Child miners aged four living a hell on Earth so YOU can drive an electric car...

[OnlinePoker]

Picking through a mountain of huge rocks with his tiny bare hands, the exhausted little boy makes a pitiful sight.

His name is Dorsen and he is one of an army of children, some just four years old, working in the vast polluted mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where toxic red dust burns their eyes, and they run the risk of skin disease and a deadly lung condition. Here, for a wage of just 8p a day, the children are made to check the rocks for the tell-tale chocolate-brown streaks of cobalt – the prized ingredient essential for the batteries that power electric cars.

And it’s feared that thousands more children could be about to be dragged into this hellish daily existence – after the historic pledge made by Britain to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2040 and switch to electric vehicles.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4764208/Child-miners-aged-four-living-hell-Earth.html?ito=social-facebook

[Warpy]

1. Yeah, we all know people only drive electric cars so

they can groove on the thought of 4 year olds working at the cobalt mines.

Typical rotten headline for The Daily Fail.

No one wants little kids working in hideous conditions for any reason. However, the reason is poverty, not selfish yuppies who drive those sissy electric cars instead of rolling coal in a big macho truck.

[Duppers]

2. Damn damn damn.

Damned if we do, damned if we don't.

These poor babies are working for their food. It's heartbreaking how the world lets these people down.

Searching for info on a mechanical way of detecting Cobalt, I found this:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4692778/

It is recyclable, if we choose to do it.

[Binkie The Clown]

3. There's no solution to the imanent end of civilization.

Techo-utopianism notwithstanding, every "miraculous" high tech advance comes at a staggering human cost. The whole house of cards that is industrial civilization is teetering on the brink of collapse.

[eppur_se_muova]

4. No, so local power brokers can get rich.

There's no shortage of cobalt. DRC happens to have an absurdly disproportionate share of the world's known cobalt reserves, but these mines only keep cobalt prices lower. The rest is good old "free"-market economics, which is just as cruel in regard to every other industry that humans are involved in.

[mopinko]

5. time for my usual rant.

is cobalt one of the metals that lie, already dug up and pulverized into a slurry, in coal ash?
it is full of metals, some very valuable, but somehow we continue to dig big rocks and grind them into powder to get the same damned metals.