Cobalt batteries… clean energy from a dirty trade using child slave labour
JAGUAR announced this week that in just four years’ time all the cars it sells will be powered by batteries.
Yup, the purr of the big cat will be replaced by the eerie sound of silence.
And now, mighty Ford has announced that it will go down the same route and stop selling petrol and diesel-powered cars, completely, by 2030.
Now, if you are a fair trade eco snowflake and you live on a diet of gluten-free feminist peace seeds, this is extremely good news.
For everyone else though? Hmmm.
Yes. Electric cars are good for the sky. I get that.
And while they are extremely expensive to buy at the moment, they are at least cheaper than a petrol or diesel to run.
But not by as much as you might think. Top up your electric car’s batteries at a public charge point in central London and you’ll get a bill for £41.
For me, though, the biggest problem is how these cars are made.
The batteries use cobalt, and three quarters of all the world’s supply comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Which isn’t democratic at all.
Many of the mines use child slave labour. And I’m afraid that, as car makers go electric and demand sky-rockets, more kids are going to get sent underground. And that means more are going to die.
Small wonder cobalt is called “the blood diamond of batteries”.
Happily, there’s been some success in the drive to develop batteries that need less cobalt.
An original Tesla needed 11kg of the stuff, whereas the Model 3 launched last year needs only 4.5kg.
But what do you use instead? The answer is nickel, and while no slave labour is used to dig this out of the ground, it’s not what you’d call a clean process.
According to a report in The Guardian, of all places, what you have around a nickel mine are: “Plumes of sulphur dioxide choking the skies, churned earth blanketed in cancerous dust, rivers running blood-red . . . ”.
And that’s before we get to all the deformed babies.
There are reports of deformed babies being born near the cobalt mines and higher rates of deformities and respiratory problems linked to nickel mining pollution.
Obviously, electric cars are coming. And in time better technology will mean fewer blood-red rivers and no more deformed babies.
But for now, if you have any sense at all, I’d buy a petrol-powered Toyota Yaris GR.
It’s not only the best car I’ve driven in many years but also, when you pull into a filling station to top up the tank, the kiosk won’t be manned by a four-year-old slave.
Drake up the past
PLANS to erect a rather brilliant statue in honour of two lesbian pirates on a pretty island off the coast of Devon are in disarray after the local parish council objected.
They’ve said that what they want instead is something that better reflects the history of the area. A pilchard perhaps.
Or what about local man Sir Francis Drake, who not only defeated the Spanish Armada but went on to run a successful operation taking slaves from Africa to . . . no, hang on a minute.
A dog's job
WE’VE known for many years that dogs can smell illness.
And now scientists are training them to seek out prostate cancer.
That’s great news for men, because instead of your doctor having to put his hand up there, you can now invite his dog to stick his nose into the back of your trousers.
It’s not such great news, however, for dogs.
I have clear intent
A MAN in Ukraine was so fed up that the council wouldn’t send a snow plough to clear the blocked road outside his house that he called the police and said he’d murdered his parents.
After they’d cleared the drifts and arrived at his property, they found his parents were alive and well.
He was fined £3 for wasting their time.
Which is why I’d like to tell the police in Oxfordshire this morning that I’ve murdered a rambler and put her in my wheelie bin.
So, if you want to find the body, you’d better get the council to empty it out as quickly as possible.
Hill of a cost dodge
SOME mad people have suggested that a 25-metre-high mound of earth should be installed next to Marble Arch in the middle of London.
They say that when the travel ban is lifted, this man-made hill will attract tourists back to the capital, but I’m not so sure.
I’ve never heard anyone say: “Yeah, I know London has Buckingham Palace and the Natural History Museum and all of those shops in the West End but I’m not going until there’s some kind of hill I can climb.”
This is probably because when people want to see hills, they can go to the Lake District.
I suspect that actually, the plan was conceived by developers who’ve got a million tons of spoil from one of their sites.
And they don’t want to pay to have it taken from the capital to a quarry in the back of beyond.
Sill curtain twitchers are the real criminals
POLICE forces across Britain have now logged 120,000 hate crimes.
And this morning, I’m going to make it 120,001.
Because I hate the man who reported Amanda Holden to the police for going to Cornwall last week.
I am aware that she shouldn’t have done this.
But I am also aware that I don’t want to live in a country where an army of curtain twitchers are reporting every small infraction to the Plod.
The name game
WHEN Donald Trump started to call Covid-19, the “China virus”, he was told by lefties all over the world that he was being racist.
Strange then that when doctors discovered a new strain of the virus in Kent, those same lefties were happy to call it the “UK mutation”.
Plane question
WE all know that if you don’t use a car for months on end, it never works properly when you turn it on again.
Which begs a question. When this virus is beaten and we can travel again, how happy will you be to get on a plane that’s been sitting in a field for 12 months?
Flare result
ONLY days after the Government reduced the terror threat from “severe” to “substantial”, the spectre of political violence once again reared its ugly head.
But this was not IS or some splinter wing of the IRA.
No. This was the real deal. This was an organisation called Blue Action, which is like the Red Brigade, apart from in every single way.
Based in Ipswich, it is demanding that the manager of the local football side is sacked and it is prepared to go to any lengths to make sure its demands are met.
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And so, earlier this week, one terror cell let off flares near the club’s training ground.
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Because a sign on the fence caught fire, training for the match against Northampton on Tuesday evening had to be suspended for ten minutes while officers from the elite Ipswich Police Service used their Vauxhall Astras to conduct a sweep of the area.
Happily, the match against Northampton went ahead and was a thrilling 0-0 draw.
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