Where I'm coming from is I frustratingly frequently see views along the lines if "lithium mining is bad so electric cars are worse than fossil fuel cars", or similar idea with energy production, and I might be overreacting but I'm hoping tweaking communications can better help on both environment and labour conditions:
Most people reading a book mention won't read the book, so where the only context you provide is only "the key mineral for the ‘green’ transition", the result I think is readers without a large amount of prior context take away a reason to be anti green transition, and with no positive action to take on it, which to me is a bad outcome.
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Many extraction practices are horrific and that needs to be acted on. Kara refers to particularly stark reveals at the end of Cobalt Red so will read that. But slavery, forced and child labour is all too common a problem across our current free market corporate-power / harder right wing that lobby for weak regulation, which could instead be pointed to as the underlying cause. It feels important right now, given the hard-right populist deregulation surge across the western world, with its foreign mineral claiming going on (see Trump and his billionaires cutting internal regulation and wanting Ukraine's minerals).
"Artisanal and small-scale mining directly employs at least 45 million people in 80 countries" compare to "Some 200,000 people work in artisanal copper and cobalt mining the Democratic Republic of Congo's Katanga region".
I don't think we really want to get into 'which is the worst bad thing' and Kara says early it's the worst instance he's found yet without giving any context yet. There are so many forced labour situations I'm sure we'd both agree need to end including other mining in DRC (gold, diamonds, copper etc, over the last 120 years), ~20% of cotton globally is from forced labour, including several million Uygher & hundreds of thousands in Egypt. It's rife in gold mining, palm oil, chocolate, and plenty of other materials we interact with daily. Again why I'm concerned about posting solely about cobalt and pointing to green transition as the cause without context of we need to use it as an opportunity for a just transition and juster economics.
These abusive extraction processes, and neoliberal capitalism itself, take their lead from colonial approaches that Amitav Ghosh writes on *incredibly* well how this has developed since 1600s in 'the Nutmeg's Curse' - definitely recommend that in return to much wider view than Cobalt Red has given at least so far.
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'Compared to what' is something that is too often
missed so I try to get the point out there when possible hence I want to expand on this green vs not green extraction a bit.
"Zero mining is not the right baseline to compare it to. The relevant comparison is what we already mine for our current fossil fuel system. The alternative to low-carbon energy is not a zero-energy economy: it’s maintaining the status quo of a system powered mostly by fossil fuels... we find that moving to renewables or nuclear power actually reduces the material requirements for electricity." https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-less-mining-fossil-fuels
Maybe the specific page I shared before wasn't a very powerful example, but there's definitely lots of awful shit being done in areas a green transition should reduce e.g.
Tbh I don’t really understand the point you’re trying to make. That me sharing this book without adequate context is a problem? I share hundreds of links, books, articles etc that I think people might be interested in. How they interpret those is really up to them.
Being an environmental activist whose work has included supply chain verification previously, I was motivated to make a comment for readers on a share where the wording I feel paints making the green transition as a bad thing compared to not making one. Not denying there is an issue here, yet I am suggesting the green transition is not the main driver of modern slavery.
Then when challenged on it I've provided some more information about why I think so, as my first example clearly wasn't that strong and having interest in discussion / your view
Love, love, love the Jamie Brisick short!
Same, came for the soundings podcast, staying for the amazing writing skills!
Check out his Substack too
Sounds rough about cobalt, we do need to extract more fairly - and maybe it's covered in the book but worth pointing out that renewables have less mining requirement than fossil fuels https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-less-mining-fossil-fuels The state of extraction of oil in some places e.g. Niger Delta is grim https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2022/jun/01/oil-pollution-spill-nigeria-shell-lawsuit yet generally get much less coverage than lithium and cobalt
Also, can't believe NS Surf happening has passed me by! I guess downside of trying not to go on social media much ATM... Cheers for pointing it out
Tbh the book makes a mockery of a page/statement like that. I'd give it a read.
