Former President Donald Trump had bragged about his success in opening the region to oil production after decades of political fighting over the resources locked under the tundra there.
I’d gladly pay a little more for gas knowing it came from a north american oil well than have the blood children working in african cobalt mines on my hands.
A billion people are on track to die from climate change, according to some estimates.
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-warn-1-billion-people-on-track-to-die-from-climate-change
Even if we call that highly inflated, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, some non-negligible number will certainly die as a result with some multiple of that facing harsh negative impacts. A disproportionate number of those will be in Africa.
If your argument is based in morality, it’s absolutely absurd to suggest the moral concerns of cobalt mining outweighs that of climate change.
You raised a very valid concern, let’s work to make it better instead of running back into the burning building.
The number of people killed by extreme weather events has been drastically declining for decades so I’m not too worried about the fear mongering of the “1 death per 1000 tons of carbon”. Especially when they follow it up with this: “This rule is actually “an order of magnitude best estimate”, which means it’s more of a range, somewhere between 0.1 to 10 deaths per 1000 tons of carbon burned.” So they are saying 10 billion people could die based on the high end of that estimate. That would be something.
So yes, buying a vehicle powered by gasoline is far morally superior to a vehicle powered by batteries. One is a well regulated US industry with millions of high paying jobs. The other has kids dying in mine collapses to try to make $1 per day. If the industry can figure that part out then things we be a lot more equal between the 2.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=JcJ8me22NVs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Fuck them kids. /s
Yeah child labor is fucked up but we need to pressure our government and corporations to get more sustainable mines and better conditions for the workers.
The problem is we need the cobalt and lithium, and domestic production of that is hard to come by due to lack of deposits, and the deposits we do have are being railroaded by environmental lawsuits. Damned if do, damned if you don’t. We can’t even log off forests that are already dead from beetle kill. So taking advantage of 3rd world kids is the only option.
