In 2016, the human rights violations in Africa fueling the technology future were well known and documented by none other than Amnesty International, which released a report on “the hazardous conditions in which artisanal miners, including thousands of children, mine cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”
Chinese mines in countries like Congo, Indonesia, and others have few, if any, environmental controls and little in the way of oversight, pay locals very little to work or collect Cobalt and other rare earth metals necessary for companies like Tesla, Apple, LG, Samsung, and others, who create the devices Westerners crave.
Things their societies won’t live without and are the backbone of the Left’s supposed Net Zero future.
UNICEF estimated in 2014 that approximately 40,000 boys and girls work in all the mines across southern DRC, many of them involved in cobalt mining. The children interviewed by researchers described the physically demanding nature of the work they did. They said that they worked for up to 12 hours a day in the mines, carrying heavy loads, to earn between one and two dollars a day. Even those children who went to school worked 10 – 12 hours during the weekend and school holidays, and in the time before and after school. The children who were not attending school worked in the mines all year round.
We’ve covered the issue a few times, but until this week, I was unaware of the Amnesty International report, which predates the Biden ramp-up, the piecemeal imposition of the Green New Deal, and the full-spectrum dominance approach to imposing environmental policy. It is proof that the offshoring of emissions, ecological devastation, and human suffering predates that ramp-up alongside mining operations that enrich China, a nation with an abysmal human rights record at home and a self-declared mortal enemy of the United States.
Any notion that China cares about African locals is absurd, but they do care about projecting power. Hence, they burn dirty coal to build green tech they then sell to the West that then ignores the short and long-term harm while laying claim to a greenwashed moral superiority.
But there is no energy future without fossil fuels.
You can’t make steel without coke from coal or energy-intensive aluminum.
80% of the sulfur “required for the production of phosphorus fertiliser and manufacturing lightweight electric motors and high-performance lithium-ion batteries” comes from the desulfurization of fossil fuels. Banning or reducing the use or access to fossil fuel-derived nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides will dramatically drop global food production, with some estimates suggesting that 40-60% of the world (mostly likely the third world) would starve to death.
Related: Not Even a Pencil Could Exist without Fossil Fuels
The Left likes to whine about Colonialism and Settlers wiping out societies in favor of their preferred lifestyles and livelihoods. What would they say about embracing an energy policy that results in 4 billion brown people starving to death?
Is it environmental justice when your programs are pogroms?
Children are dying, and entire ecosystems are being destroyed, so you can smugly attest to how much empathy you have for a planet your “planet-saving” priorities are destroying.