and other raw materials at scales unprecedented in human history. That will necessitate mining, ore processing, manufacturing, land disruption and pollution at equally unprecedented levels.

The Administration is laser-focused on ending the “climate crisis” by switching to “clean” electricity. It has few qualms about importing the critically needed materials from foreign countries, primarily China – regardless of economic, defense, national security, ecological or human rights implications. It just wants the dirty aspects of “clean” electricity far away and out of sight.

Cobalt mining involves unimaginable horrors that are never discussed by environmentalists nor by government leaders. However, the Biden Administration opposes mining in the United States even under stringent US pollution, workplace safety and mined-land reclamation regulations.

An educational and entertaining  45-minute discussion between Stu Turley of Sandstone Media’s Energy News Beat and Ronald Stein about “Clean Energy Exploitations” brings transparency to the humanity exploitations and environmental degradation in the developing countries that are mining for the exotic minerals and metals required to create the batteries needed to store “green electricity”.  Just a few minutes into the video I provide an explanation of the exploitations that should be considered in the buying process for an EV that should be viewed by all environmentalists and government leaders.

In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has been vocal about his commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the state. However, some of his recent actions of “leaking” emissions to other countries violate many sections of the written legal framework of The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and California Global Warming Solutions Act (AB32).

We hear much about reparations for descendants of American slaves, but little about reparations for Native Americans, and zilch about compensating these modern-day slaves in developing countries like those in the Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa that holds 72 percent of the world’s known supplies of cobalt.

The silence is deafening from billionaires like Bill Gates, John Kerry, Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and President Biden. Through the encouragement of tax incentives and subsidies to go to EV’s and electricity from wind and solar, they are providing financial incentives to China, who already controls the supply chain for the minerals and metals to go green, furthering our total dependence on China to achieve the green goals of America.

With demographics of EV owners predominantly middle-aged white men earning more than $100,000 per year, Social Security shows that the national average wage index for 2021 is only $60,575 ($40,000 less than the average EV owner). US News recently reported that more than 60 percent of adults are living from paycheck to paycheck and that 48 percent of Americans with annual incomes over $100,000 are also living paycheck to paycheck. As U.S. consumers struggle to afford their day-to-day lifestyle, many are relying on credit cards or dipping into savings, making them financially vulnerable.

Besides the affordability of ANY new car, ICE or EV, is it ethical and morally responsible to purchase an EV knowing where the supply chain of EV battery materials originates?

Those that are less fortunate in poorer developing countries are the ones mining for exotic minerals and metals to support the movement in wealthy countries to EV’s and intermittent electricity from wind and solar.

The wealthy country elites continue to demonstrate their lack of ethical, moral, and social responsibilities, by using subsidies that encourage the continued exploitations of people with yellow, brown, and black skin and the environmental degradation occurring “elsewhere”, out of view of those living in wealthy countries.

Ronald Stein, P.E.

Ambassador for Energy & Infrastructure

Energy Literacy website           

Ronald Stein (energy consultant) Wikipedia page

Dazed & Confused: 5 Things About the ‘Inevitable Energy Transition’ That Make No Sense

From STOP THESE THINGS

Confused about the grand wind and solar ‘transition’? It’s a sensation experienced by any rational thinker. None of what’s put forward makes even the vaguest sense, once the critical faculties are applied.

Jude Clemente selects 5 subjects as a subset and does just that in the piece below.

5 Things I Truly Don’t Understand About the ‘Inevitable Energy Transition’
Irrational Fear (ex Forbes)
Jude Clemente
29 May 2023

Please note: this article was pulled down offline from Forbes. I will let you draw your own conclusions as to why. Factually, there was no justification for it. 

This list could be closer to 50 but let’s just stick to a handful of them. I literally live in this business every day, and I’m just so confused.

1. In a world that is apparently getting both warmer and colder because of global warming, how is it that we can increasingly rely on non-dispatchable (i.e., intermittent, usually unavailable), weather-dependent electricity from wind and solar plants to displace, not just supplement, dispatchable (i.e., baseload, almost always available) coal, gas, and nuclear power? In other words, if our weather is becoming less predictable, how is it that a consuming economy like ours can, or should even try, predictably rely on weather-dependent resources? ERCOT exemplifies this: the Texas grid operator has around 31,000 MW of wind capacity but goes into winter expecting only 6,000 MW (just 20%) of wind farms to be available to generate electricity. Again, in the marketplace, the “alternatives” you keep hearing about are proving to be far more supplemental than alternative.

