The 2022 World Cup in Qatar kicked off on Sunday November 20 at the Al Bayt Stadium, but the “acceptable” toll on the cheap disposable workforce will provide viewers and participants with many lingering questions about our ethical and moral beliefs resulting from the grim toll of more than 6,500 migrant laborers who died between 2011 and 2020, many while helping build World Cup infrastructure including seven new stadiums. The low cost of stadium construction reflects the even lower cost of labor in Qatar.
Many of us had a chance to view the 2006 movie “Blood Diamonds” starring Leonardo DiCaprio that portrays many of the similar atrocities that took place in Qatar to build seven new stadiums for the 2022 World Cup, and continues occurring today in the developing countries that are mining for the “Blood Minerals” i.e., those exotic minerals and metals to support the “green” movement within wealthy countries.
Wealthy countries continue to silently support similar the exploitation of folks with yellow, brown, and black skin by supporting subsidies to procure EV’s and build more wind and solar when those subsidies are providing financial incentives to the developing countries mining for those “green” materials that promotes further exploitations of poor people in developing countries and environmental degradation to landscapes in “other” countries.
Even President Biden’s expressed his recent shift on child labor when the Biden administration declared October 4, 2022, that batteries from China may be tainted by child labor, a move that could upend the electric vehicle industry while giving fresh ammunition to critics of White House climate policies.
The Department of Labor said it would add lithium-ion batteries to a list of goods made with materials known to be produced with child or forced labor under a 2006 human trafficking law. The decision was based on many batteries using cobalt, a mineral largely mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where children have been found to work at some mining sites.
The department released the list in the form of a report that excoriated “clean energy” supply chains for using forced labor. It grouped Chinese batteries together with polysilicon — a key material used in solar panel cells — made in the Chinese province of Xinjiang.
Biden’s 2022 declaration occurred one year after the book “Clean Energy Exploitations – Helping Citizens Understand the Environmental and Humanity Abuses That Support Clean Energy was nominated for a 2021 Pulitzer Prize. The book does an excellent job of discussing the lack of transparency to the world of the green movement’s impact upon humanity exploitations in the developing countries that are mining for the exotic minerals and metals required to create the batteries needed to store “green energy”. In these developing countries, these mining operations exploit child labor, and are responsible for the most egregious human rights’ violations of vulnerable minority populations. These operations are also directly destroying the planet through environmental degradation.
Whatever the plan to satisfy our sports entertainment values, and our attempts to address climate challenges, we best not forget that have ethical and moral responsibilities to continue to address the materialistic needs of those eight billion now on this planet.
This piece first appeared at CFACT.org.
Ron Stein is an engineer who, drawing upon 25 years of project management and business development experience, launched PTS Advance in 1995. He is an author, engineer, and energy expert who writes frequently on issues of energy and economics.
Photo: Courtesy CFACT.
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