How green are EVs?
More than 70 percent of the world’s cobalt, sometimes called the blood diamond of electric vehicle batteries, comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where child labor and sexual violence are rampant in mines. About half of the world’s nickel, another key… pic.twitter.com/Ooac84FMJw
— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) July 23, 2024
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Flashback 2023: Bill McKibben in New Yorker:
At the moment, about half the world’s cobalt comes from Congo, and up to a fifth of it is mined “artisanally,” which is to say by hand, in small pits—child labor is not uncommon in a practice that has been called “modern-day slavery.” But, as advocates and journalists have reported those stories (Amnesty International released a pair of key studies), change has begun to happen. The Business and Human Rights Center set up a “transition minerals tracker” to investigate supply chains; it’s building on work done in Congo on the “3TG conflict minerals” (tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold), which were being used to support warring factions in the region’s conflicts. Donations have built five schools for children who used to be employed in the mines; after tech companies were sued last fall, Microsoft’s chief of staff for tech and corporate responsibility visited Congo in December to declare that the company would help build a coalition to monitor mining. Tesla has been trying to switch away from cobalt in its car batteries, out of fears both for its supply chain and its image—a move that also puts pressure on the mining industry to improve practices. “If we get this wrong, cobalt probably will cease to be in batteries in twenty years’ time,” the head of communications at the Cobalt Institute said this winter. Mark Dummett, Amnesty International’s director of business, security, and human rights, said, “These are examples of how companies and the government are looking for ways to make artisanal mining safe and responsible and fair. Maybe they haven’t got there yet, but they’re heading in the right direction.” He also notes that simply doing away with artisanal cobalt mining would cut “a lifeline for millions of the world’s poorest people, [so] we don’t want to see it outlawed.”
