"Alternative energy" may cost the earth

I can scarcely convey how each of the following items angers me,

It is part of the Big Lie that is being propagated by those who wish to financialise everything (including the air you breathe) to produce a “new” economy designed to move us away from fossil fuels (which are past peak so on their way out) – but actually to keep an economic system that is on the brink of collapse going for as long as possible (and don’t forget the endless wars!)

All this in the guise of “solving” climate change which has moved into runaway. No wonder less intelligent people draw the conclusion from all this that climate change is a “hoax”! I can almost understand it.

In meantime seemingly well-meaning people have swallowed the bait and tell us endlessly that if we just move to Priuses or Tesla the world will be saved.

First and foremost in my mind right now is “Robertscribbler” who from writing some of the best reports on the internet to alternating his increasingly tame and meaningless climate reports with techno-hopium, such as A Beautiful Machine to Change the World — Model 3 to Transform Global Automobile Markets, Open Pathway For Rapid Energy Transition, , being the latest example.

Today he writes about a reasonably hack piece, Denyingthe Storm: Climate Change Report Findings the Trump AdministrationDoesn’t Want You to Know About, which he uses in his other obsession – Donald Trump. However he ignores the far more significant piece, 'Dodgy' greenhouse gas data threatens Paris accord from the BBC which describes how countries have majorly cooked the books over their greenhouse gas emissions.

The BBC (!), against its usual propaganda says:

"These flaws posed a bigger threat to the Paris climate agreement than US President Donald Trump's intention to withdraw, researchers told BBC Radio 4's Counting Carbon programme."

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Robertscribbler!

I find it obscene that well-meaning people are persuaded by toxic forces that by installing solar panels or driving a Prius they can save the planet.

Not only are they contributing to the misery of children in poor countries such as the Congo but they are unwittingly contributing to greenhouse emissions.

Think about the irony of that!

The very thing that we have been taught will save us all is a major contributor to global warming.

If you want a fictional account of the involvement of western powers in the exploitation of Congo I highly recommend John le Carre's book, The Mission Song.

Child miners aged four living a hell on Earth so YOU can drive an electric car: Awful human cost in squalid Congo cobalt mine that Michael Gove didn’t consider in his ‘clean’ energy crusade

• Sky News investigated the Katanga mines and found Dorsen, 8, and Monica, 4
• The pair were working in the vast mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo
• They are two of the 40,000 children working daily in the mines, checking rocks for cobalt
• Child miners aged four living a hell on Earth so YOU can drive an electric car: Awful human cost in squalid Congo cobalt mine that Michael Gove didn’t consider in his ‘clean’ energy crusade
• Sky News investigated the Katanga mines and found Dorsen, 8, and Monica, 4
• The pair were working in the vast mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo
• They are two of the 40,000 children working daily in the mines, checking rocks for cobalt

Daily Mail,

6 August, 2017

Picking through a mountain of huge rocks with his tiny bare hands, the exhausted little boy makes a pitiful иsight.

His name is Dorsen and he is one of an army of children, some just four years old, working in the vast polluted mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where toxic red dust burns their eyes, and they run the risk of skin disease and a deadly lung condition. Here, for a wage of just 8p a day, the children are made to check the rocks for the tell-tale chocolate-brown streaks of cobalt – the prized ingredient essential for the batteries that power electric car.

And it’s feared that thousands more children could be about to be dragged into this hellish daily existence – after the historic pledge made by Britain to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2040 and switch to electric vehicles.

It heralds a future of clean energy, free from pollution but – though there can be no doubting the good intentions behind Environment Secretary Michael Gove’s announcement last month – such ideals mean nothing for the children condemned to a life of hellish misery in the race to achieve his target.

Dorsen, just eight, is one of 40,000 children working daily in the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The terrible price they will pay for our clean air is ruined health and a likely early death.

Almost every big motor manufacturer striving to produce millions of electric vehicles buys its cobalt from the impoverished central African state. It is the world’s biggest producer, with 60 per cent of the planet’s reserves.

The cobalt is mined by unregulated labour and transported to Asia where battery manufacturers use it to make their products lighter, longer-lasting and rechargeable.

The planned switch to clean energy vehicles has led to an extraordinary surge in demand. While a smartphone battery uses no more than 10 grams of refined cobalt, an electric car needs 15kg (33b).

