Child miners aged four living a hell on Earth so YOU can drive an electric car: Awful human cost in squalid Congo cobalt mine that Michael Gove didn’t consider in his ‘clean’ energy crusade

Picking through a mountain of huge rocks with his tiny bare hands, the exhausted little boy makes a pitiful sight.
His name is Dorsen and he is one of an army of children, some just four years old, working in the vast polluted mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where toxic red dust burns their eyes, and they run the risk of skin disease and a deadly lung condition. Here, for a wage of just 8p a day, the children are made to check the rocks for the tell-tale chocolate-brown streaks of cobalt – the prized ingredient essential for the batteries that power electric cars.

And it’s feared that thousands more children could be about to be dragged into this hellish daily existence – after the historic pledge made by Britain to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2040 and switch to electric vehicles.

It heralds a future of clean energy, free from pollution but – though there can be no doubting the good intentions behind Environment Secretary Michael Gove’s announcement last month – such ideals mean nothing for the children condemned to a life of hellish misery in the race to achieve his target.
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.
Almost every big motor manufacturer striving to produce millions of electric vehicles buys its cobalt from the impoverished central African state. It is the world’s biggest producer, with 60 per cent of the planet’s reserves.
The cobalt is mined by unregulated labour and transported to Asia where battery manufacturers use it to make their products lighter, longer-lasting and rechargeable.
The planned switch to clean energy vehicles has led to an extraordinary surge in demand. While a smartphone battery uses no more than 10 grams of refined cobalt, an electric car needs 15kg (33lb).


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4764208/Child-miners-aged-four-living-hell-Earth.html

This is just totally unacceptable.

Chinese middle-men working for the Congo Dongfang Mining Company have the stranglehold in DRC, buying the raw cobalt brought to them in sacks carried on bicycles and dilapidated old cars daily from the Katanga mines. They sit in shacks on a dusty road near the Zambian border, offering measly sums scrawled on blackboards outside – £40 for a ton of cobalt-rich rocks – that will be sent by cargo ship to minerals giant Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt in China and sold on to a complex supply chain feeding giant multinationals.

Challenged by the Washington Post about the appalling conditions in the mines, Huayou Cobalt said ‘it would be irresponsible’ to stop using child labour, claiming: ‘It could aggravate poverty in the cobalt mining regions and worsen the livelihood of local miners.’

Human rights charity Amnesty International also investigated cobalt mining in the DRC and says that none of the 16 electric vehicle manufacturers they identified have conducted due diligence to the standard defined by the Responsible Cobalt Initiative.

Where the fuck is our Foreign Aid going? Africa has had millions over the years, and this is what we have to show for it?

nicko wrote:Where the fuck is our Foreign Aid going?    Africa has had millions over the years, and this is what we have to show for it?

Because most of that foreign aid never gets to many of the people in Africa Nicko

Electric cars are NOT the way to go...yet

firstly get the heavy good transport OFF the road and onto rail/canal

secondly start restricting who can have a driving licence, so no one with a significant OR recedivist criminal record, anyone with mental health issues (it seems strange to me that a guy with depression is not allowed a shot gun licence...yet can keep his driving licence) and 1 drink driving offence is a ban for life.


THEN make the driving licence harder to get, vis you must hold advanced first aid certificate at least.


Finally introduce the concept of "good citizens points" which can be earned through good conduct/volunteering/helping in the community and lost through antio social behaviour and then require that you need so many citizen points before you can apply for a licence (and many other things too) The only people that should be allowed on the road behind the wheel of todays monsters are socially responsible sensible folks in any case......

