Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
There are a couple nuke plants in the area. One at Lake Norman (about a mile from my house) and a smaller one down across the border in SC.
The smaller one on Lake Wylie is Catawba.
My point being, I’m not scared to live around nuclear plants, because I already do. Heck, we had both a coal and a nuclear plant on my college campus!
BYD is a Chinese company in which Berkshire Hathaway has a minority share (it would not be allowed a majority share). BYD enjoys a domestic Chinese market protected from foreign competition and leverages the economy of scale of that market to then undercut competitors in the US.
The bus market is less regulated in the US than the car market, so a poor product can be sold.
MIT has some cool videos about their scientific reactor on the youtubes.
New York has in the past tried out test buses for new designs, to see if they can actually stand up to the city’s traffic and legendary potholes, and has rejected some models as being not up to standard, after the debacle in the early 1980s with cracks on their new-technology Grumman-Flxible bus fleet.
The buses had to be pulled from service and the city borrowed spare ones from Washington to make up for the loss, but never bought from Flxible again and Grumman got out of the bus business. So the test bus policy was the result of a past failure to trust cutting-edge technology and assume a new product was going to work. Los Angeles should have taken the hint and tested a Chinese electric bus out before ordering more, but obviously, if you have a mayor whose trying to grandstand about how environmentally caring he is, testing out untried technology before buying in bulk is not a concern.
Fukushima was a disaster because they had two, simultaneous beyond-design-basis events – the earthquake, and the tidal wave (I’m old school. I rarely use “Tsunami”). In other words, the plants were designed to survive an earthquake of a particular magnitude, and a tidal wave of a particular magnitude (part of the design basis). For some reason, the design engineers didn’t consider higher magnitudes of either event.
Don’t ask me to explain “What were they thinking?” because I haven’t a clue . . .
Amy! I am disappointed, young lady.
Tomorrow, I want you to hand in a correction of this logical argument.
— “nuclear is the cleanest on a pollution per MW basis”
— it is far and away the most dense in terms of energy per mass”
— “If you want clean energy…” you should choose nuclear.
— Cleanness depends on gravimetric energy density of the fuel at the point of the first energy conversion, even if that takes place in a fixed plant.
I’ll fix it when I’m not commenting on my phone during a bathroom break, prof.
Can we excuse it – or at least tolerate it – on the fact that for the children involved it’s either working or starvation? Don’t misunderstand; I don’t like the idea of child labor either – especially when it involves children working because their families will starve if they don’t work. But that’s the reality of the situation these children live in. And who am I – privileged, developed-country dweller that I am – to tell these families that they must starve because the idea of their children working is repugnant to me?
Think I’m engaging in hyperbole? Judge for yourself:
In Latin America, Looking at the Positive Side of Child Labor
The Outrage of Child Labor in Bangladesh’s Sweatshops
A Look at Child Labor Inside a Garment Factory in Bangladesh (especially the second section of the article where the mother explains things from her perspective)
Child Labor Bans Actually Make Things Worse for the Poorest Children (information taken from India)
This is exactly what I wondered about, thanks for all the links.
You’re welcome. Here are a couple of others I ran across that also do a good job of highlighting the complexities of the issue:
Just how bad is child labour?
Banning child labour imposes naive western ideals on complex problems
Weep,
I don’t mean to be a tough guy on this but if the children die at 20 years old from heavy metal poisoning then there will be no other way to see this but total exploitation. We’ve just got to have those mass-produced electric cars or we’ll be forced to face how badly we’ve all been misled by the environmental industrial complex. If we admit we got this one wrong then we might start to realize that there are other areas of life about which the left has told the big lie.
Regards,
Jim
Although I didn’t make it clear, I wasn’t thinking about child miners specifically when I said what I did. I was thinking about the issue of child labor in general – although I’ll admit that the questions that apply to the broader issue apply to them as well. There are no simple answers.
— From here:
We primarily spent time with one young miner who was 15 years old. And he had been working in the mine since he was 12 years old. …… he supplements his family’s income.
He has a large family. His father works in the mines and doesn’t make enough to quite support the family. …… So he, some days, make $40 – U.S. dollars – which is a lot in Bolivia. Some days, he doesn’t make anything. And half of that money goes toward the family, half of the money goes toward his own school supplies.
— And here:
Ziki Swaze, 11, agreed to meet Patta outside the mine to discuss the work.
“My parents are dead,” he explained when asked why he wasn’t at school. He lives with his grandmother, and provides their primary income from the cobalt mines.
— And here:
Many of the mine workers are Adivasi, members of India’s indigenous ethnic group. They are a segment of society who are often excluded in their own country. Others are Dalits, the so-called “untouchables,” trapped at the lowest level of the Hindu caste system.
Both groups are among the poorest of the poor and very few of them own the land on which they work, meaning they often also have to pay for a lease or mining rights. But how else are they supposed to make a living?
***********************************
Once again, let me make it clear I’m not a fan of child labor – especially not in mining and other dangerous situations; and I’m absolutely NOT giving it/them a big thumbs up. My sole intention here has been simply to point out that the issue is extremely complex and not even close to being as cut-and-dried as we (well, me at least; I assume everyone reading this feels the same) would like for it to be – not by a long shot. Especially not the larger question of child labor in general, which is what I was addressing with my initial comments.
I am for child labor, if it is a net improvement over not child labor.
My momma always told us that our labor was the whole reason she had children.
I’m pretty sure a “childhood” is a wealthy modern phenomenon, rather than some natural right.
I wasn’t saying the families, or children, should starve. But, the original statement by Guru read to me as being dismissive of the concerns regarding child labor. Pressuring these countries to discourage child labor and encourage using adults, at a higher price, should be the goal.
The ignorance of the pro-electric car crowd and the need to make an unprofitable technology profitable, or at least break even, has lead to the exploitation of these kids. If the pro-electric car crowd, who as a rule hold themselves out to be morally superior to us free-marketeers , truly cared, they would make efforts to eliminate the exploitation while developing affordable electric cars.
EDIT: And I do agree that child labor in developing, and even developed, countries is not intrinsically evil. It is the exploitation of the children that is wrong. Children in developing countries helping to support their families, like farm kids in the US, is a laudable institution and should be encouraged. It is the exploitation of that labor, putting children in known dangerous situations, that is wrong.
No matter what you pay the adults, and individual family could still benefit from having their children work, especially if they are impoverished. The stigma against “child labor” really needs to be chilled. Even in America, there are countless children that are forced to futilely try and finish high school when their lives would greatly benefit from starting work, earning money, and developing skills much earlier.
When does compensating labor with income become “exploitation?”
It’s always exploitation. What we need to do is remove the stigma from exploitation.
Maybe. I’ll listen to arguments to the contrary.
Maybe. There’s just got to be a better word. Because when people use the word “exploitation” they obviously mean something like “immoral gains off someone else’s labor” or “slave labor with technical but insufficient compensation.”
When you put the kids into dangerous mines, or expose them to heavy metal w/o protection, or work a child 10 or 12 hours a day, is when you exploit them. Compensating a child for his labor isn’t the exploitation. Using the child’s ignorance or inability to determine whether the work is too dangerous is the exploitation.
I suppose. But if the term had more of a definition, then I might not get by with telling leftwingers that I exploit top executives of Fortune 500 companies by having them work long hours and ruining their family lives to provide goodies for me. Sure, we give them some token payment in return, but it’s an exploitative relationship.