Your iPhone Was Built With Child Labor

SOURCE: The Free Press

"Congo has three-quarters of the world's cobalt, as well as monopolies on
coltan and tungsten -- which are vital for batteries and circuits, and enable
devices to vibrate. Without all three, there wouldn't be electric vehicles
or smartphones. Big customers include, no surprise, Tesla and Apple. The 
open secret, I learned, is that mining relies on child labor. You don't
need to buy a blood diamond to exploit some of the world's poorest and
most vulnerable children -- just an iPhone."

Or an electric vehicle, which may cost you a lot more than a diamond.

"It's impossible to appreciate the steep price of the green revolution until
you're there. The irony of our hunger for save-the-world renewables means
destroying the fragile environments we never see -- and condemning generations
of kids to this new slavery."

The electronic vehicle discussion is "meant to be a green choice in pursuit of 
climate sustainability goals. Yet it's utterly destructive to the environment
of the Congo. Our green energy transition -- migrating from internal combustion
engines to electric vehicles -- is built, in large part, from the battery pack
standpoint, on the utter destruction of the environment of the Congo. Millions 
of trees have been clear-cut. Foreign mining companies dump all the toxic 
effluence from their processing facilities into the water, into the air, the 
dirt. Everything is polluted."

The interviewee goes on to mention that many companies claim that they are
not using child-labor cobalt in their phones but, as nearly 75% of global 
cobalt is mined in the Congo, that is a dubious claim.

MORE AT: https://www.thefp.com/p/your-iphone-was-built...
--- SBBSecho 3.14-Linux
 * Origin: capitolcityonline.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/HTTP (618:250/1)