Vintage Auto Art Around the County
Photos by Kara Kellogg
Do Black Lives Matter When It Comes To Green Cars?
Electric cars run on the suffering of Black children living like slaves.
Amnesty International exposed this painful truth in 2016. You can read their report by clicking on its title, “This is What We Die For.” Most of the world’s cobalt comes from the Congo. Lots of cobalt is needed for electric car batteries. Its production is controlled by warlords and corrupt government officials. They are getting rich off children who dig and haul and wash cobalt in hellish conditions.
A subsequent Sky News television report (click here) is heartbreaking and infuriating.
A handful of Chinese corporations control Congo’s cobalt production. These Chinese corporations supply Chinese and South Korean battery makers who produce most of the world’s rechargeable lithium batteries. Those batteries are used in cell phones, lap tops and scores of electronic devices. But electric cars need 10 to 20 pounds for their batteries whereas a cell phone requires 5 to 10 grams and a lap top one ounce.
Cobalt mines outside the Congo might be able to meet the demand from manufacturers of smaller devices. But so much cobalt goes into electric car batteries that the Congo’s 60% share of the world’s reserves must be utilized.
Amnesty International’s findings were confirmed by UNESCO, CNN (see below), The Washington Post(a comprehensive multi-media report, 9/2016), The Daily Mail, (8/2017), and Al Jazeera (12/2017). This is just a sample of the reporting.
The mines cause other dire problems. As reported by The Daily Mail:
Soil samples taken from the mining area by doctors at the University of Lubumbashi, the nearest city, show the region to be among the ten most polluted in the world. Residents near mines in southern DRC had urinary concentrates of cobalt 43 higher than normal. Lead levels were five times higher, cadmium and uranium four times higher.
Four-year-old Monica found by the Daily Mail
to work in cobalt mines.
Battery makers, car manufacturers, Apple, Microsoft and the Chinese companies buying Congolese cobalt promptly decried the brutal situation uncovered by Amnesty, declared their supply free of cobalt mined by slaves and children and pledged vigilance to ensure humane conditions in the mines and to exclude “blood cobalt” from their products. A Responsible Cobalt Initiative was launched by the Chinese cobalt middlemen and Chinese battery makers.
Two years later, the conditions Amnesty discovered persist.
CBS News reported March 5, 2018, it found children still working the cobalt mines:
CBS News found what looked like the Wild West. There were children digging in trenches and laboring in lakes — hunting for treasure in a playground from hell.
The work is hard enough for an adult man, but it is unthinkable for a child. Yet tens of thousands of Congolese kids are involved in every stage of mining for cobalt. The latest research by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates 40,000 children are working in DRC mines.
More than half of the world’s supply of cobalt comes from the DRC, and 20 percent of that is mined by hand, according to Darton Commodities Ltd., a London-based research company that specializes in cobalt.
In a May 2018 report CNN updated Amnesty’s 2016 findings that car makers cannot determine the source of the cobalt in batteries. They exposed the Congolese certification system as a sham. The certificates are supposed to assure upstream users that their cobalt was not mined by slaves and children. CNN showed that the certificates are issued by the same people responsible for inhuman mining conditons. They found that the Congo’s Presidential Guard protects the facilities trafficking in “blood cobalt.”
Despite the pledges and denials, CNN concluded that no car manufacturer can assure buyers that their electric car does not run thanks to cobalt mined by African children.
Now We Know. What Do We Do?
We sought to determine how area owners and advocates of electric cars deal with this knowledge. What we learned is that they don’t want to talk about it.
We started with the Jefferson County EV Association. They participated in this year’s Rhody Festival Parade, silently rolling past the crowd in electric cars with signs declaring their vehicles’ virtues. We first contacted them without revealing the subject we wanted to pursue. Their spokesperson was willing to answer questions. But since we asked the specific question of how they handle knowing about the suffering behind their cars’ engines we have received no response.
We put the same questions to the four electric vehicle owners who tell their story on theassociation’s website. One of them is an elected PUD commissioner. None responded.
We reached across Puget Sound and put our questions to the woman who runs Seattle’s Green Fleet Management. The City of Seattle holds frequent press conferences and issues press releases touting its ever-increasing fleet of electric vehicles. We received no response to our questions.