Goldman Sachs, the merchant bank, calls cobalt ‘the new gasoline’ but there are no signs of new wealth in the DRC, where the children haul the rocks brought up from tunnels dug by hand.

Adult miners dig up to 600ft below the surface using basic tools, without protective clothing or modern machinery. Sometimes the children are sent down into the narrow makeshift chambers where there is constant danger of collapse.

Cobalt is such a health hazard that it has a respiratory disease named after it – cobalt lung, a form of pneumonia which causes coughing and leads to permanent incapacity and even death.

Even simply eating vegetables grown in local soil can cause vomiting and diarrhoea, thyroid damage and fatal lung diseases, while birds and fish cannot survive in the area.

No one knows quite how many children have died mining cobalt in the Katanga region in the south-east of the country. The UN estimates 80 a year, but many more deaths go unregistered, with the bodies buried in the rubble of collapsed tunnels. Others survive but with chronic diseases which destroy their young lives. Girls as young as ten in the mines are subjected to sexual attacks and many become pregnant.

Dorsen and 11-year-old Richard are pictured. With his mother dead, Dorsen lives with his father in the bush and the two have to work daily in the cobalt mine to earn money for food.

When Sky News investigated the Katanga mines it found Dorsen, working near a little girl called Monica, who was four, on a day of relentless rainfall.

Dorsen was hauling heavy sacks of rocks from the mine surface to a growing stack 60ft away. A full sack was lifted on to Dorsen’s head and he staggered across to the stack. A brutish overseer stood over him, shouting and raising his hand to threaten a beating if he spilt any.

With his mother dead, Dorsen lives with his father in the bush and the two have to work daily in the cobalt mine to earn money for food.

Dorsen’s friend Richard, 11, said that at the end of a working day ‘everything hurts’.

In a country devastated by civil wars in which millions have died, there is no other way for families to survive. Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) is donating £10.5million between June 2007 and June 2018 towards strengthening revenue transparency and encouraging responsible activity in large and small scale artisanal mining, ‘to benefit the poor of DRC’.

There is little to show for these efforts so far. There is a DRC law forbidding the enslavement of under-age children, but nobody enforces it.

The UN’s International Labour Organisation has described cobalt mining in DRC as ‘one of the worst forms of child labour’ due to the health risks.

Soil samples taken from the mining area by doctors at the University of Lubumbashi, the nearest city, show the region to be among the ten most polluted in the world. Residents near mines in southern DRC had urinary concentrates of cobalt 43 higher than normal. Lead levels were five times higher, cadmium and uranium four times higher.

The worldwide rush to bring millions of electric vehicles on to our roads has handed a big advantage to those giant car-makers which saw this bonanza coming and invested in developing battery-powered vehicles, among them General Motors, Renault-Nissan, Tesla, BMW and Fiat-Chrysler.

Chinese middle-men working for the Congo Dongfang Mining Company have the stranglehold in DRC, buying the raw cobalt brought to them in sacks carried on bicycles and dilapidated old cars daily from the Katanga mines. They sit in shacks on a dusty road near the Zambian border, offering measly sums scrawled on blackboards outside – £40 for a ton of cobalt-rich rocks – that will be sent by cargo ship to minerals giant Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt in China and sold on to a complex supply chain feeding giant multinationals.

Challenged by the Washington Post about the appalling conditions in the mines, Huayou Cobalt said ‘it would be irresponsible’ to stop using child labour, claiming: ‘It could aggravate poverty in the cobalt mining regions and worsen the livelihood of local miners.’

Human rights charity Amnesty International also investigated cobalt mining in the DRC and says that none of the 16 electric vehicle manufacturers they identified have conducted due diligence to the standard defined by the Responsible Cobalt Initiative.

Encouragingly, Apple, which uses the mineral in its devices, has committed itself to treat cobalt like conflict minerals – those which have in the past funded child soldiers in the country’s civil war – and the company claims it is going to require all refiners to have supply chain audits and risk assessments. But Amnesty International is not satisfied. ‘This promise is not worth the paper it is written on when the companies are not investigating their suppliers,’ said Amnesty’s Mark Dummett. ‘Big brands have the power to change this.’

After DRC, Australia is the next biggest source of cobalt, with reserves of 1million tons, followed by Cuba, China, Russia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Car maker Tesla – the market leader in electric vehicles – plans to produce 500,000 cars per year starting in 2018, and will need 7,800 tons of cobalt to achieve this. Sales are expected to hit 4.4 million by 2021. It means the price of cobalt will soar as the world gears itself up for the electric car revolution, and there is evidence some corporations are cancelling their contracts with regulated mines using industrial technology, and turning increasingly to the cheaper mines using human labour.