Further, good wind and solar spots are finite, based on geography, so new builds, naturally, will be forced into areas that are less windy and less sunny, lowering their already very low 35% capacity factors. And because they devour immense swaths of land, interrupting a whole host of things, that Renewable Rejection Database is mounting very quickly. If wind, solar, and electric cars too are as effective and low-cost as so many keep promising us, there would obviously be no need for government subsidies for broad adoption. Yet, there is, gigantically so. Huge amounts of taxpayer money going into this, what I call “the holy climate panacea triad,” are vulnerable to changing politics and bound to become politically untenable at some point: “Ford Is Losing $66,446 On Every EV It Sells.” Our limited financial resources are obviously very precious, so these NEVER CONSIDERED and wasted opportunity costs forcing wind, solar, and electric cars into the energy complex are truly catastrophic. Schools investing in electric buses over STEM? The $200 Billion Electric School Bus Bust. How can any of this be justified?  I’m so utterly confused.

2. Climate change is a global issue, so how is it that we can claim climate benefits for unilateral climate policy. For example, U.S. gasoline cars constitute just 3% of global CO2 emissions, so how will getting rid of them impact climate change? But this dose of real science doesn’t stop California leaders, a state responsible for just 1% of global CO2 emissions, from telling us that energy policy in the nine-county region of Northern California alone is “responsible for protecting air quality and the global climate in the nine-county Bay Area.” No wonder then that a Biden administration official was incoherent when asked how $50 trillion in climate spending in the U.S. will lower any global temperature rise. Indeed, despite the Sierra Club in 2014 promising us that “China’s Thirst for Coal Is Drying Up,” the Chinese Communist Party approved two coal plants a week in 2022. But, don’t worry guys, China promises to be net-zero by 2060. On climate, you don’t matter nearly as much as some want you to think.

So, it becomes very obvious very quickly that no energy policy in northern California has any relevance in terms of changing the climate. The region could literally disappear and there would be no discernable impact on climate change. Even our climate czar John Kerry, loving the CO2-devouring life in a private jet and $250 million, has been forced to admit that the U.S. could even go to zero emissions and it would make no material impact on climate change. Talk about all pain, no gain. The real science is that incremental global emissions are “not here but over there” U.S. CO2 emissions are in structural decline regardless of what policies we pass (save 2021 and the rebound from Covid-19’s devastation in 2020). So, where is the climate benefit for Americans when it comes to U.S. climate policy? Because we’re continuously told to “believe science,” any positive answer to that question can only be deemed as anti-science. In fact, common sense and science itself tell us that unilateral climate policy can actually be really bad for climate change because it encourages carbon leakage (e.g., climate policy in the U.S. increases costs and just pushes a manufacturing firm to re-locate to coal-devouring China).

3. Back to electric vehicles. Even green-tinted but surely practical Bloomberg admits that more than 85% of Americans can’t afford an electric car, since they are well more than double the price of oil-based cars. How can a product bring racial justice for Black Americans when the vast majority of them can’t afford it? Worse then, huge and growing subsidies for electric cars are a “reverse Robin Hood,” taking money from poor taxpayers to give to the rich ones that are, actually, in the market to buy an electric car. Forcing electric equipment over natural gas? Sorry but “gas is four to six times cheaper than electricity.” Battery costs might be much higher than expected: 1) rising global demand, 2) rising costs and unavailability of their raw materials, 3) mining complications and environmental damage, and 4) China flexing its muscles since it controls the supply chains and uses hoarding as political leverage (see Covid-19 and medical supplies). Reality check, unlike what we keep hearing about “green energy,” no technology continues to decline in cost in perpetuity: “EV battery costs could spike 22% by 2026 as raw material shortages drag on.”

And this one I’m really confused on. President Biden promotes his climate agenda as a way to create jobs. Besides lacking in economic literacy (i.e., jobs are costs not benefits), the truth is that electric cars, for instance, entail far less jobs because they, for one thing, have far less moving parts. And there’s all kinds of evidence that electric car life-cycle emissions could be way worse than advertised, mostly because of the massive amounts of mining required to make them. We all know about child labor and your electric car, but even pro-EV outlets are being forced to report on the mounting problems from mining, the latest on how bauxite for the aluminum needed is destroying the Amazon. And about our President’s we’ll need oil for “another decade” claim? The U.S. Department of Energy just modeled that our oil demand will actually slightly INCREASE, not decline, to over 21.1 million b/d by 2050. Reality check: planes, industry (petrochemicals), heavy trucking, and sheer Energy Inertia will have oil dominating way longer than you’re being told.

4. How on Earth could anybody expect those in Africa and the other horrifically poor nations to “get off fossil fuels” when the rich countries haven’t come close to doing it. Germany and California, the world’s two greenest governments, are still overwhelming fossil fuel-based and overwhelmingly dependent on imports (dangerously so in Germany’s case). This comes despite decades of huge subsidies, scores of mandates, deploying the best engineering expertise, and having low population growth and thus low incremental energy needs, all giving them a huge advantage in “going green.” The energy stat to remember most? No U.S. state will ever “try to go green” like California has over the past 20 years, yet oil and gas still supply 70% of the state’s energy, even above the national average of 65%.

