‘Slave-like’: Solar panels may be great for the environment but at what human cost?
www.smh.com.au
Modern-day abolitionist Grace Forrest is now at the same level as Nelson Mandela, Malala Yousafzai, Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Her cause is to curb forced and child labour while there’s time.

Almost 90 per cent of the global supply for polysilicon, a common raw material in electronic devices and solar panels, comes from China, and about half of that comes from Xinjiang, the north-western province that is home to the Uyghurs, says Grace Forrest, founder of Walk Free, a charity dedicating to fight forced labour.

The organization has exposed modern slavery, forced and child labour throughout the renewable energy supply chain, with evidence of state-imposed forced labour of Uyghurs and other Turkic and Muslim majority groups in China in the making and supply of solar panels and other renewable technologies.

It has also shone a light on the slave-like conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where cobalt is mined by workers for its use in rechargeable batteries for laptop computers and mobile phones.

“We have an opportunity to build an economy that isn’t coming from colonial lines and yet, right now, a green economy absolutely will be built on forced and child labour,” Forrest says.

“So the message really is, you cannot harm people in the name of saving the planet.”

Walk Free’s latest Global Slavery Index estimated that 50 million people were living in modern slavery – either in forced labour or forced marriage – on any given day in 2021.

  • Zworf@beehaw.org
    3·
    3 months ago

    most personal trips can be done safely and easily using an E-bike (much smaller batteries that can be produced en mass with existing supply chains) and cars should be reduced in usage outside of particularly rural areas where they truly are a necessity (which is a tiny portion of the overall population).

    E-bikes are often not an option for many reasons. Needing to bring cargo, bad weather, danger from other traffic. If they were actually such an amazing option everyone would be using them because they are hella cheaper than cars. Even in the netherlands where bike infrastructure is great, people are extremely car-centric.

    Personally I think subsidised public transport is a much better option.

    And nuclear is not cheaper and it doesn’t even factor in waste storage and decommissioning otherwise it would not have been viable. Right now when a nuclear plant is closed the operator walks off scot free and the cleanup costs are borne by the public. The mining of the uranium is also pretty polluting. There’s a lot of this externalisation to make it viable.

    The only reason it worked in the past was that the governments were building nuclear arsenals and invested in nuclear industry (note that this industry was not necessarily capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium but still, it was about building up an industry). It’s no coincidence that most countries relying heavily on nuclear power are also nuclear armed.

    Also, environmental pollution is also a safety issue. Don’t just look at human deaths. Even Fukushima was a major disaster despite not leading to many deaths. The regulation is there for a reason and that still didn’t manage to prevent Fukushima (not talking about Chernobyl there because that was just human idiocy fucking up at its worst). And other first-world countries have also had meltdowns.

    Personally I also feel bad about dumping our waste problem on future generations. That kind of thinking is exactly what led to the climate crisis. But admittedly this is a lesser issue for nuclear in particular because we do this with pretty much everything (as this article also mentions)