Quote:
Originally Posted by Battlebasset
Highly recommend you read "Red Cobalt" and tell me with a clean conscious that we should convert our perfectly workable ICE vehicle infrastructure to LI batteries. From the WSJ review:
"The reader senses that the author has been left shell-shocked, not from the aesthetic carnage but from seeing thousands of people mining by hand, hammer and shovel in vast open pits hundreds of feet deep, most of the pits arrayed with hand-dug tunnels. Mr. Kara reports visiting a typical mine where “more than three thousand women, children, and men shoveled, scraped, and scrounged . . . under a ferocious sun and a haze of dust.” The book has no photographs, an understandable absence given the risks of using a camera with armed guards everywhere. Instead Mr. Kara captures the impact of artisanal mining through the powerful stories of the miners—men, women and children—that he has gleaned through interviews. It’s often hard to read his descriptions of the miners’ daily lives, the risks, accidents, promises unfulfilled and, too often, heart-wrenching tales of maimed or dead children.
This is in the Congo, BTW. There's your clean energy.
|
I completely agree with you that lithium mining is fraught with inhumane conditions and needs reformation. Hopefully enough light gets shown on this abuse that international pressure pushes reforms in those countries and those corporations that allow it to continue.
Similar conditions existed in coal mining here and elsewhere for generations, and still exist in clothing manufacturing, other mining, and very likely in the production of the cell phone I use. Sadly we as consumers are certainly complicit in our inadvertent or even advertent worker and environmental abuses. And worker abuses do not only occur in the third world, only differing in the severity and breadth of those abuses. The horror stories from Qatar building the World Cup facilities is a good example of how this goes on even in a rich country.