Germany and California have shown us what these climate policies bring: Germany has the highest electricity prices in the world; and California’s are the highest in the continental U.S. and soaring out of control. How the heck can we push for “deep electrification” to fight climate change if we are going to follow policies that surge the price of electricity, while also lowering grid reliability? And rich Westerners, spare us the judgments, demands, and hypocrisy on climate change: Germany thrives on a GDP per capita per year of $51,200, compared to a horrifically sad $2,260 for India.

5. But, perhaps I’m most confused about the whole air quality thing. The obsession over it gets attached to all energy policies. But there’s clearly a strawman to the “we need cleaner air now” demand. First, the air quality conversation in the U.S. reminds me of Voltaire’s “the perfect is the enemy of good.” Americans seem completely unaware how drastically our air quality has improved. Check data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), our criteria pollutants have been plummeting over the past many decades. The risks seem exaggerated. Let’s just take Los Angeles, which for a big city notoriously has the worst air quality in the country. Tell me, please, if air quality is such a problem and such a health concern for Americans, why is it that Angelinos have a life expectancy of 82 years, a hearty three years above the national average. Just think of all the coal that China has devoured since 2000 (I figure around 70 billion tonnes), yet the country’s life expectancy, apparently shockingly to so many, is up a very impressive six years to nearly 78 since then. Maybe it’s because Chinese GDP per capita per year has skyrocketed nearly 9-fold to over $18,500. Even for rising asthma rates in the U.S., smoking is way down, coal usage is way down, and criteria pollutants are way down. So what gives?

“Better air quality and environment” are not free, as attaining government standards cost businesses hundreds of billions of dollars per year. These costs are ultimately paid by Americans in the form of higher prices, lower wages, and less choices. And at some point, the cost of the regulation to achieve better air outweighs its benefit. We’ve won on water too: the water in your toilet is cleaner than what the vast majority of humans on Earth drink. For every time that we hear “environmental justice” we need to say “economic justice” 100 times. In this country for all Americans, Blacks and Hispanics/Latinos make 30% less money than Whites and Asians. Too many politicians focus on the endless pursuit of “better air quality” and other abstract, seemingly impossible to measure benefits because they have no clue on the real ways to help communities of color and other low-income Americans: help them get a better education, help them get a better job, and help them make more money. Career politicians love bottomless, money-devouring pits the most: “America’s $100 billion climate change flop.” And although its entire existence is based on never being able to declare victory (imagine a football game with no time and no keeping score), EPA should consider that it’s wealth that matters most for health equity.

But, that’s not its business, is it?
Irrational Fear (ex Forbes)

Cobalt Carnage, Child Labor and Ecological Destruction

From Watts Up With That?

Horrific for cell phones, worse for electric vehicles, calamitous under Net Zero

Paul Driessen

Global cobalt demand soared with the advent of cell phones and laptop computers. It exploded with the arrival of electric vehicles and now is skyrocketing in tandem with government EV mandates and subsidies. Cobalt improves battery performance, extends driving range and reduces fire risks.

Demand will reach stratospheric heights if governments remain obsessed with climate change and Net Zero. States and nations would have to switch to electric cars, trucks, buses and tractors; end coal and gas electricity generation; convert gas furnaces, water heaters and stoves to electricity; and provide alternative power for windless, sunless periods. Electricity generation would triple or quadruple.

Weather-dependent Weather-dependent wind turbines and solar panels would require billions of battery modules, to stabilize power grids and avoid blackouts every time wind and sunshine don’t cooperate. and solar panels would require billions of battery modules, to stabilize power grids and avoid blackouts every time wind and sunshine don’t cooperate.

All that Net Zero transformation equipment – plus transmission lines, substations and transformers – will require billions of tons of cobalt, lithium, copper, nickel, graphite, iron, aluminum, rare earths and other raw materials at scales unprecedented in human history. That will necessitate mining, ore processing, manufacturing, land disruption and pollution at equally unprecedented levels.

Just President Biden’s first tranche of US offshore wind turbines (30,000 megawatts by 2030) will require some 110,000 tons of copper, for the turbines alone. Transmission lines, transformers and batteries are extra. Based on average global ore concentrations, getting that copper would require extracting 40,000,000 tons of surface rock (overburden) and 25,000,000 tons of copper ore.

But those 2,500 12-megawatt 800-foot-tall turbines would provide barely enough electricity to power New York state on a hot summer day, if the wind is blowing, and before its Net Zero mandates kick in.

However, the Biden Administration opposes mining in the United States – even for essential Net Zero materials; even under stringent US pollution, workplace safety and mined-land reclamation regulations. The President’s horse-blindered Secretary of the Interior has vetoed mining for materials in Alaska, Minnesota and almost anywhere critical metals and minerals might be found.

