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The Tragic Downside of Electric Cars: Child Labor
Electric vehicles are the wave of the future, according to environmentalists, with individual citizens and governments investing millions of dollars into the concept. Los Angeles Mayor (and presidential hopeful) Eric Garcetti has spent over $330 million to bring electric buses to city streets, despite the fact that the electric buses are plagued with breakdowns and poor performance. In May, the Los Angeles Times reported:
A federal testing center and transit agencies across the country logged driving ranges that were dozens of miles short of company claims, limiting the routes they can handle and requiring passengers to shuffle onto replacement buses when the batteries go low. The first five buses BYD sent to Los Angeles Metro were pulled off the road after less than five months of service. Internal emails and other agency records show that agency staff called them “unsuitable,” poorly made and unreliable for more than 100 miles. Despite strong concerns from its own staff about the quality and reliability of the company’s vehicles, the transit agency awarded [bus manufacturer] BYD tens of millions of dollars more in public contracts.
It’s the same story in Albuquerque, according to the Associated Press:
[Albuquerque] had planned to operate at least 20 fully electric buses built by the manufacturer Build Your Dreams, but the buses have been plagued with delays and various problems. City officials say the battery range of the buses fell short of what was promised. [Mayor Tim] Keller says the city is planning to negotiate to reduce the number of buses from the company and take outside bids to fill the order. The remaining buses would use natural gas or clean diesel.
Taxpayer money isn’t being spent on just these buses, but on individual family cars as well. California is leading the way, with the California Air Resource Board (CARB) burning through cash on the project. According to public records, “Through April 2018, [California] has provided rebates for over 235,000 vehicles at a cost of nearly $525 million since the project’s launch in 2010.
City, state, and federal government money is being spent every year on electric cars; but are they paying for child slavery? One of the key components to the batteries for electric cars is cobalt, and it’s being mined by tens of thousands of kids in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). A CBS News report from March outlined the issues:
CBS News’ investigation of child labor in African cobalt mines revealed the shocking fact that tens of thousands of children are still growing up without a childhood. On Monday we showed you how most of the mineral used to make batteries is unearthed in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
An estimated two-thirds of children in the region of the DRC that CBS News visited are not in school. They’re working in mines instead. What we found when we travelled to the south of the country for this investigation was a complex host of barriers for children; weak economy, corrupt government, but above all, poverty.
CBS News correspondent Debora Patta followed one young boy, Ziki Swaze, home from a mine to understand the challenges he faces as his family’s main provider. Ziki has never been to school. He has no idea how to read or write, but he is an expert in washing cobalt.
He is one of an estimated 40,000 children in the DRC getting paid a pittance to produce cobalt. Every evening the 11-year-old returns home with a dollar or two to provide for his family.
“I have to go and work there,” he told Patta, “because my grandma has a bad leg and she can’t.”
Sky News has more heartbreaking details on what life is like for those mining the materials necessary for electric vehicles:
“At one cobalt mine, children toiled in the drenching rain carrying huge sacks of the mineral. Dorsen, eight, had no shoes and told us he hadn’t made enough money to eat for the past two days – despite working for about 12 hours a day. His friend Richard, 11, talked about how his whole body ached every day from the tough physical work. The mine tunnels are dug by hand by miners who have no protective equipment. The tunnels have no supports and are prone to collapse, especially in the rain. At one mine we travelled to, workers had downed tools in support of a fellow miner who had died after one such collapse.”
In their reporting, CBS explained that companies supplying these vehicles, funded by our tax dollars, are well aware of the issue:
Many top electronic and electric vehicle companies need cobalt to help power their products. We spoke with some of the companies that use cobalt in their lithium-ion batteries. All the companies acknowledged problems with the supply chain, but said they require suppliers to follow responsible sourcing guidelines.
Here’s the question we should be asking of lawmakers: should our government be funding these cars because of our fetishization of electric cars while these human rights abuses are taking place? At what point do we decide there’s a line, and that it will not be crossed? One would think the line would be with virtually enslaved children in mines in Africa.
Published in Environment
Where is the electricity that these cars and buses need to operate come from?
We are sending these children to suffer and die in mines for a non-solution solution. It’s a pity that we can’t send environmentalists.
