CALIFORNIA’S GREEN COLONIALISM
In January, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced with great fanfare that nearly 19 percent of all new cars sold in California last year were zero-emission vehicles. In celebrating the milestone, he said that “keeping our focus on the communities that are most impacted by the intensifying climate crisis, we’ll keep pushing ahead to make our clean transportation future a reality in California.”
I would like to know how the governor rationalizes this comment when communities across the globe are being ravaged by his policy to ban gasoline-powered cars in favor of electric vehicles. California’s green future is being built on an economic colonialism that is destroying lives and the environment.
An electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car, including rare earth minerals such as cobalt, that are only found in places like China and the Democratic Republic of Congo. A new book called “Cobalt Red” by Siddharth Kara describes how cobalt in the DRC is being extracted by “artisanal” miners — freelance workers who do extremely dangerous labor for the equivalent of just a few dollars a day. In a recent NPR interview, Kara noted that “You have to imagine walking around some of these mining areas and dialing back our clock centuries. People are working in subhuman, grinding, degrading conditions. They use pickaxes, shovels, stretches of rebar to hack and scrounge at the earth in trenches and pits and tunnels to gather cobalt and feed it up the formal supply chain.” It is a supply chain that leads straight to California.
The DRC’s mining industry has ravaged the country’s landscape, all to feed green environmental policies like those supported by the administration. NPR notes that in the DRC, millions of trees have been cut down, the air around mines is hazy with dust and grit, and the water has been contaminated with toxic effluents from the mining processing. Cobalt itself is toxic to touch and breathe and hundreds of thousands of poor Congolese people, including estimates of 40,000 children, are touching and breathing it every day.
California currently imports more than half of its oil from Ecuador even though that country is actively bulldozing down the Amazon rainforest and millions of metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions are released shipping that oil to California. The impact on indigenous Indian tribes in Ecuador has been profound, with their jungle disappearing and water contaminated by unregulated discharges.
Many in Newsom’s administration would argue that the environmental damage happening to the Amazon illustrates why California must eliminate its dependence on fossil fuels all together. This thinking is as fantastical as it is naive.
The demand for oil is not simply going to disappear because the governor wishes it to. More than 6,000 everyday consumer products require petroleum inputs, such as footballs, propane for barbecues, televisions, critical medical equipment and others.
This administration has made a deliberate decision to meet the current and future demand for oil with imports from countries like Ecuador, but also those like Saudi Arabia and Iraq which engage in human rights abuses and policies at odds with our values. Much of the oil we import could be replaced by California’s in-state producers, providing California jobs, if the industry was allowed to expand production. The California producer operates under the most stringent environmental and regulatory rules in the world but more than 1,000 permits are waiting to be approved by Newsom’s administration.
Like he has done with oil and cobalt production, the governor seems content to continue along this road, pretending that the profound environmental damage happening in other countries is OK as long as California can lead the way toward a carbon-free future.
Billions of tax dollars are being spent on this green utopia, but it will not do anything to address global climate change. Time to wake up, Governor.