We reached out to Coltura, a Seattle advocacy group whose mission is seeing the United States rapidly transition completely to electric vehicles. A recent report by Coltura lamented the failure of local governments to meet the Legislature’s directive to run all vehicles on electricity or biofuels “to the extent practicable.” Coltura did not respond to our questions.
While attending a climate change summit in Paris in 2015, Governor Jay Inslee unveiled an electric fleet initiative to ensure that at least 20% of all state vehicle purchases are electric by 2017. So we reached out to the State of Washington with our questions about the morality of buying electric cars that rely on child and slave labor.
Off the record we learned the state is buying mostly Chey Bolts. The batteries are made in Michigan. So far, so good. But our research showed that the batteries in Chey Bolts come from LG Chem of South Korea, which buys its cobalt from the same Chinese outfit implicated in all the reports starting with Amnesty. In the Amnesty investigation LG Chem admitted using cobalt from the mines where the horrible conditions were found. The Washington Postasked LG Chem where they got their cobalt. They claimed their cobalt comes not from the Congo, but from New Caledonia. However, minerals experts consulted by The Post concluded that could not be true, as LG Chem uses more cobalt than New Caledonia’s entire national production.
We are still waiting for a statement from the state.
Another Seattle activist organization, the Alliance for Jobs and Clean Energy, is pushing I-1631, a ballot measure which would impose an annually rising charge on gasoline and other carbon-based fuels. Their goal is to force people out of their gas-powered cars into electric vehicles or mass transit that would also run on electricity. Their equivalent of a carbon tax, they claim, is based on social justice and racial ethics.
Months ago we asked them to respond to the findings of the racial injustice inherent in the cobalt supply system that leads straight to the electric vehicles they advocate. They never responded.
Electric Cars Are Great–Except for the Racism Part
In the United States, it is whites with enough money to pay the premium prices who buy electric cars. Yet it is poor African Blacks who pay the highest prices in terms of their freedom, their health and their lives.There may be white people in the US and Europe who might defend this human suffering in Africa as necessary in the fight against what they consider a greater concern–climate change. But they are never going to volunteer themselves or their children to take the place of Blacks in the cobalt mines. They prefer someone else doing the dangerous, miserable jobs in the struggle for climate justice. And it’s not someone who will ever have the money to enjoy owning an electric car.
Consider this: Most of the high-paying jobs in the oil and gas industry in coming years will go to Black and Hispanic workers. (Women are also snagging a big chunk of those lucrative jobs). Unlike warlords and corrupt officials who exploit Black laborers, the US oil and gas industry gives workers in the US a very good life.
Efforts are underway to find a substitute for cobalt. There are also calls for including cobalt in the US law that targeted blood diamonds and rare minerals controlled by African warlords. Developing technologies promise carbon capture on a scale that will let people keep their internal combustion cars. Mazda is rolling out gasoline-powered cars next year that promise lower carbon emissions than electric vehicles.
Some very intelligent people, such as environmental economist Bjorn Lomberg, contend that electric cars don’t do that much to reduce carbon emissions and may actually be detrimental to the environment and broader social justice causes.
Electric cars may not be all that green. As reported by the National Review:
In 2013, the Environmental Protection Agency described these batteries as having the “highest potential for environmental impacts,” with lithium mining resulting in greenhouse-gas emissions, environmental pollution, and human-health impacts. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that specializes in “science for a healthy planet and safer world,” agrees: For long-range electric vehicles such as Tesla, manufacturing emissions are 68 percent higher than for conventional cars.
It may be more ethical to hang onto your gas-powered car as long as it keeps running. You avoid the carbon emissions and pollution that come with manufacturing a new one. You won’t be rewarding people who profit from inhumanity. And you won’t find yourself in the hypocritical position of shopping for free trade goods in a car that runs on human suffering.
Lights in the Darkness
The young man was dead.
He lay on his back, eyes open, skin the color of ash, no sign of breathing. It looked like he had fallen off a new Cannondale road bike. The bike–carbon fiber, electric transmission, high-end wheels–was on his chest. He wore earbuds for a cell phone tucked inside his clothing. What looked like prison tats scrolled from his wrists and disappeared under his shirt.
