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Third World Child Slavery, a Small Price to Pay for Environmentalist Virtue Signaling
No cost is too high to meet Eurotopia’s insatiable demand for green virtue-signaling. The latest virtue signaling fad to sweep Europe is to outlaw cars and trucks that are fueld by gasoline and diesel fuels. Sweden and France have already passed laws to phase out non-electric vehicles by 2040, and there is a movement for other countries to follow suit. It is an article of faith on the environmental left that electric cars are non-polluting and will save the world from ManBearPig.
The batteries to power Eurotopia’s new fleets of electric vehicles will require staggering amounts of rare Earth metals as well as lithium and cobalt. The extraction of these elements from the Earth is so environmentally devastating that no advanced western country would ever allow it to take place on their soil. The Eurotopian greens are only too happy, however, to shift the burden to places like Communist China and Africa, where environmental protections are non-existent and the people doing the hard labor are so backward and deplorable they probably use the wrong gender pronouns. So, who cares what happens to them?
By the way, as an added bonus, those electric Teslas and Volvo’s also promote third world child slavery.
Dorsen, just eight, is one of 40,000 children working daily in the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The terrible price they will pay for our clean air is ruined health and a likely early death.
Goldman Sachs, the merchant bank, calls cobalt ‘the new gasoline’ but there are no signs of new wealth in the DRC, where the children haul the rocks brought up from tunnels dug by hand.
…
No one knows quite how many children have died mining cobalt in the Katanga region in the south-east of the country. The UN estimates 80 a year, but many more deaths go unregistered, with the bodies buried in the rubble of collapsed tunnels. Others survive but with chronic diseases which destroy their young lives. Girls as young as ten in the mines are subjected to sexual attacks and many become pregnant.
Yeah, but isn’t it worth it for the smug sense of superiority leftists get from plugging their Teslas and Nissan Leaf’s into the power-up station? It totally is, isn’t it?
Well, yes, but only so far as the leftist mind can keep all the related issues separate. Which generally is a very long time. Hopefully the Katangans know how much “we” care.
I’m stealing that.
Let’s see: no nuclear power for electricity, no coal for electricity, no oil for electricity, no water dams for electricity…those are pollutants in one form or another that are verboten. But cobalt and lithium, well that comes from Africa so it’s ok. Well turns out it’s not so ok. Leave it to a leftist to not be able to think two steps ahead. My electric bill for my home has nearly doubled. On the front of the envelope the utility was promoting electric cars. I had to laugh.
Do we not have data on the net energy consumed and pollution produced by an electric car? Making it, creating batteries, disposing of same, replacing them, generating and transmitting the electricity. We’d have to add to that the energy consumed subsidizing them as well and the bureaucratic overhead not included in the subsidy of the government efforts to force it on the population. I’d be surprised if it’s a net saving although that is irrelevant as the net impact on the environment is not measurable. Moreover the very act of subsidizing existing technology and pushing the global economy in a particular direction and away from market determinations, will slow the technological development that will in fact some day lead to cleaner cheaper transportation.
VTK,
As I’ve tried to emphasize before, Ideology and Engineering don’t mix. Environmental ideologues decide beforehand what the outcome should be and ignore truly hideous monumental problems with their little pet theories.
Anyone who wants a cobalt mining operation or a battery plant in their backyard needs serious psychiatric care. I’d take all the drilling in Texas and 50 more oil refineries before I’d say OK to mass battery manufacturing. Musk is a fraud and the greenies are insane.
Regards,
Jim
Aren’t the batteries rechargeable? I mean, I know they are but when they truly run out can’t they be “fixed” and sold to Bangladeshis?
15% penalty charging the battery. 15% penalty discharging it. So, we have to increase the amount of power generated for transportation by 130% just to stay where we are.
Trump isn’t proof of the concept of the movie Idiocracy. The Europeans are.
Can you expand on this? 15% compared to what? You lose 15% charging and 15% discharging? But the engine is over 90% efficient. That’s 65% efficient, worst case scenario.
A gasoline engine by comparison is 40% efficient (more likely 30%), best case scenario.
I think we’re discussing electric power generation, not thermodynamics. The root question is how are they going to charge all those electric cars?
Coal fired plants in China or Africa with underwater cables.
The EU went through the same idiocy a decade ago when they arbitrarily banned lead in nearly everything. For electronics, this not only reduced the safety and longevity of devices (lead-alloy solders are very very durable) but drove up manufacturing costs as the replacement alloys all require a great deal more energy to melt. Further, the current lead-free solders are all mixes of less obtainable alloys that are far more trouble to mine and smelt than lead. Silver and bismuth, as well as a variety of others. Lead is easier to recycle too from scrap. All this despite the utter irrationality of fearing lead poisoning from electronics.
But they’d rather run on emotion than look at the logic.
You know this better than I, but as someone who has soldered a lot of circuits by hand, I can tell you lead based solder is much superior to lead-free. The RoHs regulations are ridiculous, as they even banned lead from glass used in specialty optics. There is probably nothing more inert than lead glass.
Don’t let your kids eat your transistor radio.
No wonder they are reproducing below the replacement rate.
On a serious note, sometimes I worry about the anti-child labor sentiment. Yes, we all feel for children in third world countries that must work instead of go to school, but on the other hand would you rather have them starve? Children also have the right to make a living. The problem in the DRC is not children working in mines, it is the chaos that is the DRC, where gangs with guns run everything.
This site has round-trip efficiency at 75-90%. I figure that they are assuming ideal conditions (battery age, temperature, etc.)
Conditions are seldom ideal, and never for long. And batteries aren’t power sources, they only store power. Any introduced inefficiencies still have to be paid for.
If electricity for charging electric cars will come from ‘renewable sources’, as often claimed, then this will further increase battery demand above and beyond that required for the cars themselves.
Most people will want to charge their cars at night, when the sun doesn’t shine. Hence, somewhere there will have to be sufficient grid (or home) battery capacity to time-shift the generation to the time period when it is needed.
Ramirez pens a classic:
Also, from WUWT, lithium battery disposal literally killing the earth (microbes). As someone said in the comments, why stop with multi-cellular birds, bats, and… children?
Oil and coal are two of the best proofs that there is a God and he loves us.
The only good electric cars require no batteries, are surrounded by a 360 degree bumper and driven by 10 year olds.
The comments on the Daily Mail piece are fascinating: apparently this is all just propaganda from the oil companies.
Because of course it is
I love tweaking particularly sanctimonious people who say “electric car” like it’s a hymn.
Oh. You mean ‘coal-powered’ cars…? They fail to see the humor in it.
Also banned from alloys in things like pipe organs – really hosed the resonance of the pipes. Pure emotionalism.
The superiority of lead solder comes down to several things:
Skip,
I don’t think everybody gets the real underlying problem. I mean aside from burning enough coal to charge the cars. You are pointing out the strict rules involving heavy metal pollution. Imagine the weight of the metals you are describing. Now imagine the weight of a single set of batteries that can power the Tesla. Now multiply the weight of the batteries by replacing them millions of times every year. The pollution potential is just astronomical. Heavy metal pollution is a huge problem at this scale. Musk and the greenies just ignore it while they are allowed to spin their magic subsidized fantasy on both the taxpayer dollar and private capital.
When you pre-decide what is a good clean technology and what is an evil dirty technology then you ignore reality and will use ideology to drive us all to an absurd conclusion.
Regards,
Jim
Notably, it’s not just technology; rather, disconnection between reality and ideology seems to pervade everything touched by the leftist hivemind.