Ed Miliband has admitted that solar panels for English schools and hospitals will come from China, despite concerns over human rights and environmental impacts.
The first project of the Energy Secretary’s new green quango will see it oversee a £180 million project to install rooftop panels on 200 school buildings and nearly as many NHS sites.
He informed reporters yesterday that the Great British Energy initiative will instantly reduce electricity costs for the public sector because services will be able to sell excess power back to the National Grid.
But when asked where the solar panels will come from he conceded that some will come from China, which is responsible for an estimated 80 percent of total global supply. Questioned why British ones were not being used, Mr Miliband told LBC radio: ‘Our solar panel industry has not got this kind of share of the market.’
When asked if they would come from China or Russia, he said: ‘Some of them will be, they’ll be from different countries, but that’s why we’ve got to build our domestic industry.’
Critics claim that transporting materials from China, where they were probably made using electricity from coal-fired power plants, is illogical for Britain’s goal to reduce emissions in the UK.
The Conservatives’ energy spokesman Andrew Bowie said: ‘If these solar panels do come from thousands of miles away it shows how ridiculous this whole thing is. Ed Miliband and his eco warriors need to get real.’
Concerns have also been raised about the use of Uyghur forced labour in Xinjiang province by China’s solar power sector. A proposal to ban public support of renewable energy businesses that use forced labour in their supply chains will be discussed by MPs next week.
Labour ministers are likely to use their majority in the Commons to get the amendment to the Great British Energy Bill removed from the legislation, even though the Lords passed it last month in a loss for the Government.
Luke de Pulford, of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, told the Mail: ‘Uyghur forced labour is rife in the solar supply chain, and very little is being done about it.
‘Where’s the climate justice in a green transition built on modern slavery? I hope the Government sees sense.’
Sources said strict procurement rules will allow the Department for Education and the NHS to end contracts with suppliers that have broken slavery laws.
Ed Milliband is a complete moron, and I believe that most people will agree with me, but then perhaps I’m being unkind to morons because Milliband is in a class of his own making.
He embodies the Labour Cabinet’s tendency to make things up as they go along since they are unaware of how they are financially and ethically bankrupting the United Kingdom.
Let’s discuss EVs being a scam while we’re at it. See how it’s manufactured.
Batteries require two million litres of water to create one ton of lithium. This is causing serious stress on water resources, and mining waste is discarded into rivers and lakes. Children are being sent to mines to mine lithium, all because fools believe it’s more environmentally friendly.
Even though smartphones, laptops, and electric cars are symbols of the contemporary world, the cobalt used in their rechargeable batteries is often extracted in the Democratic Republic of the Congo using slave labour.
The DRC has more cobalt deposits than the whole world combined, and studies on child labour, human trafficking, and modern-day slavery have been conducted for 20 years.
DRC’s cobalt is being removed by so-called ‘artisanal’ miners – freelance workers who do extremely dangerous labour for the equivalent of just a few dollars a day.
People are labouring in subhuman, gruelling, terrible conditions.
To collect cobalt and move it up the official supply chain, they rummage and hack at the ground in trenches, pits, and tunnels using pickaxes, shovels, and lengths of rebar.
The air surrounding mines is cloudy with dust and grit, millions of trees have been felled, and the water has been tainted by hazardous mining processing effluents.
Cobalt is toxic to touch and breathe—and there are hundreds of thousands of impoverished Congolese people touching and breathing it day in and day out. Young mothers with infants strapped to their backs, all breathing in this toxic cobalt dust.
The production of practically all lithium-ion rechargeable batteries used today involves cobalt. Furthermore, although people outside the DRC distinguish between cobalt that was mined by the nation’s sophisticated industrial mining firms and that that was dug by artisanal miners, the two are inherently linked.
Cobalt extracted by industrial excavators and cobalt excavated by women and children using their bare hands are completely cross-contaminated.
Cobalt is crucial for technological equipment and the switch to renewable energy sources.
We shouldn’t be switching to electric cars at the expense of the environment and people in one of the world’s most destitute and oppressed regions.
According to the legislation, artisanal mining is technically prohibited in all industrial mines. Nevertheless, it turns out that artisanal mining is occurring in the majority of industrial mines.
Visualize a whole population of people who cannot survive without scrounging in hazardous conditions for a dollar or two a day. There is no alternative there. The mines have taken over everything.
Imagine families whose children, husbands, and spouses had suffered horrendous injuries. Frequently, digging in these larger open-air pits, where a pit wall collapses. Visualize a mountain of rock and stone just avalanching down on people, crushing legs, arms and spines.
Everywhere you look, you may find opportunities to earn money. You also have these militias. They will kidnap, traffic, and recruit youngsters from even distant regions of the Congo; they are sometimes referred to as commandos.
A significant portion of the issue is corruption. That’s the reason why so much of this abuse continues. The problem is, picture the Congo. It’s a war-torn, extremely poor country that has seen centuries of ransacking and pillaging, dating back to the slave trade. It is thus not implausible to assume that corruption will occur when significant foreign stakeholders arrive brandishing substantial quantities of money.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 