The Global Warming Children’s Crusade
We still have to calculate the costs of materials like iron, concrete, and rare-earth metals mined in countries that use child and slave labor: As Driessen points out, "For cobalt alone - say UNICEF and Amnesty International - over 40,000 Congolese children, as young as four years old, slave away in mines, from sunrise to sundown, six or even seven days a week. That's today. Imagine how many will be needed to serve the 'ethical green energy utopia.'" Throw in the expense of disposing worn-out components like solar panels and turbine blades, and the pollution caused by mining, constructing, and transporting all these materials, and it's clear to anyone other than a quarter-educated teenager or a government subsidy-pirate that "free, clean, and renewable" is a pipe dream.
If a well-fed, pampered, leisured American teenager-one of the richest human beings to ever walk the earth-thinks she lives in "fear and despair," she should be packed off to Congo or Iran or Somalia or Venezuela and learn what real "fear and despair" feel like.