JoNova 7/1/2020
Welcome to the Clean Green Future. Demand for rechargeable car batteries is predicted to rise 700% in the next four years. But even at current levels, children are already dying in mines in the Congo, and farmers in Chile are being forced off their land.
The UN is now slightly “concerned†about a car battery boom which it helped create.
…a new report from UNCTAD, warns that the raw materials used in electric car batteries, are highly concentrated in a small number of countries, which raises a number of concerns.
…two-thirds of all cobalt production happens in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). According the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), about 20 per cent of cobalt supplied from the DRC comes from artisanal mines, where human rights abuses have been reported, and up to 40,000 children work in extremely dangerous conditions in the mines for meagre income.
And in Chile, lithium mining uses nearly 65% of the water in the country’s Salar de Atamaca region, one of the driest desert areas in the world, to pump out brines from drilled wells. This has forced local quinoa farmers and llama herders to migrate and abandon ancestral settlements. It has also contributed to environment degradation, landscape damage and soil contamination, groundwater depletion and pollution.
The UN’s answer, of course, is not to slow the transition, but to project out three shades of hope. They hope people will find some other deposits of cobalt and lithium. They hope people will figure out how to recycle them, and they hope someone will design some batteries that use other materials.
In the meantime, though, little black lives in The Congo matter slightly less than an undetectable temperature change.
Children mining cobalt in slave-like conditions
More:
http://joannenova.com.au/2020/07/even-the-un-is-warning-about-the-environmental-damage-electric-vehicles-will-cause/