Good piece, Bethany. Thank for bringing this to us. It is just another part of this headlong rush into something that has many angles to it, some which we never even think about.
Wales has purchased a fleet of “environmentally friendly” electric buses. They are recharged on diesel generators.
Bethany,
We are coming face to face with the reality of nearly 50 years of organized ideological environmentalism. When ideological prejudice is the prime mover of a particular technology the marketplace isn’t allowed to discipline it. Thus ‘environmental products’ get to an advanced stage of manufacture without really being proved out. Once there the forever wishful thinking reinvests over and over again even though the problems aren’t solved so great is the ego invested in this technology.
The fact that cobalt mining is a very ugly process involving child labor has been completely ignored by the media. Their pet fantasy, electric cars mass produced, is dependent on not facing reality. You have left out the long-term health problems for the children. Heavy metal poisoning is extremely dangerous. I am sure they are absorbing or ingesting small amounts every day.
We have not faced the huge environmental dangers of the battery manufacturing process either. When you pre-judge a technology as virtuous, you are opening the door for a world of trouble.
Regards,
Jim
I … can’t … even …
There is energy loss involved when you charge batteries. There is energy loss involved when you discharge them. They are burning more diesel perpetrating that nonsense than they would if the buses just ran on diesel.
What are you? Some kind of engineer? You want environmental policies to make sense.
Child labor is better than child soldiers and prostitots.
Amen, Percival, Amen.
40,000 kids suffer horribly so that the environmentalists can continue their pipe dream, which as you say and is clear from the article, is a non-solution. Like so many of their ‘dreams’, the tradeoffs are never publicly discussed and debated.
Hmmm, why can’t we send those environmentalists to the mines???
And, our tax dollars at work.
Hopefully generators with 110% efficiency….
The Party of Science strikes again.
I just finished mowing with my lithium-ion battery-powered walking mower. It got too dark, or I would have done more. Tomorrow I’ll fire up my twin-V fossil-fuel mower and do the rest. And when I was still working my favorite vehicle to drive to the main campus was one of the university’s Ford hybrid vehicles. I would like one for myself if I did a lot of driving on urban streets. Recent battery technology is wonderful.
But should we care about child labor used to produce the cobalt? Yes, we should. If we care we can have battery-powered machinery without the child labor, so I wouldn’t use that as a long-term argument against it. But it may take a while, judging by the information in this Reuters article:
Next question: Should we regulate against importing cobalt from child-labor sources? Maybe. Depends on how it’s done, I suppose.
Related question: Should we regulate against social media companies that agree to censorship in order to do business in China and other repressive countries?
That gives us the worst of both worlds, if we’re recharging batteries with smaller, local generators.
But what do Ricochetti think about battery-powered vehicles that are recharged from electricity produced by nuclear power plants? Or coal-fired plants?
That’s a pretty low bar to cross.
I suspect from the name that the Democratic Republic of Congo is neither Democratic or a Republic. (The only thing worse would be a People’s Democratic Republic.) So unfortunately we can’t expect them to be improving their working conditions any time soon. Our government should be working on how to encourage development of other cobalt deposits, including looking at how environmental regulations are hindering development here in the US.
I’m not sure that your conclusion is right based on the information provided. It is conceivable that there is some saving in diesel fuel compared to an on-board diesel engine.
The charging system is likely designed with diesels running much cleaner and more efficiently than they would be in the case of an on-board diesel engine, where the engine spends most of its time outside of its high efficiency torque/rpm region. Electric locomotion itself is a great deal more efficient that a diesel on-board motor, even with charging losses, which can be quite low.
I’m just sayin’ lets not pretend that the next best alternative is magic rainbows, ambrosia and unicorn farts.
I am as opposed to government subsidies on transportation as any other conservative. Let everyone compete in a free marketplace and whoever produces the most cost effective (purchase price and cost of running) buses should get the contract to supply them, whether they run on diesel, natural gas, or soy beans. Best would be if the buses were operated by private companies rather than municipal governments.
On the matter of cobalt mining, though, I don’t know that this is the worst thing that could happen in Congo. Yes, it’s awful that kids that haven’t even hit puberty have to work in mines to support their families. But how much worse off would they be if those mining jobs didn’t exist? People are sending their kids to the mines because it’s the most viable economic opportunity they can find.
