There is one part to the “green” EV revolution that we have written about – but that no one else is talking about: the incessant need for cobalt and the “appalling” way that the battery metal is mined and produced.
After a recent Joe Rogan podcast that went out to the viral host’s 40 million plus listeners, we’re hopeful that dialogue may finally start to take place.
Siddharth Kara, who is a Harvard visiting professor and also the author of “Cobalt Red: How The Blood of The Congo Powers Our Lives” took to the podcast last week with comments about cobalt mining that already have more than a million listens.
He told Rogan that there’s no such thing as “clean cobalt” and that the term was “all marketing,” according to a wrap up of the podcast by the NY Post. He noted that the level of suffering of Congolese people working in cobalt mines was “astounding”, the report says.
“I’ve never seen [a cobalt mine that did not rely on child labor or slavery] and I’ve been to almost all the major industrial cobalt mines,” he told Rogan.
Yet, modern demand for cobalt doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down any time soon. “Cobalt is in every single lithium, rechargeable battery manufactured in the world today,” Kara said to Rogan.
“Every smartphone, every tablet, every laptop and crucially, every electric vehicle” needs it, he noted. “We can’t function on a day-to-day basis without cobalt, and three-fourths of the supply is coming out of the Congo. And it’s being mined in appalling, heart-wrenching, dangerous conditions.”
“By and large the world doesn’t know what’s happening,” he continued. “…it just so happened that the Congo is sitting on more cobalt than the rest of the planet combined.”
“Before anyone knew what was happening, [the] Chinese government [and] Chinese mining companies took control of almost all the big mines and the local population has been displaced,” he told Rogan.
“They dig in absolutely subhuman, gut-wrenching conditions for a dollar a day, feeding cobalt up the supply chain into all the phones, all the tablets, and especially electric cars.”
Meanwhile the report notes that the Biden administration recently “entered into an agreement with the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia” to help bolster the supply of such materials, despite these issues.
You can listen to the full comments here:
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All depends on if the labor is voluntary or forced. So they bring in heavy equipment and displace the workers? A dollar a day is better than nothing. It’s a hard call without all the facts.
you are a total piece of jewish shit.
And you’re a hysterical teenage girl.
The conditions are probably awful, but so was the West’s industrial revolution. What’s your proposal for lifting Africa out of its perennially backwards condition? Lefty-commie-SJW phone apps?
Things have to begin how they begin. Africans REALLY “didn’t build that”. Two thousand European Christian men did.
Melty is right to a point. The workers are exploited just like all over the world but perhaps worse than most. No one in power is really interested in raising them up.
The problem is the inability of western people to face the truth. People are just happy living in a sea of lies.
Last week I saw a Tesla with a license plate- I DR CLN. Virtue signaling par excellence! Totally oblivious.
No matter how many times you tell an idiot the truth he is unable to understand it. EVs cannot be made without extensive mining, smelting, the use of coal, oil, and gas is required , they are no more “clean” than any other ICE vehicle. F ing idiots.
Africa will never progress beyond what it is today much like why the middle east is the way it is:
Tribalism at it’s most primitive.
Low IQ hurts. Look at an IQ map of Africa, it’s scary.
Not remotely a kike. Is Tony a dago name as in Fauci? So you’d rather Irishmen do the work?
The globohomoshclomo Banksters enslaving the masses for some lucre. Satan is alive and well on planet earth.
Satan would be in rags, if only billions of Christians would stop coveting worldly glory and willfully misunderstanding Romans 13:
http://www.sobran.com/reluctant.shtml
My fellow Christians have argued that the state’s authority is divinely given. They cite Christ’s injunction “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” and St. Paul’s words “The powers that be are ordained of God.” But Christ didn’t say which things — if any — belong to Caesar; his ambiguous words are far from a command to give Caesar whatever he claims. And it’s notable that Christ never told his disciples either to establish a state or to engage in politics. They were to preach the Gospel and, if rejected, to move on. He seems never to have imagined the state as something they could or should enlist on their side.
