Lethal Environmentalism
The word artisan is a noun describing a handmade craft usually by a skillful, accomplished person. Most people will see the term when buying certain foods – especially up-market or more extravagant styles of bread. The related adjective would be artisanal. I had never thought of this adjective being used to describe a type of mining or mineral extraction, but the linked story is filled with the term. I would use the term hand mining or manual mining. The term manual mining can include varying hand tools, including picks, shovels, hammers, chisels, and pans.
Where I grew up, in almost every direction, mines dotted the horizon. The tall headframe, indicative of underground mines, in many cases, has given way to open pit mining methods with sizeable equipment that is used in drilling, blasting, loading, and hauling to a rock crushing and milling process. Open-pit mining is typically safer than its underground cousin and with solid reclamation requirements may leave an identifiable landscape modification but with no noticeable scar.
Not so in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the pits, tunnels and unstable rock faces you will see children digging with antiquated tools and hands in search of cobalt. In a related video from the Joe Rogan Experience writer Siddharth Kara asserts that never in the human history of slavery has there been more suffering and carnage than in the cobalt mining environment of the Congo.
At the current time, approximately 75% of all cobalt arrives from the Congo. Each time we look at our cell phone, our notebook, our laptop, our desktop, or our electric vehicle, we should see the destitution and privation of these Congolese children. Cobalt is an essential ingredient in lithium-ion rechargeable batteries.
As progressive governments begin to ban internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles in favor of electric vehicles and as more and more storage batteries come online as backup and support relative to the intermittency of renewable energies, more and more people and children will be driven into slavery for minerals extraction.
The government of the Congo is corrupt as seems to be many in that part of the African continent and the nefarious nations of the world are there to take full advantage. As is customary in our intentionally established, ‘out-of-sight out-of-mind’ world China controls much of the world’s supply of cobalt, including that located in the Congo. The callous, cold-blooded communists do not have the compassion to terminate this type of slavery while the Western eco-politicians and fanatical environmentalists block the permits to safely mine deposits in our own countries with safe mechanical mining techniques.
Even National Public Radio (NPR) covers the story but of course, plays softball on the climate change angle so intertwined with this mining activity. I also include a video from Gravitas Plus called Blood Batteries. The one genuine thing about climate alarmists is their ability to turn a blind eye to anything and everything they do that is detrimental, injurious, and lethal to humans.
