Almost 90 per cent of the global supply for polysilicon, a common raw material in electronic devices and solar panels, comes from China, and about half of that comes from Xinjiang, the north-western province that is home to the Uyghurs, says Grace Forrest, founder of Walk Free, a charity dedicating to fight forced labour.
The organization has exposed modern slavery, forced and child labour throughout the renewable energy supply chain, with evidence of state-imposed forced labour of Uyghurs and other Turkic and Muslim majority groups in China in the making and supply of solar panels and other renewable technologies.
It has also shone a light on the slave-like conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where cobalt is mined by workers for its use in rechargeable batteries for laptop computers and mobile phones.
“We have an opportunity to build an economy that isn’t coming from colonial lines and yet, right now, a green economy absolutely will be built on forced and child labour,” Forrest says.
“So the message really is, you cannot harm people in the name of saving the planet.”
Walk Free’s latest Global Slavery Index estimated that 50 million people were living in modern slavery – either in forced labour or forced marriage – on any given day in 2021.
Or maybe shouldn’t come into being in the first place?
Billionaires are a symptom of a system that’s eating itself. Taxation might be able to offset it, but the actual power needs to be broken up, and both laws and attitudes about unchecked growth need to change.
We’ve ended up in a situation that’s fundamentally tainted by capitalism. Every company, every product, is being slaughtered like a pig for quarterly profits. It happens over and over again. Some new thing comes out that seems great, it gets bought up or goes public, and it turns to shit.
We have to have the nerve to point at it, call it out, and figure out how to stop it before it kills us all.
True, nobody should ever have billions. There’s simply no need for that much money, you can’t ever use it up.