At first sight, St. Paul seems to be more positive in affirming the authority of the state. But he himself, like the other martyrs, died for defying the state, and we honor him for it; to which we may add that he was on one occasion a jailbreaker as well. Evidently the passage in Romans has been misread. It was probably written during the reign of Nero, not the most edifying of rulers; but then Paul also counseled slaves to obey their masters, and nobody construes this as an endorsement of slavery. He may have meant that the state and slavery were here for the foreseeable future, and that Christians must abide them for the sake of peace. Never does he say that either is here forever.
St. Augustine took a dim view of the state, as a punishment for sin. He said that a state without justice is nothing but a gang of robbers writ large, while leaving doubt that any state could ever be otherwise. St. Thomas Aquinas took a more benign view, arguing that the state would be necessary even if man had never fallen from grace; but he agreed with Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all, a doctrine that would severely diminish any known state.
Abolish the state.
From your comment I have concluded that God has no use for governments. God in the flesh chose to just ignore the governments as much as possible. That seems worth pondering.
Found this tidbit a while ago. It answered a nagging question I’ve had for years. Might be worth a read: https://www.craiggreenfield.com/blog/romans13
I couldn’t find the list of years it would take at current mining production rates to meet the demand for an all electric vehicle fleet.
Cobalt was something like 400 years?
Does anybody have that list?
Permits for a cobalt mine in Minnesota were just denied.
Good.
1. they say you should buy EVs (red herring)
2. they ban internal combustion engines (california)
3. future – they restrict EV ownership due to grid and environmental factors (legit)
4. future – you must use public transport to travel.
5. future – you must move to the city due to lack of public transport to the hinder land.
if you like your EV you can keep your EV. however, you will not own an EV in the future.
I will just get a horse.
and the green freaks can clean up the shit.
There is NO HONEST ACCOUNTING of ANY source of energy/power that is used by humans. The nuclear cartel doesn’t ever have to expose the truth of who is picking up the tab for waste disposal, nor the fragility of some of the reactors around this country, nor that there are superior alternatives to the current design, but are not allowed. The oil folks never have to talk honestly about where the hazardous waste that is pumped underground as part of “fracking” ends up, and how much of America’s aquifer system has been polluted, nor talk about the free security services the military gives the overseas oil investments. The solar folks never have to do an honest accounting for all the costs, nor where everything comes from or who is practically en$laved to dig the stuff up and process it for use, or the environmental damage, etc. Same for the wind folks and their giant propellers of bird death. Nobody can make an honest and sound choice in anything because nobody is allowed to know anything, nor is anyone allowed an actual choice as determined by free market pressures, NOT political demands or edicts. Small, seriously decentralized power generation facilities (I don’t know enough to comment in any truly scientific way, but Thorium or even sodium reactors have been mentioned) that would put decision-making back into the hands of the users, and keep issues in one area from becoming widespread issues. Get the power out of the hands of the few and put it back into the hands of the many. The technology is available at this point.
And these are the same corporations that donated piles of money to black lives matter to pretend they give a shit about blacks. When in the history of the world has a billion dollar corporation ever given a flying fuck about black people?
And you think they care about any other people?
And virtue signalling by donating to one lesbian commie whore- who even falls for that? But because I’m sure they aren’t stupid then they must have known.
Spare me the FAKE outrage.
Stick with the democrat parties MURDER of AMERICANS with their FAKE VIRUS CRISIS and POISON vaxx !
I found some of the comments disturbing. The historical double standard is astounding. No one seems to care that the Chinese are the ones colonizing Africa now; I guess only Westerners are the only ones acceptable to crucify.
Um….the Chinese aren’t colonizing only Africa. Research how much of the US/North America they already own, and are pursuing–and the administration are only too happy to oblige.
Went viral?
The info of the brutality of both cobalt and lithium mining has been known for a long time now. Shows how lazy and ignorant many are to not even bother to research and just wait for someone to tell them the truth.
Many will not care any way. Virtue signaling and child labor is great! Just wait till the ‘school to work’ agenda is actually implemented here. Gov already said ‘nothing wrong with child labor’!