The race to decarbonise the world’s economy risks repeating the mistakes of the colonial era by building industries on forced and child labour, rights advocate warns
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.
It’s wild because we don’t need to. We can use extant technologies with established supply chains, it just requires us to move past minor hang ups.
Battery electric cars/trains/buses are unnecessary. Trains and busses can use overhead/3rd rail electrification, 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).
For the power grid… WE HAVE NUCLEAR POWER! IT IS SAFER, CHEAPER, AND LESS POLLUTING THAN LITERALLY ANY OTHER OPTION! The only thing holding it back is massive amounts of red tape put in place due to fear mongering funded by the gas and coal industries.
It's not cheaper. New nuclear power plants are so expensive to build today that even free fuel and waste disposal doesn't make the entire life cycle cheaper than solar.
It is cheaper when you’re just talking about the actual construction, operation, and externalized elements of the fuel cycle. The reason they are so expensive is the massive difficulties and delays that come from getting the projects approved and the constant legal challenges to shut down construction once approved. If construction is delayed by an injunction, you still have to pay all the specialist until construction starts again.
Solar is only particularly cheap if the power goes directly in to the grid and doesn’t need to stored. Including the cost of grid scale storage bloats the price to be uncompetitive with natural gas.
Can you name an example? Because the reactor constructions that I've seen get delayed have run into plain old engineering problems. The 4 proposed new reactors at Vogtle and V.C. Summer ran into cost overruns because of production issues and QA/QC issues requiring expensive redesigns mid-construction, after initial regulatory approvals and licensing were already approved. The V.C. Summer project was canceled after running up $9 billion in costs, and the Vogtle projects are about $17 billion over the original $14 billion budget, at $31 billion (and counting, as reactor 4 has been delayed once again over cooling system issues). The timeline is also about 8 years late (originally proposed to finish in 2016).
And yes, litigation did make those projects even more expensive, but the litigation was mostly about other things (like energy buyers trying to back out of the commitment to buy power from the completed reactors when it was taking too long), because it took too long, not litigation to slow things down.
The small modular reactor project in Idaho was just canceled too, because of the mundane issue of interest rates and buyers unwilling to commit to the high prices.
Nuclear doesn't make financial sense anymore. Let's keep the plants we have for as long as we can, but we might be past the point where new plants are cost effective.
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)
Industry is like a triangle and if you move towards one corner you have to move away from another:
Imo, if we want ethical and green, then billionaires should be taxed more heavily for the good of us all.
Or maybe shouldn't come into being in the first place?
Billionaires are a symptom of a system that's eating itself. Taxation might be able to offset it, but the actual power needs to be broken up, and both laws and attitudes about unchecked growth need to change.
We've ended up in a situation that's fundamentally tainted by capitalism. Every company, every product, is being slaughtered like a pig for quarterly profits. It happens over and over again. Some new thing comes out that seems great, it gets bought up or goes public, and it turns to shit.
We have to have the nerve to point at it, call it out, and figure out how to stop it before it kills us all.
True, nobody should ever have billions. There's simply no need for that much money, you can't ever use it up.
I think it would make more sense to replace cost-effective with cheap. It may be cheaper to use a process that makes it likely 80% of the population dies in 35 years, but that's a huge (non-monetary) cost. The overarching issue is our current economic system ignores those costs that take a generation or more to come due.