After the terrible plight of Dorsen and Richard was broadcast in a report on Sky News, an emotive response from viewers funded a rescue by children’s charity Kimbilio. They are now living in a church-supported children’s home, sleeping on mattresses for the first time in their lives and going to school.

But there is no such happy ending for the tens of thousands of children left in the hell on earth that is the cobalt mines of the Congo.

So much for the hype on solar energy. It’s linked to a potent greenhouse gas!

A BBC report yesterday revealed countries are cooking the books with regard to their greenhouse gas emissions. For example Italy reported only a tiny proportion of its emissions HFC-23 (which I take to be a hydroflurocarbon) compared with the actual emissions measured from negbouring Switzerland.

I regard this as a major, major revelation but I am sure this will not be reported beyond the BBC.

'Dodgy' greenhouse gas data threatens Paris accord

Solar panel manufacturing linked to potent greenhouse gas

the Weather Network,

4 July, 2017

America’s growing reliance on solar power may have created a new enemy for environmentalists — a greenhouse gas that’s thousands of times more potent than CO2.

According to data recently released by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, carbon dioxide makes up 82 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. The gas nitrogen trifluoride, or NF3, accounts for only a small margin, but is on the rise.

Overall emissions fell by 2.2 percent, and CO2 has risen only 5.6 percent from 1990 to 2015. Levels of NF3, however, have seen a 1,057 percent increase over those same 25 years.

This exponential rise has been linked to the manufacturing sector, which uses the chemical to make solar panels, semiconductors and LCDs. This discovery threatens the construction of Trump’s US-Mexico border wall.

At a rally at the US Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Trump proposed installing solar panels on his wall. The wall would then be able to “create energy and pay for itself” and according to Trump, “Mexico will have to pay much less money.”

However, the Trump administration faces the problem of constructing the solar panels, which could increase the prevalence of NF3 and intensify the issue of climate change.

NF3 is mainly used as a cleaning agent to clear away excess silicone. The gas is mostly eliminated during use, but a small percentage is reportedly leaked into the atmosphere.

It’s unclear exactly how much has been leaked, but scientists warn that NF3 is highly effective at trapping heat, and can remain in the atmosphere for up to 740 years.

Scientists warn that NF3, when combined with CO2 and other greenhouse gases, could lead to a climate problem, especially with the emissions rising not only in the U.S., but in growing solar markets in Asia as well.

With carbon dioxide proving difficult to limit, environmentalists could soon target NF3 in their quest to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Solar Panels Linked To Rise In Greenhouse Gas; NF3 More Potent Than CO2

Carbon dioxide makes up 82 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. But it seems that it is less of a problem now compared to the rise of a more potent emission: nitrogen trifluoride or NF3.

The Weather Network noted that overall emissions of CO2 have risen only 5.6 percent from 1990 to 2015, but levels of NF3 have seen an increase of 1,057 percent in the same period. The exponential rise may have been linked to the manufacturing sector that uses the chemical to make solar panels, semiconductors and LCDs. Incidentally, the same discovery threatens the construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall ordered by President Donald Trump.

At a rally in Iowa, the president proposed installing solar panels on his wall, saying that the wall can then "create energy and pay for itself." However, the administration is still facing a problem regarding construction of solar panels, which could increase prevalence of NF3 and intensify climate change issues.

Mainly used as a cleaning agent to clear away silicone, NF3 is usually eliminated during use, but a small percentage can still leak into the atmosphere. At this point, it is unclear just how much has been leaked but scientists have warned that NF3 is effective at trapping heat and can remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. Seeker also noted that NF3, despite contributing little to greenhouse gas emissions compared to CO2, is actually 17,200 times more potent.

Dr. Michael Prather of the University of California, Irvine, said that while NF3 will not create a climate problem, its numbers still add up. Thus, everyone should pay attention to the small things that add up, especially considering how dangerous it could be in the long run.

Despite the rise of NF3 being linked to solar panels, environmentalists are still quick to defend their stance. Tim Donaghy, a senior research specialist for Greenpeace, said, "The impact of NF3 as a global warming gas is big on a per-molecule basis, but the benefits of carbon-free energy from solar panels swamp the negative impacts due to NF3 emissions."