The department released a report this month finding that several minerals that are key components of electric vehicles and solar panels may be produced through these unethical labor practices.
The findings point to a serious problem that comes with the ongoing energy transition. At the same time, not acting on climate change also endangers many of the world’s most vulnerable people.
“There are supply chains where there are certain bottlenecks in countries with a very bad performance when it comes to human rights,” said Tom Moerenhout, a research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
“The ethics of that is critical not just for a government [that] is trying to direct public policy in an ethical way, but also often for consumers and companies,” Moerenhout added.
The new report stated that there was forced labor in Chinese aluminum and silicon, Indonesian nickel and cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It said that child labor was being used in the aforementioned cobalt as well as copper from the DRC and Zambia, as well as Zambian manganese, Zimbabwean lithium and inputs used for South Korean Indium.
Read more tomorrow at TheHill.com.
