Do Black Lives Matter When It Comes To Green Cars?

By Jim Scarantino

Electric cars run on the suffering of Black children living like slaves. 

Amnesty International exposed this painful truth in 2016.  You can read their report by clicking on its title, "This is What We Die For." Most of the world's cobalt comes from the Congo.  Lots of cobalt is needed for electric car batteries. Its production is controlled by warlords and corrupt government officials.  They are getting rich off children who dig and haul and wash cobalt in hellish conditions. 

A subsequent Sky News television report (click here) is heartbreaking and infuriating.  
A handful of Chinese corporations control Congo's cobalt production.  These Chinese corporations supply Chinese and South Korean battery makers who produce most of the world's rechargeable lithium batteries.  Those batteries are used in cell phones, lap tops and scores of electronic devices.  But electric cars need 10 to 20 pounds for their batteries whereas a cell phone requires 5 to 10 grams and a lap top one ounce.  

Cobalt mines outside the Congo might be able to meet the demand from manufacturers of smaller devices.  But so much cobalt goes into electric car batteries that the Congo's 60% share of the world's reserves must be utilized. 

Amnesty International's findings were confirmed by UNESCO, CNN (see below), The Washington Post (a comprehensive multi-media report, 9/2016), The Daily Mail, (8/2017), and Al Jazeera (12/2017).  This is just a sample of the reporting.

The mines cause other dire problems.  As reported by The Daily Mail: 

Soil samples taken from the mining area by doctors at the University of Lubumbashi, the nearest city, show the region to be among the ten most polluted in the world. Residents near mines in southern DRC had urinary concentrates of cobalt 43 higher than normal. Lead levels were five times higher, cadmium and uranium four times higher.

Extremely rare birth defects are occurring at alarming rates in children born to wives of cobalt miners.

Four year old Monica found by the Daily Mail

to work in cobalt mines.

Battery makers, car manufacturers, Apple, Microsoft and the Chinese companies buying Congolese cobalt promptly decried the brutal situation uncovered by Amnesty, declared their supply  free of cobalt mined by slaves and children and pledged vigilance to ensure humane conditions in the mines and to exclude "blood cobalt" from their products.  A Responsible Cobalt Initiative was launched by the Chinese cobalt middlemen and Chinese battery makers.

Two years later, the conditions Amnesty discovered persist.  

CBS News reported March 5, 2018, it found children still working the cobalt mines:  

CBS News found what looked like the Wild West. There were children digging in trenches and laboring in lakes -- hunting for treasure in a playground from hell.
The work is hard enough for an adult man, but it is unthinkable for a child. Yet tens of thousands of Congolese kids are involved in every stage of mining for cobalt. The latest research by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimates 40,000 children are working in DRC mines.
More than half of the world's supply of cobalt comes from the DRC, and 20 percent of that is mined by hand, according to Darton Commodities Ltd., a London-based research company that specializes in cobalt.

In a May 2018 report CNN updated Amnesty's 2016 findings that car makers cannot determine the source of the cobalt in batteries.  They exposed the Congolese certification system as a sham.  The certificates are supposed to assure upstream users that their cobalt was not mined by slaves and children.  CNN showed that the certificates are issued by the same people responsible for inhuman mining conditons.  They found that the Congo's Presidential Guard protects the facilities trafficking in "blood cobalt." 

Despite the pledges and denials, CNN concluded that no car manufacturer can assure buyers that their electric car does not run thanks to cobalt mined by African children.


Now We Know.  What Do We Do?

We sought to determine how area owners and advocates of electric cars deal with this knowledge.  What we learned is that they don't want to talk about it.

We started with the Jefferson County EV Association.  They participated in this year's Rhody Festival Parade, silently rolling past the crowd in

electric cars with signs declaring their vehicles' virtues.  We first contacted them without revealing the subject we wanted to pursue.  Their spokesperson was willing to answer questions.  But since we asked the specific question of how they handle knowing about the suffering behind their cars' engines we have received no response.

We put the same questions to the four electric vehicle owners who tell their story on the association's website.  One of them is an elected PUD commissioner.  None responded.

