junkscience.com
19 October 2020
Steve Milloy

The makers of wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles and other supposedly environment-friendly technologies — as well as the green activists, politicians and bureaucrats who promote and support them with our tax dollars — continually claim that these technologies are ‘green,’ ‘clean’ and ’just.’ Is that true? In this premier edition of our new series “Mean and Unclean,” JunkScience.com explores the African child labor cruelly exploited to make electric cars go.

Here are some salient background points.

• Cobalt is an expensive metal used in electric car batteries,costing about $35,000 per ton.
• 59% of cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
• Cobalt mining in the Congo is often done by children —as many as 40,000— working in brutal and unsafe conditions. A euphemism for these children is ‘informal’ workers.

What follows is the harsh reality of children laboring for…