Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t JoNova, MaxD – The United Nations has issued a belated warning that soaring demand for raw materials for the electric vehicle revolution is creating dangerous conditions for children working in toxic mines.
UN highlights urgent need to tackle impact of likely electric car battery production boom
28 June 2020 Climate Change
…
Electric cars are rapidly becoming more popular amongst consumers, and UNCTAD predicts that some 23 million will be sold over the coming decade: the market for rechargeable car batteries, currently estimated at $7 billion, is forecast to rise to $58 billion by 2024 .
The shift to electric mobility is in line with ongoing efforts to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, and reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change, but 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.
Drilling down in DRC, Chile
For example, 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.
…
Read more: https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/06/1067272
JoNova also provides a link to a 2018 Australian ABC report which drills into the Cobalt issue in more detail.
Children mining cobalt in slave-like conditions as global demand for battery material surges
The Signal / By Angela Lavoipierre, Stephen Smiley and Lin Evlin
Posted 25 July 2018…
Former child labourer Yannick from Kolwezi, a city of more than 500,000 people in the south of the DRC, dropped out of school and went into full-time work at the age of seven.
“When I was going to the mines it was to look after my family, because there was a lot of suffering,” Yannick said.
Yannick said the work in the mine involved intense physical labour using only a crowbar, and said conditions underground were generally hot and sticky.
He also described former bosses who insisted their underage employees put in long working days without breaks.
“People died in the mine, and you could suffocate when you are deep in the mine,” he said.
“When it rained, it created a lot of landslides.
“When we were working there and when someone hurts himself, we could not even look at him — the person had to go and get treated on his own, as we were there to work.
“It is not good to let children work at the mines.
…
Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-25/cobalt-child-labour-smartphone-batteries-congo/10031330
The UN report also mentions human rights abuses in Chile, with locals in an arid region being deprived of water and forced to relocate, as the water they depend on is being diverted to lithium mining.
What is so important about Cobalt?
Cobalt oxide adds durability to batteries, by supporting chemically stable matrices. This stability prevents the matrix from shattering, when lithium ions migrate in and out of the matrix during violently energetic high power battery discharge and recharge cycles.
There are strenuous efforts to eliminate cobalt from batteries, because it is expensive and because of the human rights abuses associated with Cobalt mining.
For example Tesla has launched a line of cobalt free battery powered vehicles in China. The batteries replace Cobalt oxide with iron phosphate. Anybody who has painted treatment solution primer straight onto rusty steel has already seen the durability of iron phosphate.
If this new iron phosphate battery technology wins broad acceptance, the link might be broken between human rights abuses in Congo, and batteries for electric vehicles and renewable energy backup systems.
There are also efforts to eliminate lithium from batteries, replacing lithium with other alkali metals like sodium, which if successful would take the pressure off vulnerable people living near Lithium mines in the Andean highlands.
Having said that, Lithium might still be used for many applications. Lithium is a very lightweight metal, a lot less dense than sodium. Weight matters in portable devices.
And most of the best experimental sodium batteries use, you guessed it, a Cobalt based electrode.
Regardless of the promise of these new technologies, we’re not quite there yet. For now, the majority of the world’s production ready high energy density rechargeable batteries use Lithium and Cobalt.
Demand for Lithium and Cobalt is surging, as governments and industry rush their plans to electrify the world’s vehicle fleets.
There is just no end to the list of man’s sins (is there?)
It’s ruining my human right to have gas-powered automobile.
And I suspect it’s sexist as well, because my car is bound up with a male part of my human anatomy…
The obvious question “Why are the BLM protestors silent on this issue ? “
They’re only decades late reporting the obvious to those that have been paying attention and pointed that out repeatedly. And since the Chinese control a lot of the mining and processing, what would one expect?
well duh…..
Climate activists can spin it I”m sure…oh but we’re doing so much “good” for the world…..yea….sure…..right….uh huh……whatever. Because these kids’ world? sucks. So who’s world is it exactly that your demand is making better? Cuz, it ain’t theirs. Or the slag lake residents next to the mine for your wind machete’s either.
Go talk to them about how your vision is making their world better. I dare you.
But, but, it is “green” right???? right?????
Child labor in a dangerous and polluted environment is the argument against the rush to renewable energy.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/06/22/child-labor-in-the-drc-and-climate-change/
Yah, lets quit using cobalt so that these kids can starve….
/s and a dose of “be careful what you wish for”
Regardless of where we Skeptics stand on the issue, we can always enjoy the schadenfreude of seeing Greenies agonizing over it. It must create a boatload of cognitive dissonance for them.
Don’t the lithium phosphate batteries also not spontaneously catch fire like current EV batteries do?
Perhaps the UN elite are collecticely nostalgic for the good ol days. The days when they were young and produced the greatest car the world had even known. a car that brings tears of joy to their Marxist eye , a car that they will someday bring back for all the world to enjoy once more: the Trabant.
Well golly jeepers! How does the UN think we will ever attain Green Nirvana without all those raw materials?
Are EVs really becoming more popular among consumers? Sales in 2019 were 20% lower than 2018. I would not bet that 2020 will be better.
