'BLOODSTAINED' BATTERY COBALT MINED BY BLACK PEOPLE

The world, and especially the western developed nations, are guilty of setting up a new middle passage. The victims are the same, black-skinned people in Africa. The Industrial Revolution was built on the backs of Black slave labour. Ships travelled from Europe to Africa to the Americas and back to Europe. The middle passage, Africa to America, was the slave cargo portion of the triangle.

A major part of the electrified energy system is electric vehicles (EV) powered by lithium batteries. One of the ingredients of these batteries is cobalt. Cobalt is toxic but EV producers, western governments and environmentalists seem not to have a problem with the fact that children and their parents are grubbing in the dirt of the Congo by hand to mine it.

The bloodstained cobalt will be washed and neatly packaged so consumers don't have a clue how it was produced. I call this the new middle passage; we are building our clean energy system on the backs of Black slave labour.

JANE VANDERVLIET