‘Green’ Mandates Force Us to Exploit Child Slaves in Africa, But at Least They Don’t Post Mean Tweets
Team Biden swept into power on a wave of dubious ballot totals and spurious virtue signals.
Kamala Harris gave away the real agenda when she admitted that culling the number of humans was in fact a key part of their plan: “When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water,”she said at a 2023 event at Baltimore.
To be fair to her, Kamala managed to deploy some of the lies from her script. Clean air and water aren’t the issue at all: the U.S. already has some of the highest standards for air and water quality. But the driving issue for the Democrats is not improving our lives or even protecting nature.
Instead, what they seek is control, the concentration of wealth, power, and even the freedom to breed in the hands of the privileged few — those who tick off the boxes on their ideological checklist. The rest can freeze in the dark, or slave in the cobalt mines till they end up in unmarked graves.
The Climate Cult Body-Snatched the Environmental Movement
The environmentalist movement isn’t misguided or mistaken. It’s gone. Its body has been snatched by the elitist Climate Cult. Few activists even bother anymore to lobby for pure air and water, or protect endangered species — except where such a cause can be weaponized to attack private property rights, cheap and reliable energy, or independent farmers. Just ask Europe’s farmers, who last week en masse marched on the major cities, spraying manure and blocking streets to protest the EU’s plan to radically restrict the production of food.
What kind of people want to make food and energy much more expensive, and centralize control of them among unelected bureaucrats? The same kind of people who implemented Stalin’s famine in Ukraine.
Now instead of “collectivized farms” and a socialist Utopia, the pie in the sky for whose sake we’re obliged to starve is “saving the Climate.” The human cost of this fever dream is already becoming obvious, though our media are ignoring it as studiously as the New York Times denied reports of skeletal peasants in Ukraine. The electric vehicle mandates being imposed all across the world are damaging our lives in the West, and spreading death and misery among the most vulnerable people on earth.
Electric Cars Don’t Work Well and Nobody Wants Them Except Our Elites
Last week, Toyota Motor Corp. Chairman Akio Toyoda predicted that “battery electric vehicles will reach at most 30% market share” even if ownership increases rapidly. He further stressed that “with a billion people in the world living without electricity, limiting their choices and ability to travel by making expensive cars isn’t the answer.”
Car buyers agree. The Telegraph noted that
Renault has scrapped the separate listing of its EV unit Ampere;
Volvo stopped funding its EV unit Polestar;
Volkswagen is cutting production of two of its flagship EV models; and
Ford is scaling back its battery plant in Michigan.
Morgan Stanley predicted on February 6 that electric cars will only make up 10% of all vehicle sales by 2030. But the Biden regime insists that figure must be 50%, and it plans to wield government force to achieve that Six Year Plan. Last month Ford registered a 11% year-on-year fall in EV sales. And it’s hemorrhaging money: Ford lost $4.7 billion on EVs in 2023, which is about $64,731 for every EV it sold. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Shares of Tesla, which have already valued the company well beyond any other mere carmaker, have fallen more than 20% this year through Friday while other tech giants, such as Microsoft and Nvidia, have seen huge gains fueled by excitement around their work in AI.
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EVs have also become a massive headache everywhere the weather sometimes get cold. You know, for instance, in northern climes in the winter. Comprehensive research by Recurrent shows all the top 12 EV car brands lose significant range/mileage in freezing conditions. Volkswagen ID.4 loses almost half its mileage (46 percent). Chevrolet Bolt (42%) and Hyundai Kona (34%) also had high mileage losses.
Building Utopia from the Bones of African Children
But despite this lack of appeal for EVs in the free market and their lame performance whenever it’s cold outside, the global political authorities and organizations like the World Economic Forum demand a faster transition to EVs across the world. And they’re willing to build their utopia from the bones of the world’s poorest children.
Oil and natural gas are typically extracted by well-paid workers in places like Texas and Alaska, with good health insurance, in carefully regulated working conditions. The batteries that make electric cars run get dug out of the ground by little brown hands of illegal child laborers in tyrannical backwaters like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
More than 70% of the world’s cobalt — a critical raw material in EV batteries — is mined in DRC. This share of DRC is expected to grow further, since Congolese cobalt is superior. It’s like the fine white cotton picked by American slaves before the Civil War and sold around the world.
A 2023 report by leading mainstream think tanks in the U.S. exposes this ugly truth:
[T]here is no such thing as a clean supply chain of cobalt from the Congo. All is tainted by various degrees of abuse, including slavery, child labor, forced labor, debt bondage, human trafficking, hazardous and toxic working conditions, low wages, injury and death, and incalculable environmental harm.
The Perfect Slave Plantations
According to Biden’s own Department of Labor, at least “40,000 children, including children as young as 6 years old, work in cobalt mines in the DRC.” DOL further states that in 2022, “the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo supplied weapons and munitions to non-state armed groups known for recruiting children” to work in artisanal cobalt mines in the country’s Copperbelt.
Siddharth Kara, a Harvard academic with 20 years experience in researching modern slavery, visited people working in these cobalt mines. He writes in Cobalt Red: “At no point in human history has so much suffering generated so much profit and been directly linked to the lives of billions of people around the world … . Cobalt mining is the slave farm perfected.”
Louise Boyle of The Independent, in her detailed report on the dismal state of child slavery in Congo’s cobalt mines, notes that
Cobalt is toxic to touch and breathe in and can be found alongside traces of radioactive uranium. Cancers, respiratory illnesses, miscarriages, headaches and painful skin conditions occur among adults who work without protective equipment … . Children in mining communities suffer birth defects, developmental damage, vomiting and seizures from direct and indirect exposure to the heavy metals.
Some people may argue that battery demand comes not just from EV vehicles, but also from everyday electronics like phones and laptops. But the proportion of demand for batteries is vastly different between these sectors. The International Energy Agency (IEA) says “automotive”lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery demand increased by about 65% between 2021 and 2022. When it comes to production, around 90% of all future demand for batteries will come from the automotive sector.
A Weaponized Doomsday Message
So wouldn’t it be more humane for people to buy and use conventional combustion engine cars rather than actively enable child labor and slavery in Congo? Our elites don’t really care. They want to cut down the number of humans anyway, and nameless African kids aren’t high on their list of priorities.
The climate doomsday message has been weaponized and governments across the world are now forcing us to buy vehicles that don’t reliably run, fueled by the blood, sweat, and tears of enslaved African children.
But hey, at least Klaus Schwab and Kamala Harris don’t post mean tweets.
Jason Jones is a film producer, author, popular podcast host, and human rights worker. He is president of the Human-Rights Education and Relief Organization (H.E.R.O.), known for its two main programs The Vulnerable People Project and Movie to Movement. His latest book, The Great Campaign Against the Great Reset, will be released in Spring 2024.