Popularity among consumers will ultimately be driven by value. New technology is needed to boost value of EVs. When and if it will come remains to be seen.
Is 23 million EVs over the next 10 years a lot for car manufacturers?
I would have thought that would make for a fairly boutique market segment in the global auto industry.
?
Let’s clarify those headlines a bit:
“UN Warns Green Policy Rush is Causing Human Rights Abuses”
“UN highlights urgent need to tackle impact of Green policies”
“Children mining cobalt in slave-like conditions as a result of Green Policies”
There, fixed them for ya.
Imagine that! Government rushes in to save the day -and makes things worse. Who would have guessed?
So they know about this, but their big concern right now is (non-existent) systemic racism in America. You couldn’t make this up. Perhaps if America had put minority children into forced labor camps (slavery), that would be better?
There is an interesting paper just published on Li intercalation based batteries by the Electrochemical Society in tribute to the researcher Michel Armand :
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/1945-7111/ab787a
(J electrochem soc vol 167 , no7, Devaraj Shanmukaraj et al)
Title is :
Review—Towards Efficient Energy Storage Materials: Lithium Intercalation/Organic Electrodes to Polymer Electrolytes—A Road Map (Tribute to Michel Armand)
and it is open access.
It contains a short history of the intercalation concept and looks forward to further developments , including a Li-air battery. It also calculates the % energy requirement for EU countries if 80% of vehicles are electric by 2050.
For those who do not know it the Electrochemical Society (founded in US) has been around for over 100 years,
and in that time has published leading work on materials and procsses for electrorefining , electroplating, battery materials and performance , vacuum devices , the processing of silicon for early transistors , LCD materials and display performance , lamp and CRT phosphors and of course LED phosphors . It now even publishes on sensors for electrochemical detection of prostate specific antigen (of interest to some of us I suspect). Just lately many articles are open access. well worth a visit .
The mines where these children work to produce cobalt, are parts of former industrial-scale mining operations that have been essentially abandoned by the companies that previously operated them.
This whole disastrous mess could be cleaned up by a responsible government re-licensing these mine sites to real mining companies who know how to operate safely and cleanly. Adults could get jobs with decent wages and child miners could go to school.
If the DRC had a responsible government.
PS before the cobalt boom started happening, the child slave miners were mainly picking out columbo-tantalite because tantalum is fairly rare, fairly valuable, and widely used in computers, smart phones etc. The industrialized world survived the guilt from that scandal without any significant damage, so I see no reason to assume that the cobalt-based guilt is going to have any effect. Just more wasted lives in a third-world country that nobody really cares about, a country abandoned by its former Belgian colonists, who exploited its mineral wealth without giving back anything that could form the basis of a civil society.
While in the Congo, (Zaire) at that time, the UN was in the pocket of Mobutu. Does that tell you something? It hasn’t changed much. Exploitation of little people goes on and on. Some areas are beautiful——for the rich.
There is so much wrong with this report and I’ve repeatedly given critiques of it and criticized Paul Driessen of CFACT on it . Im not going to repeat it all.
1) Much of the sensationalism on the subject of child labor in Africa originated from the days of the Hutu massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda/Burundi. Tutsis operated much of the artisanal mines in Eastern DR Congo but much of this was taken over by Hutu genocidists after the massacre, and this was the well known “coltan” (Columbium-Tantalum) production. The element now known as Niobium was (in USA) called columbium. Nb,Ta are used in capacitors for electronics, metal carbide tools and equipment, jet engine turbines, etc.
2) It’s bad enough that nearly all this hype about child labor under murderous overlords is a product of anti-development, anti- capitalism propaganda by lefty NGOs. The truth is that most of these artisanal ops are family owned and operated and the families are better off than those outside of resource rich areas. And they can be found around the world. China has countless family ops. Latin America, all of Africa and throuout Asia. In earlier generations child labor was universal on farms, in mines, factories, street hawkers, etc.
In many areas, conditions have been improved, and with full development the need for child labor in arduous and dangerous occupations will disappear.
You have to be sceptical about everything in a fake news world. You have to inform yourself- do your own research (made difficult by Google and other political filters). And for homework, guess who has been holding these poor people back from development and prosperity?
the fight against healthy happy, prosperous, dark skinned people continues by the greens.
Black live don’t matter unless they are useful for agitprop..
” ….. harmful greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change, …. ”
Evidence?
No?
Didn’t think so.
Well, this situation was not any different a few years ago. Why do they SUDDENLY see the light?
Let’s put those magic BS-filter sunglasses on… 🕶 «OBEY» …okay, it’s the logo, what’s under it?
«Looks like maybe it’s becoming actually useful. Also, Elon Musk is not our friend anymore.»
Oh.
This is a June 2019 quote from the South Australian Liberal Party (in power at the moment) and shows how blinkered they are about the plight of the people in the UN report.
It appears that they consider the electricity grid to be a simple mechanism that can be controlled on a second by second basis in order to control supply and demand using an intermittent supply. We should prepare ourselves for being supplied with a very complex timetable for when we can charge our electric vehicles, do the washing, have air conditioning, etc.
I’ll be sending the UN’s concern for the plight of child miners to the relevant minister (who also made the above statements).