A bottle of Jim Beam Apple Whiskey nested in the backpack’s side pocket.
The Port Townsend police officer shone a bright light into the young man’s eyes. No reaction. No blinking, no change in the pupils.
The young man under the expensive bike wasn’t breathing.
“Hey!” the officer shouted. “Are you all right?” He shouted it again.
No response. The young man was dead.
I said a silent prayer. Sadness crossed the officer’s face.
“Whah?”
From death the young man spoke and the officer moved in to sit him up and check him for weapons. Slowly, the young man regained consciousness. His speech was slurred, but he was coherent. He said he was having a bad time. Four friends had died from heroin overdoses in the past six months. He’d been closed in a room with one of them.
He reached for a cigarette and asked the officer, “You ever perform CPR on a corpse?”
Port Townsend’s Dark Side
I’ve twice gone on patrol with the Port Townsend Police . The first time, the officer behind the wheel educated me about the troubles most of the city never sees–the drugs, the violence, the aggressive transients that come to Port Townsend from Seattle, California, the East Coast. They’d heard it was a cool place to hang and get high and get lots of free stuff and tender care.
But that night the only call was about a stolen battery from a vehicle impounded at All City Towing. Nothing else to do, both units on duty responded. The police officers recognized the truck. They knew its owner, a troubled woman suffering from mental illness made worse by meth abuse. She came out of the darkness and they greeted her by name. The call about the missing battery was a ruse. She wanted them to recharge her cell phone.
This night, June 9, 2018, I walked with two officers along Water Street. People participating in the Steampunk Festival passed in outlandish costumes armed with fake swords and ray guns.
We were notified that a man “in a fetal position” occupied the floor in the handicap stall in the men’s room at the public bathrooms at Pope Marine Park. He had locked himself in. A bag with cans of fortified beer and other possessions was pushed against the wall. He did not appreciate being disturbed. He said he was trying to get some sleep.
The officers knew this man. He had been harassing women at the bus stop at Haines Place earlier that day. He had a long history of arrests for violence against the homeless. He had threatened the life of one of the officers. He had threatened the officer’s family.
He was placed under arrest for disorderly conduct. When notified he had the right to an attorney, he told the officers exactly what they had the right to. It did not involve appointed counsel or keeping their mouths closed. He bragged how the judge would let him out and be angry at them. “You know Judge Landes will turn me loose and be pissed at you.” More profanity, more mocking, more bragging about a court system he felt confident would put him back on the street after he got a good night’s sleep. “Thanks for a free bed,” he said.
He looked at me. Reeking of alcohol, front teeth gone, clothes filthy, he snickered, “They wish they had me for more than disorderly conduct.”
A minute later, the mean drunk became an assailant. He kicked one of the officers and was now under arrest for assault.
These officers had spent years trying to help this man. They had bought him food and once showed him respect to lay a foundation for trust.
“My guys are going to get you,” he said to the officer whose life and family he had previously threatened.
At the shelter under the American Legion we were told this man “cold cocks you. That’s his MO.” He carries a knife, as do most of the transients on Port Townsend’s streets. He had used it to threaten the shelter’s manager.
Over a break for food back at the police station, officers talked about the city’s transients. They’ve bought food for almost all of them. The man arrested that night had destroyed a guitar that gave joy to another man who frequented the Boiler Room. Officers collected funds to buy a replacement and hunted for the guitarist until they found his camp and delivered his new instrument.
All the money spent on clothing, food, and coffee comes from the pockets of police officers who get to know these people by name, arrest them, call for ambulances to get them help, or find them dead.
Back to that young man with the bike. He looked familiar to the officers but they couldn’t be sure. He gave his name and they learned those tattoos were in fact prison tats. He claimed he had a wife with a good job. An EMT crew from Jefferson Healthcare determined that, despite his high alcohol blood level (.333), he was not in danger of dying. He did not want to go to the hospital. The police could not force him off the street.
Washington does not have a public intoxication statute.
He had collapsed where camping was not permitted. But if they forced him to move, there was a good chance he could become a victim. His shiny, expensive bike would be a magnet for predators.
