SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
One of the big changes facing the global transportation industry is electrification. Big corporations and car manufacturers are ditching combustion engines, with Toyota saying it will have an electrified or hybrid version of all vehicles by 2025. But there is a dark side to this revolution.
Cobalt is one of the key ingredients added in electric batteries, and more than half of it is currently mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Amnesty says children as young as seven work in dangerous conditions in Congo cobalt mines.
"At the present time, you'd have to say that there isn't a lot of regulation around the mining of cobalt," says Gavin Wendt, the founding director and senior resource analyst at Australia-based Minelife.
Wendt thinks recent international scandals in the car industry have put pressure on car manufacturers to ethically source the materials needed for their cars.
"We're seeing more and more ... pressure from society to ensure that these commodities are ethically sourced ... A very big issue is going to be where this cobalt will come from, and hence companies are looking to source cobalt outside of the DRC as much as possible," Wendt says.
With 54 percent of cobalt currently coming from the Congo, that goal is still a long way off.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 27 2017, @12:16PM (1 child)
So I'm dropping by soylentnews every few months to check the state of the site and holy crap, there's a guy trying to justify child labour and getting upvoted... no wonder this site's commenting population has a reputation for being edgy lowlifes.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday December 28 2017, @07:04PM
Lazy analogy AC. A better analogy would be if you want to eliminate the root causes of homelessness, closing soup kitchens won't do anything other than give the "appear do something, do anything, and then tweet about it proudly to collect the street cred" crowd something to feel self important about although they aren't improving anything at all. I mean, without soup kitchens the homeless would be even worse off, but since you're only hearing and caring about the homeless because the soup kitchen is in the news, well, your feelz will reeeee less if soup kitchens are forcibly removed from the news, right?
Maybe a better analogy is if you oppose the human suffering of war orphans, the most humane solution probably isn't drone surgical strikes on orphanages. Once the nuns are all dead, you won't have to hear about orphans anymore, but that kinda misses the point about the morality of killing the nuns and orphans.
If you don't like it that a sub population has nothing, then shitting on the only people giving them anything might feel better, might feel like doing something, but it isn't going to help.