If UK Councils have independently researched the environmental and social impact of making the batteries for the proposed electric bikes, scooters and buses then they are knowingly supporting slave labour and destruction of the environment. 

If they haven’t conducted their own research then “I was just following orders” will not save them from being accused of encouraging atrocities to be committed in their quest for unjustifiable “net zero.”

Electric cars and renewable energy are not as “green” as they appear. Production of raw materials like lithium, cobalt and nickel that are essential to these technologies are often ruinous to land, water, wildlife and people.

To extract lithium, a single mine can use over 5 thousand tons of sulphuric acid per day, Rachel Mathews told the Colchester City Council on 6 June.

To remove the acid, over 3,000 gallons of water are used per minute.  Every year, that single mine produces over 350 million cubic yards of permanent waste laced with sulphuric acid and radioactive uranium.  And they anticipate what’s left of the water supply, in the area indigenous people rely on, could be contaminated for an estimated 300 years.

Mathews pointed out that Cobalt is also required for rechargeable batteries. There’s an enormous invasion of the human rights of the people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (“DRC”) as well as massive environmental destruction and toxic contamination relating to the mining of cobalt.  Slavery and child labor are alive and thriving in the DRC in the cobalt mines. Anyone with a rechargeable gadget is an unwilling participant in this horror but we don’t have to be.

It isn’t possible to “use ethically produced batteries” as the Council has suggested, Matthews said in the Council meeting on 6 June, “because 70% of Cobalt is mined using child labour which is mixed in at the factories with the 30% that isn’t.”

She quoted from the author of the book ‘Cobalt Red’ and slavery researcher Professor Siddharth Kara from Harvard University.  “Professor Kara who visited these supposedly audited eco mines in the Congo where children work and die in unimaginably awful conditions says”:

There is no clean cobalt. There is not a single company on planet Earth that makes a device that has a rechargeable battery in it that can reliably and justifiably claim that their cobalt isn’t coming from sources like that.

In the latest Council meeting held on 22 June, Mathews began:

“I’ve been a supporter of green energy and a keen environmentalist since my twenties … So, I was mortified to discover that a single lithium mine causes millions of tons of waste every year, laced with sulphuric acid and radioactive uranium polluting the water supply for 300 years. Not to mention the unacceptable human costs of child labour to mine cobalt.

“When I researched which solar panel to purchase, I did not, for one minute consider if it would be made by people trapped in razor-wire enclosed labour camps, being exposed to large quantities of quartz dust which causes silicosis!”

Below are the recordings of Mathews’ presentation to the Colchester City Council on 22 June followed by Carinna Cooper who raised the safety issues with electric vehicles and the need to be sure about what “climate change” actually is. “If you expect the public to willingly go along with losing our entire way of life, our livelihoods and our freedom, then you absolutely must conclusively prove it’s necessary. Anything less is insane,” she said.

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