The police talked to him as a human being, not a pitiful drunk. They did not want to see him hurt. They wanted him to get help. They worried about what he was doing to himself, but there was only so much they could do.
They gave him a blanket, Gatorade, and let him hide in the dark. They would check on him later that night to see how he was doing. They poured out the whiskey because just a few pulls more could kill the young man.
I returned the next morning and took the photo shown above. The bottle of whiskey the police had emptied was there. The young man and his bicycle were gone. A large, wild-looking man in the bushes screamed at me about money and being on his turf. I got out of there. I warned an elderly couple with a fluffy dog who were starting on a walk what lay ahead. They got in their car and left.
Lights in the Darkness
They’re tough. They’re firm. They are imposing with their physical presence and the impressive weaponry they carry.
Inside those vests loaded with extra bullet magazines and a second gun, hearts beat for the broken souls these police officers meet every day. We may avert our eyes, walk away and ignore strangers who might frighten or repulse us. Police officers go looking for them to make sure they will live through the night.
They get spat and puked on, insulted, punched, kicked and attacked with human waste and blood. Their lives and those of their loved ones are threatened. They face guns and knives and never know what to expect of that person who won’t get out of their car or who won’t take their hands out of their pockets.
But they don’t stop. They don’t quit.
For people living on the streets, on the beaches, under trees, huddled against dumpsters, in cars littered with used needles and filth, their nights are a little less black because of these compassionate, powerful men and women in uniform. They are lights in the darkest corners of our town’s nights.
OUR BUSY BOATYARD
Local workers, local businesses, local heroes
photos by Kara Kellog
Moon Over Port Townsend
The Battle of the Sexes has reached new depths of confusion. Not a day passes without some person being accused by some other person of some form of unseemly behavior, invariably linked to sex or something like sex. Some cases are very serious, like the rape charges against Bill Cosby and former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. Others may involve retaliation against an accuser, as was alleged by a staff member of California Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, who is accused of firing a male aide for refusing to play spin the bottle with her.
Most of what we read about involves people in positions of power exploiting those with no real means of fighting back. This power dynamic makes such harassment far more pernicious, but it can also distract us from other misconduct that does not involve famous, powerful people. Some complaints ring true and terrible while others suggest false outrage. In some instances, what used to be called flirting is now called harassment. What are we to think?
Some of this confusion came to Port Townsend May 11 when police responded to a report of a woman exposing her buttocks from the window of a truck. The term of art would be ‘mooning.’ According to Port Townsend Police Public Information Officer Keppie Keplinger, the 26-year-old mooner and the driver, a 42-year-old woman from Port Hadlock, were cited for not wearing seat belts. The woman exposing her rear end was also counseled against displaying her derrière from a moving vehicle. And that’s it.
One could be forgiven for wanting this woman frog-marched into the Jefferson County Courthouse, pants tightly cinched around her waist, and called to account for her behavior. I mean, we’re talking about the public display of one or more butt cheeks and God Knows What Else. If harassment is harassment no ifs, ands or buts (no pun intended), why should this woman be excused for exposing herself?
On the other hand, the response struck me as somewhat nostalgic, harkening back to a different time in America, when mooning was a prank for teenagers of all ages meriting little more than a stern finger-wagging. It turns out that exposing one’s buttocks and whatever lies between them is just fine. “It’s not a crime,” said Keplinger. Indeed, mooning has been adjudicated in numerous courts as a form of expression protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution.
We’re left with something of a conundrum. The Pound Me Too Movement (I refuse the made-up word ‘hashtag’) has made expressing admiration of a woman’s appearance tantamount to second-degree murder while a woman displaying her rear end at a stop light in Port Townsend gets a pass.
For those who say admiring a woman’s appearance may be uncomfortable for the recipient of the compliment, I submit that a full moon could be quite uncomfortable for its recipients, not to mention a dangerous distraction if you’re behind the wheel. But we who were not at the stop light on the corner of Haines Place and Sims Way on May 11 can never know how it felt to be on the receiving end of this display of female flesh.