If you want clean energy, nuclear is the cleanest on a pollution per MW basis, because it is far and away the most dense in terms of energy per mass. Electric cars charged with nuclear power are probably the most environmentally friendly and energy-requirement-realistic option we have at today’s technology.
I think Fukishima might have something to say about that. (we still don’t really know where the corium is, and the ice wall isn’t keeping out the ground water, and they are filling a large water tower with radioactive water every 8 days, and they are running out of places for water towers).
Amy,
Why Amy you are using pure logic and an excellent fundamental analysis. That’s not fair. Don’t you know that Nuclear is simply evil and shouldn’t even be mentioned? Of course, cars powered by something so simple as gasoline are also evil. Wouldn’t the really shortest distance between two points argument be to increase our refinery capacity. The reason that the world oil glut hasn’t brought down the price of gasoline to the 1-2 dollar range is that the hyper-regulatory environmental idiocy has made it impossible to build a refinery for many years.
Working children to death while you poison them is just fine if it’s in the glorious cause of electric cars!? Musk can’t mass produce his electric cars using AI so he hired, you know, humans to build them. Unfortunately, humans are very expensive. However, the Chinese have very cheap human labor. So cheap you could (and should) call it slave labor. Unfortunately, China has a nasty habit of stealing the patents of anybody they deal with. Musk is in trouble. I feel bad but I didn’t tell him to suck up all the investment capital in the universe and build electric cars.
Regards,
Jim
I can’t speak to Fukishima, but there has never been a leak in the US. Even at Three Mile Island when everything that could go wrong did, there was no escaping radiation. And as I understand it, Fukishima itself would have been able to withstand either the earthquake or the tsunami; it just couldn’t handle both. So long as we avoid building the plants on earthquake faults near shorelines — which we can do because unlike the Japanese, most of our country is actually habitable and we have options — all Fukishima does is scare the NIMBYs who have kept the US from commissioning a new nuclear plant for the last forty years.
The Fukushima nuclear power plant was commissioned in 1971. Engineers have come up with much better, much safer designs since then. If new plants were built in the future they would not have the vulnerabilities of these old designs.
Is Wolf Creek in Kansas the last plant built? I was a youngster when officials were going around Kansas holding information meetings. I think our electric cooperative was one of the owners. I was fascinated by it and the promise of nuclear power. Looking at Wikipedia, construction began in 1977 and was commissioned in 1985.
Sounds likely. Being in Charlotte NC, my power could be coming from two hydro plants, a nuclear plant, or a couple coal plants, and I don’t know when Catawba Nuclear was built without checking. (I’m working on a coal ash case for Duke, not a nuclear one.)
These wouldn’t be VW diesels, would they? I hear that they are very clean.
Palo Verde, southwest of Phoenix, was the last major plant completed — two units in 1986 and the last in 1989. It serves an area stretching all the way to the edge of the Permian Basin in West Texas, but between the time it was commissioned in the mid-1970s and completed at the end of the 80s, new regulations increased the operating costs so much that a couple of the participating utilities flirted with bankruptcy.
It was the cost-prohibitive nature of the plants, post-Three Mile Island, that helped push the U.S. electric industry away from nuclear, and while some utilities are again starting to look at it as an option, the associated regulatory and legal costs still make construction of any new facilities economically problematic.
As I’ve said before, the reporters who flew from the West Coast to PA received more radiation (naturally) during that flight than they did standing next to the plant while they did their reporting (which managed to scare the hell out of the listening public).
I look for cobalt and the other ingredients that go into making batteries to become the next big environmental scare.
Lets not build with 1970’s technology. There are much safer and cleaner technologies involving uranium and most intriguing thorium.
That’s what I was thinking – buses do a lot of starting & stopping, idling at intersections, etc. Presumably the charging generators are running flat out in their most efficient speed range the whole time they’re on.
The whole thing wouldn’t exist except as a lark and experiment unless we subsidized it heavily. We can’t stop doing dumb things because some very influential people get rich from it. So what’s new?
Makes no sense. Being shot and paralyzed is better than being murdered, from a non-victims perspective, but both are horrible. We can’t excuse child labor, because there are worse things that could happen to them. If this was a satirical statement, sorry I missed it.