The Democratic Republic of the Congo produces nearly three-quarters of the world’s cobalt, an essential component in rechargeable batteries powering laptops, smartphones and electric vehicles. But those who dig up the valuable mineral often work in horrific and dangerous conditions, says Siddharth Kara, an international expert on modern-day slavery and author of Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. In an in-depth interview, he says the major technology companies that rely on this cobalt from DRC to make their products are turning a blind eye to the human toll and falsely claiming their supply chains are free from abuse, including widespread child labor. “The public health catastrophe on top of the human rights violence on top of the environmental destruction is unlike anything we’ve ever seen in the modern context,” says Kara. “The fact that it is linked to companies worth trillions and that our lives depend on this enormous violence has to be dealt with.”
Can you explain how this works?
Only part of the reason petroleum products are an issue is because they are nonrenewable. The primary complaint is that their combustion produces CO2 (and other greenhouse gases like NOx).
Ethanol, methanol, and any other hydrocarbon that undergoes combustion produces CO2 (and other gases). That’s how combustion works. For example, the combustion equation for methanol is: 2CH3OH + 3O2→2CO2 + 4H2O.
The only way around this while still performing combustion is by combusting hydrogen, where the combustion equation is simply: 2H2 + O2→2H2O.
Biofuel combustion still produce CO2, and I don’t believe at a significantly different rate than petroleum combustion, even if it does have the added benefit of being renewable.[1]
Yes, this view is missing a few variables. For one, biofuel production itself can be less carbon-intensive than oil drilling and processing processes. Biofuels can also be used to “recycle” other carbon-containing (waste) material. That being said, combustion is still the largest problematic factor at play here. ↩︎
Right, we’re not magically sucking CO2 from the atmosphere at a rate higher than we combust the biofuel.
The process is not neutral.
Absolutely. Compared to gasoline, it might be better. And if there were literally no other alternatives for powering engines, it could be acceptable. But there’s no point in taking “the lesser of two evils” when non-evil solutions do exist.
Do they, though? How much rare-earth metal is mined ethically? How much of it is controlled by “evil” empires (China, Russia)? How can hydrogen or electric vehicles be made cheap enough to be sold as non-luxury vehicles?
The fact of the matter that is, until non-evil solutions are actually designed, switching from petroleum fuel to biofuel shouldn’t be overlooked. Ignoring biofuel in favor of non-solutions like electric and hydrogen vehicles isn’t going to slow down global warming. We’ll just keep burning oil instead of much cleaner biofuels in the meantime.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/edg/media/BiofuelsMythVFact.pdf
Just because mining may not currently be done ethically doesn’t mean it can’t be. The whole system needs to be upturned, not just moving away from gasoline, but making sure every step of the supply chain is ethical and environmentaly sound.
See above.
Several ways. One way, an approach being taken in the USA, is subsidies both to manufacturers and buyers to encourage buying greener vehicles. Also the assumption that production costs will never change–will forever remain high–is nonsense: technological advancements increase efficiency and decrease cost, amortized costs become paid off, and international competition between manufacturers all help keep prices low.
You can pretend the solutions that are materially in front of you don’t exist, but they do. You act as if they’re pies in the sky, or undiscovered future technology. They’re neither. They exist, materially, in the real world and are in use now. And they can only get better (more efficient, cheaper, more ethical, etc).
Here’s the problem with your reasoning: if we say “let’s move to biofuels”, you’re just going to provide reason to keep producing ICEs. As long as ICEs are being produced, purchased, and used, there is inherently less demand for alternatives. People are also not going to buy better solutions if they’ve recently purchased an ICE vehicle.
As I said earlier, the whole system needs to be upturned. There is no reason every human needs their own car; there is no reason people need to drive an hour each way to work, or half an hour each way to a shop, all the while having a single person in the car. Your concern of overpriced alternatives is not an issue when the cost is consolidated into, say, a slightly more expensive (up-front) bus. People need to walk, bike, and take public transport more. More and better public transportation needs to be designed and implemented. Cities need to be designed to make having a car not only less necessary, but less desirable.
I’d say your ideas are significantly more pie-in-the-sky than mine. Rare earth metals aren’t going to get more common; they will only get more rare as more of them are extracted. That extraction process will become more expensive and more damaging to the environment, and as a result, electric vehicles will get more expensive.
Contemporary battery technology cannot replace ICE vehicles. We need to reduce vehicle emissions now, not wait until some undetermined future time when an alternative is finally viable. Biofuel is how we do that.
But sure, go ahead and ignore the overwhelming evidence and cling to your outdated idea of replacing combustion engine vehicles with electric vehicles.
That doesn’t make any sense to me, and it’s been awhile since my biofuel class but I don’t think that’s true.
The carbon in the combustion product comes from the biofuel, the biofuel comes from plants, the plants get the carbon from the air. Therfore, by definition, every gram of Co2 released by combusting a biofuel came originally from the atmosphere.
It has to be neutral, otherwise where is the magical extra carbon coming from?