Child miners aged four living a hell on Earth so YOU can drive an electric car...

[OnlinePoker]

X-posted from E&E

Picking through a mountain of huge rocks with his tiny bare hands, the exhausted little boy makes a pitiful sight.

His name is Dorsen and he is one of an army of children, some just four years old, working in the vast polluted mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where toxic red dust burns their eyes, and they run the risk of skin disease and a deadly lung condition. Here, for a wage of just 8p a day, the children are made to check the rocks for the tell-tale chocolate-brown streaks of cobalt – the prized ingredient essential for the batteries that power electric cars.

And it’s feared that thousands more children could be about to be dragged into this hellish daily existence – after the historic pledge made by Britain to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2040 and switch to electric vehicles.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4764208/Child-miners-aged-four-living-hell-Earth.html?ito=social-facebook

[Not Ruth]

1. That is horrible; those four year olds should not be working in the mines

[Igel]

3. People shouldn't die smuggling illegal drugs.

But a common response to that is that all the crime and misery in Central America caused by the drug cartel is because Americans have high demand for illegal drugs.

Either lose the demand or legalize the drugs to deprive the cartels of their power.


We say the same thing over illegal immigration. Either stop employing illegal aliens or find a legal way for immigration to reduce the rate of illegal immigration.


To each of those we could say, "cartels should not be abusing people and smugglers shouldn't engage in criminal activity." Or "people should respect American immigration laws--and if that happens, perhaps asylum seekers would be treated as such instead of people trying to game the system."


We have all sorts of restrictions in place on the sourcing of lithium and coltan and other ores or metals used in cell phones and high-tech batteries. Except that on the ground in these places there's a lot of chaos and the EPA, FBI, and others have no say. The materials get labeled to disguise where they come from, they get laundered, and while in many cases the companies have a good idea where a batch of stuff comes from, or they are pretty sure 25% of their supply is illicit and just don't know which 25%, they either lack the proof or cave in to demand from consumers and desire for profit. As with unauthorized counter-legal immigration and illegal drug smuggling, the best way of dealing with it would be to reduce demand or find alternate ways of doing things ethically. Good luck with that for the time being. It's been an issue for a long, long time, and unlike blood diamonds, something intended for a very few, very rich people, this particular issue hits workers and middle-class people.

[sandensea]

2. It's been downhill all the way for Congo since Mobutu

Mobutu and Poppy Bush, his chief backer and reputed beneficiary of Mobutu's secret campaign contributions to numerous western leaders (mostly on the right).

[rawtribe]

4. Koch-Funded Electric Car Video Debunked Again and Again

1) None of the metals in modern electric car batteries are classified as being a human or plant toxicity concern; (2) None are considered particularly rare in occurrence or hard to extract; (3) None are classified as "rare earths;" (4) Lithium is not a rare earth metal; (5) Cobalt is not a rare earth metal; (6) Only cobalt is mined primarily in China and DRC, and the rest of battery metals (which make up the majority of the battery) are extracted elsewhere. And many other countries produce cobalt, including Canada which produces almost the same amount as China. And hand mining only makes up a very small portion of extraction and is already being banned by Apple and others. So the notion that electric cars depend on the mining shown in the video is misleading."

https://www.ecowatch.com/koch-brother-electric-vehicles-2462683886.html

[Squinch]

6. Thank you for this.

[NobodyHere]

7. Amnesty International seems to think it's a problem

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr62/3183/2016/en/

Are they Koch puppets too?

[Eko]

5. This reminds me of the natural

vs chemical argument, in that things are cherry picked to further an argument while leaving out everything else.
Cobalt is used in many things, from prosthetics, to super alloys, radiation treatments, steel, magnets, adhesives, electroplating, agriculture and medicine, dies, pigments, colors, recording audio, glass, and of course batteries. Cobalt has been used by humans for 5,000 years. If we just trashed the electric car mining would go on. The problem here is not the electric car, nor cobalt itself, but the people that allow that type of treatment of fellow humans. There are plenty of other cobalt mines across the world where that does not happen. You should be against that mine, not electric cars or even prosthetics.
http://www.thecdi.com/cobaltfacts.php

[Blue_true]

8. China is the biggest miner of Cobalt.

The metal is a minor byproduct in US mines and improvement in seperation techniques can make it a major byproduct.

The people that have child miners in the DRC are thugs, if they don't force the kids to mine cobalt they will make them into child soldiers. Once they canno longer sell cobalt mined by children, they will sell something else that is still legal for them to sell, using child labor to extract it. The only real way to stop this is to put the people responsible in prison for life.