Will do, and have made a start, will write back more on the book itself when I get through it perhaps as I'll be interested to see if some criticisms I've read about saviourism and himself dehumanising the local people hold https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/cobalt-red-siddharth-kara-democratic-republic-congo-book-review/
Where I'm coming from is I frustratingly frequently see views along the lines if "lithium mining is bad so electric cars are worse than fossil fuel cars", or similar idea with energy production, and I might be overreacting but I'm hoping tweaking communications can better help on both environment and labour conditions:
Most people reading a book mention won't read the book, so where the only context you provide is only "the key mineral for the ‘green’ transition", the result I think is readers without a large amount of prior context take away a reason to be anti green transition, and with no positive action to take on it, which to me is a bad outcome.
--
Many extraction practices are horrific and that needs to be acted on. Kara refers to particularly stark reveals at the end of Cobalt Red so will read that. But slavery, forced and child labour is all too common a problem across our current free market corporate-power / harder right wing that lobby for weak regulation, which could instead be pointed to as the underlying cause. It feels important right now, given the hard-right populist deregulation surge across the western world, with its foreign mineral claiming going on (see Trump and his billionaires cutting internal regulation and wanting Ukraine's minerals).
"Artisanal and small-scale mining directly employs at least 45 million people in 80 countries" compare to "Some 200,000 people work in artisanal copper and cobalt mining the Democratic Republic of Congo's Katanga region".
I don't think we really want to get into 'which is the worst bad thing' and Kara says early it's the worst instance he's found yet without giving any context yet. There are so many forced labour situations I'm sure we'd both agree need to end including other mining in DRC (gold, diamonds, copper etc, over the last 120 years), ~20% of cotton globally is from forced labour, including several million Uygher & hundreds of thousands in Egypt. It's rife in gold mining, palm oil, chocolate, and plenty of other materials we interact with daily. Again why I'm concerned about posting solely about cobalt and pointing to green transition as the cause without context of we need to use it as an opportunity for a just transition and juster economics.
These abusive extraction processes, and neoliberal capitalism itself, take their lead from colonial approaches that Amitav Ghosh writes on *incredibly* well how this has developed since 1600s in 'the Nutmeg's Curse' - definitely recommend that in return to much wider view than Cobalt Red has given at least so far.
--
'Compared to what' is something that is too often
missed so I try to get the point out there when possible hence I want to expand on this green vs not green extraction a bit.
"Zero mining is not the right baseline to compare it to. The relevant comparison is what we already mine for our current fossil fuel system. The alternative to low-carbon energy is not a zero-energy economy: it’s maintaining the status quo of a system powered mostly by fossil fuels... we find that moving to renewables or nuclear power actually reduces the material requirements for electricity." https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-less-mining-fossil-fuels
Maybe the specific page I shared before wasn't a very powerful example, but there's definitely lots of awful shit being done in areas a green transition should reduce e.g.
- Children and slaves in coal mining https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/19/coal-workers-are-orphans-the-children-and-slaves-mining-pakistans-coal
- Local people being murdered raped and tortured in the Niger Delta over oil extraction https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2017/11/investigate-shell-for-complicity-in-murder-rape-and-torture/
- Brazil indigenous peoples lives being destroyed for oil extraction as well as farming cattle
- For reference DRC has some of the largest reserves of oil in south and central Africa and work continues trying to get extraction ramping up https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/the-carbon-brief-profile-drc/index.html#fossil-fuels which I can only imagine will cause more pain to people there if and as it progresses.
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Finally, some positive actions to shout-out:
+ Fairphone, have cofounded fair cobalt initiative and properly vet their supply chain for gold and some 20odd other materials, and are good phones https://www.fairphone.com/en/impact/fair-materials/
+ Cobalt is used mostly for EVs so going avoiding car ownership
+ To try to avoid other supply chain slavery it's best to buy cotton fair trade certified & chocolate from Tony's Chocolonley
Cheers for promoting interesting discussion and (maybe) making it through my overlong reply
Tbh I don’t really understand the point you’re trying to make. That me sharing this book without adequate context is a problem? I share hundreds of links, books, articles etc that I think people might be interested in. How they interpret those is really up to them.
My bad if my point is unclear,
Being an environmental activist whose work has included supply chain verification previously, I was motivated to make a comment for readers on a share where the wording I feel paints making the green transition as a bad thing compared to not making one. Not denying there is an issue here, yet I am suggesting the green transition is not the main driver of modern slavery.
Then when challenged on it I've provided some more information about why I think so, as my first example clearly wasn't that strong and having interest in discussion / your view