Posted on 07/29/2023 9:01:21 AM PDT by rktman
Global cobalt demand soared with the advent of cell phones and laptop computers. It exploded with the arrival of electric vehicles and now is skyrocketing in tandem with government EV mandates and subsidies. Cobalt improves battery performance, extends driving range and reduces fire risks.
Demand will reach stratospheric heights if governments remain obsessed with climate change and Net Zero. States and nations would have to switch to electric cars, trucks, buses and tractors; end coal and gas electricity generation; convert gas furnaces, water heaters and stoves to electricity; and provide alternative power for windless, sunless periods. Electricity generation would triple or quadruple.
Weather-dependent wind turbines and solar panels would require billions of battery modules, to stabilize power grids and avoid blackouts every time wind and sunshine don’t cooperate.
All that Net Zero transformation equipment – plus transmission lines, substations and transformers – will require billions of tons of cobalt, lithium, copper, nickel, graphite, iron, aluminum, rare earths and other raw materials at scales unprecedented in human history. That will necessitate mining, ore processing, manufacturing, land disruption and pollution at equally unprecedented levels.
Just President Biden’s first tranche of US offshore wind turbines (30,000 megawatts by 2030) will require some 110,000 tons of copper, for the turbines alone. Transmission lines, transformers and batteries are extra. Based on average global ore concentrations, getting that copper would require extracting 40,000,000 tons of surface rock (overburden) and 25,000,000 tons of copper ore.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
How easily the corrupt happily ignore the picture of what the advocate....
Doubt if these child miners will need surgery and hormones to transition.
Exploring kids is okay as long as it’s for libtards
Pretty sure spell chk got you. EXPLOITING? although “exploring” would apply to a lot of libtards.
When coal began to displace wood as the source of heat in England, the cheapest source of labor were the orphans scavenging for a living in urban areas. Huge lots of Irish children were imported to work the mines, pecking away to remove the coal from its overburden, to fuel not just home heating, but the locomotives and steamships that hauled the transport of goods and people, eventually all over the world.
The birth and growth of the petroleum extraction and refining industry displaced much of this child labor, which was being replaced by machinery adequate to the job of removing the overburden and burrowing down for the coal and other minerals that were becoming far more important to the continued industrial growth in manufacturing and consumer goods. Child labor in more civilized countries, like other forms of slavery, was simultaneously being abolished, and for the first time, children became a protected class, no longer a mere commodity.
Like protected classes everywhere, the survival of children to adulthood expanded exponentially, and real growth in population took hold, with a rising standard of living generation after generation.
Suddenly the movers and shakers of the world began to see a looming problem, TOO many people, how should this problem be met? Make people stop reproducing, first by gentle admonitions to “limit” family formation, and by going to some kind of reliable birth control, one of the more extreme examples of which is abortion of the unborn fetus. Then it is to take the already-born children out of future reproduction by “transgendering” them from biological males and females into what is either a neutered eunuch or a barren freemartin. Given time, the reproducing of future generations dwindles down, until there is an actual contraction of the overall population.
Aldous Huxley predicted just such a world in his novel, “Brave New World”, which is now being used as an instruction manual, along with George Orwell’s “1984”. Voilà! Here is the solution, virtually depopulate most of the planet, and divide humanity into an hierarchy of the finest and most fit down to the most expendable.
Build a sustainable command-and-control regime, and make it practically impossible ever to mount a revolution or even small rebellions.
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