Also it is estimated that at least 1 in 4 workers "could" work from home; we have the technology to do so easily and resistance to this comes mainly from employers. and only a small fraction of those who "could" in fact do. as a result you get the lemming run into big cities every sunday evening and the reverse on friday afternoon....(especially london of course) and the manic "rush hours" (and rush they aint) into any city every working day.

also ban parking except for residents within a mile of any school (disabled excepted of course)

Lord Foul wrote:Electric cars are NOT the way to go...yet

firstly get the heavy good transport OFF the road and onto rail/canal

secondly start restricting who can have a driving licence, so no one with a significant OR recedivist criminal record, anyone with mental health issues (it seems strange to me that a guy with depression is not allowed a shot gun licence...yet can keep his driving licence) and 1 drink driving offence is a ban for life.


THEN make the driving licence harder to get, vis you must hold advanced first aid certificate at least.


Finally introduce the concept of "good citizens points" which can be earned through good conduct/volunteering/helping in the community and lost through antio social behaviour and then require that you need so many citizen points before you can apply for a licence (and many other things too)  The only people that should be allowed on the road behind the wheel of todays monsters are socially responsible sensible folks in any case......

Nah. They need to enforce it with all public transport. Make public transport cheaper. Ban cars in city centres.

What a life for these kids,like it was here just a hundred years ago. Atleast that changed, why don't their governments do something about it.

pfffft...PUBLIC TRANSPORT?????

you gotta be jokeing....

what happens when you want to go somewhere where IT doesnt? at a time its not scheduled to go???

or you want to go get 5 50kg bags of cement fron the orange shed?
or take home a huge plant from the garden center?

or even, given te ignorant public these days, want to travel to your local clay shooting ground with your shotgun..???

stuff that game....

mind if it soley applied to cities i wouldnt give a monkeys....I avoid them like the plague in any case

Lord Foul wrote:pfffft...PUBLIC TRANSPORT?????

you gotta be jokeing....

what happens when you want to go somewhere where IT doesnt? at a time its not scheduled to go???

or you want to go get 5 50kg bags of cement fron the orange shed?
or take home a huge plant from the garden center?

or even, given te ignorant public these days, want to travel to your local clay shooting ground with your shotgun..???

stuff that game....

mind if it soley applied to cities i wouldnt give a monkeys....I avoid them like the plague in any case

That's what I said, didn't I? About banning cars in city centres. I don't mean ban cars anywhere else. I think public transport should be all electric. Why not?

Lord Foul wrote:pfffft...PUBLIC TRANSPORT?????

you gotta be jokeing....

what happens when you want to go somewhere where IT doesnt? at a time its not scheduled to go???

or you want to go get 5 50kg bags of cement fron the orange shed?
or take home a huge plant from the garden center?

or even, given te ignorant public these days, want to travel to your local clay shooting ground with your shotgun..???

stuff that game....

mind if it soley applied to cities i wouldnt give a monkeys....I avoid them like the plague in any case

The #1 reason I rarely use public transport is that it doesn't go where I want to go -- one of the main reasons that has over three-quarters of Oz's population shunning it...

Then there's all those things you usually can't carry on most buses and passenger trains, some of which Victor mentioned, e.g. :

Bicycles
Surfboards
Sheets plywood, mdf, etc.
Quantities of timber
Most pets
Other livestock
Guns
Beehives
Bags of Cement, fertilser, mulch
Watertanks
Cupboards
Kayaks and Canoes
Many pre-packed items from Aldis or Ikea..

And the list goes on.

I wonder what the climate change fanatics think about this.?

smelly-bandit wrote:I wonder what the climate change fanatics think about this.?

We should destroy the planet in order to save the children, of course. They don't need a planet and neither do we.

Ben Reilly wrote:

smelly-bandit wrote:I wonder what the climate change fanatics think about this.?

We should destroy the planet in order to save the children, of course. They don't need a planet and neither do we.

I'm just curious Ben.

On one hand you have the evil naughty deisel and petrol cars chugging along and spew climate change with every mile.

The only solution is electric cars.

But of course the electric cars are built by ethnic minority child slave labour.

What's Ecoliberal to do??

You guys have fluid morals that allow for most things, so I take it these ethnic minority children are just collateral damage in your climate change indulgence??

Can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs eh Ben??