While I am by no means pro-child labor especially in DRC where I've seen what could be considered genocide, I am also not delusional towards progress. Show me a phone that uses coal batteries and I will be pro-coal as an alternative to cobalt.
The "Internet" uses data centers, commonly called server farms. It's estimated that about 40% of the energy used to run them is cooling.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317308758_Cooling_Energy_Consumption... This is bad for the environment, when typewriters and mailed letters, while bad for trees, and using fuel to distribute, still are more environmentally efficient than the internet.
Instead of increasing the efficiency and human cost of Cobalt mines we should use Coal because it is cleaner now - after a century of development. Also it is less likely children will be used.
So by this logic instead of creating and using the Internet and then developing more efficient means of managing it's environmental impact we should have kept typewriters and envelopes because those are more environmentally friendly and far less likely to harm children.
The reason I bring these up is because we could stop all Cobalt mining in the world and pay each Cobalt miner a livable wage to mine Coal instead. Mine that Coal all day every day, clean as could be and no matter how much Coal we mine we would have to go back to mailing more letters because our cellphones wouldn't hold power since there are no Coal stabilized capacitors.
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