Don’t get me wrong; this is not to conflate mooning with the behavior of Harvey Weinstein. There is no place for sexual harassment or assault – ever. But cultural norms and social mores are always in flux, and the very real risk to my wife and daughter and every other woman is that we’re defining deviancy down while defining the innocuous up. What once was taboo is now ordinary; what once was mundane is now criminal. It is the criminally mundane that marginalizes truly egregious conduct and the victims of it.
In the case of the Port Townsend Moon, the mundane is just that. It is no more a threat to society than winking at a member of the opposite sex across a crowded room. Rather, it is the cacophonous indignation over perceived slights and micro-aggressions that pose a greater threat to us. There’s a big difference between a moon from a passing truck, leaving one speechless, and being forced into speechlessness by the censorship that attends manufactured outrage.
Scott Hogenson is a resident of Jefferson County. His column will appear Wednesdays. Responses, no more than 700 words, may be sent to ptfreepress@gmail.com.
ABOUT IPA, AND INTRODUCING OUR FIRST COLUMNIST
We rate everything from Port Townsend Brewing as quaffable, top-notch suds. That is our considered position on local beer and we’re sticking to it.
So much for a beer tasting review. This is really about the last group of dancers in the Rhody FestivalParade. I was told they call themselves The IPA. Not India Pale Ale. No, they are “The Intergalactic P**sy Alliance.”
You’d know how to fill in the missing letters if you had seen them. A group of women in very short skirts, some not reaching their thighs so that their underwear was out in the open. Their dance was nothing more than the thrusting of pelvises at the crowd. They were nondiscriminatory: men, women and children alike got the treatment.
The woman gyrating directly in front of me wore lacy undies and frantically pushed her pubic area at nearby onlookers. Little was left to the imagination. She appeared determined to make sure we all saw what she was revealing. Desperate, even. It wasn’t artful or entertaining. It was aggressive.
Nothing was left to the imagination regarding another woman. Was she even wearing anything under that strip of fabric that flapped as she bounced? It didn’t look like it.
I wish I had had the presence of mind to take photos. But then again, I don’t think I would publish them on this site.
This spectacle came in the same parade as marchers and floats of high school bands, people celebrating substance abuse recovery, local businesses, classic car buffs and electric vehicle activists, veterans, senior citizens, hospital workers, candidates for public office, first responders, the royalty of different area festivals, the missionaries of Youth with a Mission, a church’s day school.
What was the point of this aggressive display of female anatomy? What were they saying?
Sure, you can say, “If you don’t like it, don’t watch.” But families with children did not know what was coming until it was upon them.
If a group of men in jockstraps (or without anything under their kilts) suddenly faced the crowd and performed the same pelvic thrusts and exposed themselves, would it be acceptable?
Is this sexual harassment, or at least inappropriate sexual behavior that should be condemned? Charlie Rose, David Letterman, Matt Lauer, Harvey Weinstein—all of them are accused of exposing themselves to unwilling witnesses. Does the same standard apply to what concluded an otherwise family friendly-all-around-good-wholesome-fun Rhody Parade?
I mean, who asked if we wanted this thrown in our faces?
Is it okay if women expose themselves, but not men? In the case of the vile famous men just mentioned, they wielded power over female victims. That is a critical factor in those cases. But, to be fair, the IPA women also possessed some degree of power and responsibility which they used without consideration for their audience.
Maybe the whole purpose was to be “in your face.” That, in itself, implies a power imbalance. What were the families seated on the curbs, on blankets and in folding chairs to do, run away?
I just don’t know. It didn’t seem the classiest way to end a lovely parade showcasing the best in our community. I’ve heard from other people on the receiving end of this crude choreography. They also felt disappointed, even victimized to some extent.
I’m not the only one wondering about things like this. Tomorrow’s column by Scott Hogenson shares his thoughts in Moon Over Port Townsend. “Moon,” not as in a lunar event, but in a woman pushing posterior flesh out a truck window at Sims Way and Haines Place and how our police responded.
Scott’s columns will likely be provocative. Let me restate that: Scott’s columns will definitely be provocative. I may not agree with what he says. This will be his column expressing his unique viewpoint. We welcome well-written responses to Scott and will be happy to publish them. No more than roughly 700 words, please, the same rule Scott works under.