China and Its Green Revolution Facade

The world is changing at a faster pace and all countries around the world are facing myriads of challenges. One of the biggest challenges is Climate Change. Countries all over the world are replacing the use of fossil fuels to renewable energy sources and pushing their manufacturing and industrial sector towards eco-friendly and sustainable future. In this race, all big economic giants are moving towards use of electric entities including electric vehicles.

Countries like U.S.A and China have pledged to become carbon neutral by 2050 and 2060 respectively and so have started using renewable energy sources. These countries have started manufacturing e-vehicles and even their exports in the global market.

But when it comes to manufacturing e-vehicles, there is a huge demand of minerals like lithium and cobalt which are used in producing batteries for the e-vehicles. The more efficient the battery is, the higher is the performance of the vehicle including then traveling range. But the countries like China who have limited mineral resources to manufacture e-vehicle in large amounts imports these resources from the continent like Africa. Democratic Republic of Congo is one of those countries which has abundant resources necessary for producing batteries for e-vehicles and has around 70% of world’s cobalt sources.

It has 19 cobalt mines, but adhering to its poor population and low economy 15 of these cobalt mines are taken by China. But where China comes violation of human rights comes inevitably. In these mines owned by China, the small children are involved in the extraction of cobalt who work for the wages as small as a dollar. It is using the minority population of its country like the Uyghurs and many prisoners as the workers in the mines and exploiting their rights. And the influx of money in the name of development is a part of China’s vicious debt trap policy like it did with Sri Lanka.

With the procurement of these cobalt resources China is manufacturing e-vehicles at a faster rate with lower price compared to other countries, but at what cost. This green revolution of China includes exploitation of natural resources and the exploitation of the people of the poor countries like D.R.C.

So all these facts tells us that this green revolution of China is not green at all.