We reached across Puget Sound and put our questions to the woman who runs Seattle's Green Fleet Management.  The City of Seattle holds frequent press conferences and issues press releases touting its ever-increasing fleet of electric vehicles.  We received no response to our questions.

We reached out to Coltura, a Seattle advocacy group whose mission is seeing the United States rapidly transition completely to electric vehicles.  A recent report by Coltura lamented the failure of local governments to meet the Legislature's directive to run all vehicles on electricity or biofuels "to the extent practicable."  Coltura did not respond to our questions.

Governor Inslee

While attending a climate change summit in Paris in 2015, Governor Jay Inslee unveiled an electric fleet initiative to ensure that at least 20% of all state vehicle purchases are electric by 2017.  So we reached out to the State of Washington with our questions about the morality of buying electric cars that rely on child and slave labor.  

Off the record we learned the state is buying mostly Chey Bolts.  The batteries are made in Michigan.  So far, so good.  But our research showed that the batteries in Chey Bolts come from LG Chem of South Korea, which buys its cobalt from the same Chinese outfit implicated in all the reports starting with Amnesty.  In the Amnesty investigation LG Chem admitted using cobalt from the mines where the horrible conditions were found.  The Washington Post asked LG Chem where they got their cobalt.  They claimed their cobalt comes not from the Congo, but from New Caledonia.  However, minerals experts consulted by The Post concluded that could not be true, as LG Chem uses more cobalt than New Caledonia's entire national production. 

We are still waiting for a statement from the state. 

Another Seattle activist organization, the Alliance for Jobs and Clean Energy, is pushing I-1631, a ballot measure which would impose an annually rising charge on gasoline and other carbon-based fuels.  Their goal is to force people out of their gas-powered cars into electric vehicles or mass transit that would also run on electricity.  Their equivalent of a carbon tax, they claim, is based on social justice and racial ethics.

 

Months ago we asked them to respond to the findings of the racial injustice inherent in the cobalt supply system that leads straight to the electric vehicles they advocate.  They never responded.

Electric Cars Are Great--Except for the Racism Part

In the United States, it is whites with enough money to pay the premium prices who buy electric cars.  Yet it is poor African Blacks who pay the highest prices in terms of their freedom, their health and their lives.There may be white people in the US and Europe who might defend this human suffering in Africa as necessary in the fight against what they consider a greater concern--climate change.  But they are never going to volunteer themselves or their children to take the place of Blacks in the cobalt mines.  They prefer someone else doing the  dangerous, miserable jobs in the struggle for climate justice.  And it's not someone who will ever have the money to enjoy owning an electric car. 

Consider this: Most of the high-paying jobs in the oil and gas industry in coming years will go to Black and Hispanic workers.  (Women are also snagging a big chunk of those lucrative jobs).  Unlike warlords and corrupt officials who exploit Black laborers, the US oil and gas industry gives workers in the US a very good life.

Efforts are underway to find a substitute for cobalt.  There are also calls for including cobalt in the US law that targeted blood diamonds and rare minerals controlled by African warlords.  Developing technologies promise carbon capture on a scale that will let people keep their internal combustion cars.  Mazda is rolling out gasoline-powered cars next year that promise lower carbon emissions than electric vehicles.

Some very intelligent people, such as environmental economist Bjorn Lomberg, contend that electric cars don't do that much to reduce carbon emissions and may actually be detrimental to the environment and broader social justice causes. 

Electric cars may not be all that green.  As reported by the National Review:

In 2013, the Environmental Protection Agency described these batteries as having the “highest potential for environmental impacts,” with lithium mining resulting in greenhouse-gas emissions, environmental pollution, and human-health impacts. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that specializes in “science for a healthy planet and safer world,” agrees: For long-range electric vehicles such as Tesla, manufacturing emissions are 68 percent higher than for conventional cars.

It may be more ethical to hang onto your gas-powered car as long as it keeps running.  You avoid the carbon emissions and pollution that come with manufacturing a new one.  You won't be rewarding people who profit from inhumanity.  And you won't find yourself in the hypocritical position of shopping for free trade goods in a car that runs on human suffering.