So much for saving the planet: in just weeks, the green-left have gone from fetishising Teslas to vandalising them on sight. Not that we needed that to see through the sheer humbug of the Climate Cult’s pretensions environmental saviourdom.
Over a decade ago, research found that the most ostentatiously ‘environmentally conscious’ people tended to have the most gargantuan carbon footprints. Largely because Climate Cultism is a boutique obsession for the wealthy, and wealth is directly correlated to one’s environmental footprint. These are people who, having spent the rest of the year virtuously driving their luxury EV about, feel perfectly entitled to the indulgence of multiple overseas holidays.
As it turns out, though, even their smug electric car isn’t saving the planet at all – quite the opposite, in fact.
“Our workers are dying for electric vehicles”
Global demand for cheap, Chinese-made electric vehicle batteries has brought about unprecedented demand for cheap, dirty Indonesian nickel.
It’s created 250,000 jobs for young Indonesians like Rifky and, for many, the average wage of $400 per month is a windfall.
But union official Jay Jaelani, a crane operator at Morowali, told Spotlight that companies constantly cut corners on safety to drive down costs, leading to an unacceptable number of workers being killed or left with permanent disabilities.
Morowali Industrial Park doesn’t release workplace fatality figures, but Jaelani said he received reports of eight to 10 workplace incidents per day, many of which are fatal or result in permanent disability.
“Our workers are dying for electric vehicles,” Jaelani said.
It’s not just the workers, either. The entire environment surrounding the plant in Sulawesi, one of Indonesia’s largest and most populous islands, is choking to death.
China operates Indonesia’s two largest nickel processing facilities – the Morowali Industrial Park and the Weda Bay Industrial Park – with little regard for environmental standards […] Indiscriminate dumping of waste has contaminated the ocean and rivers with heavy metals, poisoning local fish stocks that locals rely on as their sole source of protein.
Half of locals tested at Weda Bay, west of Sulawesi and home to another industrial complex, had dangerously high levels of arsenic and mercury in their blood.
It’s impossible for the researchers to draw a definitive link between the Weda Bay Industrial Park and the widespread heavy metal poisoning of the local population because the Indonesia Government won’t release its own data.
Prior to the construction of the complex, however, there were no known cases of heavy metal poisoning among local residents.
China and Indonesia also won’t release data on Weda Bay’s nickel output either.
But by some estimates, the Weda Bay Industrial Park accounts for almost 20 per cent of the world’s nickel supply.
A damning fact is that the Climate Cult’s demented hysteria has been a boon to Communist China – and a death sentence for some Indonesian islands.
China has invested hundreds of billions of dollars into mining and processing Indonesian nickel, home to the world’s largest nickel reserve.
In 2017, Indonesia produced 17 per cent of the world’s nickel, but with China’s investment that figure has risen to about 70 per cent, according to an Indonesian government source.
The cheap, dirty, Chinese-owned nickel that runs the Climate Cult’s beloved electric cars comes at the cost of safer material produced elsewhere.
It’s China’s disregard for emission output, workplace safety, the health and wellbeing of local residents, and environmental standards, which has made Indonesia’s nickel so cheap and as a result, destroyed Australia’s nickel sector.
BHP, Australia’s largest nickel producer, had invested $4.7 billion in the past five years into reviving Australia’s nickel sector, in preparation for the electric vehicle boom.
It even built a 22,000-panel solar-farm to help power its Leinster Mine as part a plan to reduce its emissions.
But the mining giant has now placed its Nickel West operations – which employed 3500 – into care and maintenance for the foreseeable future. Most of the remaining 3500 workers in Australia’s nickel sector have also been retrenched.
The Chinese-owned plants in Indonesia, meanwhile, run on five coal-fired power plants, with seven more under construction. When they’re finished, this one industrial park will emit more greenhouse gases that the entire nations of Brazil or Spain.
And it’s all being turbocharged by cretins like the Albanese Labor government, which is pouring hundreds of millions into forcing Australians to buy electric cars. Most of them using dirty Chinese nickel.
If it’s not the nickel, it’s the ‘biofuel’. Indonesia plans to raze forests about the size of Belgium to grow sugar cane for ‘bioethanol’.
The Climate Cult is surely the most destructive mass delusion since Communism.
