Blood Batteries for Electric Vehicles

Climate activists extol the benefits of electric vehicles (EVs) by campaigning that they will eliminate the pollution caused by current vehicles using fossil fuels. This will make our environment cleaner. EVs will reduce fuel costs and require lower maintenance. These benefits sounds good and appear to be the solution to some of the problems we face.

Are EVs really the clean, green solution they are hyped to be? EVs are run on batteries. Where do these batteries come from? What is required to make them?

In his analysis piece Green Energy’s Dirty Secret: Its Hunger for African Resources, Cobus van Staden writes:

In June, the European Parliament voted to effectively outlaw the sale of new cars using gasoline or diesel by 2035.…

What the parliamentarians didn’t mention: The world cannot mine and refine the vast amounts of minerals that go into batteries—lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, palladium, and others—at anywhere close to the scale for this rapid transition to electric vehicles (EVs) to occur. The dirty secret of the green revolution is its insatiable hunger for resources from Africa and elsewhere that are produced using some of the world’s dirtiest technologies. What’s more, the accelerated shift to batteries now threatens to replicate one of the most destructive dynamics in global economic history: the systematic extraction of raw commodities from the global south in a way that made developed countries unimaginably rich while leaving a trail of environmental degradation, human rights violations, and semipermanent underdevelopment all across the developing world.

The video below, provides details related to the process involved in getting the minerals needed for the batteries. It is a story that entails child labour, human rights violations and poverty. It is not just the makers of these EVs, but all those who sing from the same climate change song sheet about the benefits of EVs for the environment and net zero emissions – businesses, politicians, green groups, activists, as well as citizens who vote for candidates from Green and Teal parties – who have blood on their hands. They are complicit in the crime.

The Clean Green movement is a sham. The ones at the top have profits on their mind, not a leafy, pristine planet. Anyone gullible enough to purchase these vehicles has not considered the validity of the merits being marketed, or the related issues such as the electricity needed to recharge the batteries, and the safe disposal of these batteries, after they can no longer be used.

The presenter, Palki Sharma Upadhyay summarises this deception:

Doesn’t add up, does it?
Much like the claim of electric cars being clean. These cars run on dirty energy. On blood battery. This is not climate solution, this is human rights abuse. And the two cannot co-exist. Climate solution is not supposed to be at the expense of human lives.… Electric vehicles have miles to go before they can claim to be clean.

Still thinking of doing your part in saving the environment by buying a battery-powered electric car?