The Administration is laser-focused on ending the “climate crisis” by switching to “clean” energy. It has few qualms about importing the critically needed materials from foreign countries, primarily China – regardless of economic, defense, national security, ecological or human rights implications. It just wants the dirty aspects of “clean” energy far away and out of sight.

Cobalt mining involves unimaginable horrors. Cobalt Red, by Nottingham University associate professor of modern slavery Siddharth Kara, exposes the excruciating realities that Stop Oil and Net Zero campaigners strive to keep buried – along with the bodies of parents and children killed in cave-ins or dying slowly and painfully after being maimed or poisoned in cobalt mines.

Professor Kara took multiple trips to the Democratic Republic of Congo, risking his health and life to document conditions for desperate Africans in a region that holds 72% of the world’s known supplies of cobalt. He estimates that 70% of this cobalt (half the world’s entire supply) involves some measure of child labor, while much of the rest involves near-slave labor.

The DRC’s once-verdant southeastern corner hosts the largest, most accessible, highest grade cobalt ore deposits known on Earth. For EV buyers, Net Zero aficionados, and corporate and government elites, the land is blessed with cobalt interspersed with copper, other Net Zero metals, uranium, chromium, gold and silver. For those toiling at the bottom of the Congo food chain, the land is cursed with those metals.

In DRC mines, “labor is valued by the penny, life hardly at all,” Kara says. Miners in its big industrial mines get somewhat decent working conditions, medical care and pay (perhaps $10 per day).

But almost one-third of Congo cobalt is gouged from the earth by artisanal miners: men and women, and boys and girls as young as six. They and their families live and work in a treeless “hellscape of craters and tunnels patrolled by maniacs with guns.”

Noxious clouds of gas permeate air that even infants must breathe. Families fish, play and bathe in – and drink from – rivers and lakes contaminated with metals and industrial chemicals.

They labor ten to twelve hours a day in sweltering heat and toxic mud, water and dust, in enormous pits hundreds of feet deep – hacking at rocky walls and in long, narrow tunnels that collapse with frightening frequency. Injured miners may get initial medical care; then nothing.

In some areas, their clothing and skin are covered with mustard-colored dust – dried sulfuric acid from processing the ores. Almost everywhere, breast, kidney and lung cancers are rising, because adults, children and babies are exposed constantly to heavy metals and uranium in everything around them. High lead levels cause permanent neurological damage.

15-year-old Muteba hobbled on crutches, his shattered, mangled legs dangling below his skinny waist. He was the only survivor from a cave-in that buried his brother and six others alive. 16-year-old Makano fell into a pit, broke and gashed his leg and hip, and was left with a festering, infected wound that desperately required antibiotics and medical attention he was unlikely to receive.

There are thousands more like them – maimed, paralyzed, disfigured or dead.

“Fair living” wages? Male artisanal miners receive around $2-4 a day – for output that might reach two 90-pound (40-kilogram) sacks of heterogenite cobalt ore. Women and children are typically paid half that, regardless of how much they produce or the purity of the ore they mine.

Those who disobey mine overseers can get “locked in a shipping container with no food or water for up to two days.” At Kanina, two boys who tried to get more than the usual pittance for their 65-pound bags of ore were gunned down – murdered – by security guards.

“Here it is better not to be born,” a mother lamented. A miner reflected, “Here we work in our graves.” Of course we fear the dangers, said another, “but if we do not work, we do not eat.”

And still mining, tech and EV companies, ESG investment firms, politicians and climate zealots tell us they require and ensure “responsible sourcing” of Net Zero supply chains, good wages, safe working environments, and prevention of child labor and slavery. What indifferent, self-serving fraud.

No DRC buyer knows or cares where a quantity of cobalt ore came from, under what conditions it was mined, or whether children dug it out. The entire marketplace is designed to collect and mix ores from formal industrial mines and legal or illegal artisanal operations – making it impossible to trace sources or tell whether child slaves or brutal militias were involved.

At least one marketplace is a remote night operation that can have no other purpose “than to launder artisanally mined cobalt into the formal supply chain completely our of view.” Every mixed load of ore is then thrown into acid baths for initial processing – before being sent out of country, mostly to China.

We hear much about reparations for descendants of American slaves – but little about reparations for Native Americans, and zilch about compensating these modern-day slaves.

Nor do we hear from billionaires like Bill Gates, John Kerry, Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros and Michael Bloomberg. They lavishly fund “climate crisis” and “clean energy” campaigns. Have they spent one dime bringing decent wages, working conditions, living standards and medical care to Congo’s miners?

These human rights issues should top their charitable giving – and the agenda for anyone promoting the climate crisis, ESG, Net Zero and batteries, especially President Biden, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate change, environmental policy and human rights.