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RoW examined how the demand for critical metals from China’s burgeoning EV industry has ravaged parts of Indonesia, resulting in a hell on Earth  may  be cleaned up.

The report was titled The Dirty Road to Clean Energy: How China’s Electric Vehicle Boom is Destroying the Environment. Green Energy emphasizes the unsettling fact  proponents of “green energy” have decided to simply ignore the environmental devastation caused by hasty efforts to dig up the minerals required for solar panels and batteries.

The Greens have been content to outsource those dirty jobs to China, which knows how to talk a good game at climate change conferences but has no qualms about destroying the environment or emitting “greenhouse gases” in pursuit of its industrial goals.

Green energy has also pumped funds into one of the world’s most repressive regimes, giving Beijing enormous economic leverage over free market corporations.

RoW focused on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, which has turned into something straight out of an environmentalist propaganda cartoon: a once-untouched paradise turned into a grim hellscape by greedy corporations, much to the chagrin of the locals. Nobody will create an environmentalist propaganda cartoon about Sulawesi or condemn the Chinese corporations  destroyed it because they manufacture electric vehicles.

On November 24, 2010, officials led by Jakarta Governor Fauzi Bowo (first R next to car) and Mercedes-Benz and Siemens officials hold the handover ceremony for the “smart ed,” Indonesia’s first electric car, at the Jakarta city hall compound. (AFP/ROMEO GACAD via Getty Images)

People in the fishing village of Kurisa told RoW’s investigators  their town is “dying” and their way of living is coming to an end because corporations eager to mine Indonesia’s rich nickel lodes have poisoned the water and overheated the ocean:

Herdiantxo Anton, 32, a Kurisa resident and fisherman, told Rest of World  when he was a teenager, the clear water under the houses was full of wildlife playing hide-and-seek in the coral  grew there.  was before large corporations began to establish nickel-processing plants in nearby villages.

A coal plant a few hundred meters away powers the nearby Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP), a massive industrial complex dominated by nickel-related industries and managed by a Chinese-Indonesian joint venture. Residents have complained  IMIP’s operations, which began in 2015, have resulted in polluted waters.

“Before, we could see a needle at the bottom,” Anton said, motioning to the waters beneath a wooden walkway. “It’s mud!”

The report also chastised the IMIP plant for polluting the Sulawesi atmosphere with “sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and coal ash.” Residents of the surrounding villages have expressed concern about their health, as well as the loss of their fishing grounds. Kurisans said they couldn’t go out their doors and use their windows  any longer and were concerned about allowing their children to play outside.

“We no longer eat fish.” “We eat coal,” a local woman explained to RoW. Another villager complained about loud drilling operations  were launched without warning to the locals.

The Bugis, a Sunni Muslim people with ancient traditions who would undoubtedly become the beleaguered heroes in a Big Media exploitation narrative if their lands were ruined by any other industry, make up the majority of Kurisa’s residents.

The Indonesian nickel industry used to be less environmentally damaging, according to RoW, but when President Joko Widodo decided to partner with China and become a major player in the EV industry, the old safeguards were abandoned. Indonesia’s EV strategy necessitates mining and exporting nickel, but also refining it for use in lithium electric car batteries, which necessitates massive coal-powered factories like the one near Kurisa.

Elon Musk’s Tesla, which signed a five-year contract with Chinese suppliers to secure processed Sulawesi nickel last summer, is one of the customers for these refined lithium products.

Although the nickel mines and refineries investigated by RoW are described as “joint ventures” between China and Indonesia, the Indonesians are minor partners in the venture. According to Bhima Yudhistira Adhinegara, director of the Jakarta Center of Economic and Law Studies, China controls a “dominant” 61 percent of Indonesian nickel production, compared to about five percent for Indonesian state-owned companies.

Another Indonesian analyst, Ahmad Redi of the University of Tarumangara, was concerned  China’s billions-dollar investments in the Indonesian economy would result in greater Chinese influence over the country’s economy and government. The Chinese Communist Party is notorious for using economic leverage to force foreign governments and corporations to comply with its political agenda.

“Environmental damage and social conflict will cause long-term losses in Indonesia,” Redi warned.

Sulawesi is not the just part of Indonesia, or the world, to suffer environmental devastation as a result of the rush to obtain minerals made suddenly valuable by politicians in the United States, Europe, and China’s forcible “adoption” of electric vehicles. Government policies such as Europe’s ban on gas-powered vehicles, which is set to take effect in 2035, and the massive government subsidies pumped into electric cars by the US government created EV “demand” out of thin air.

This created a massive demand for the minerals required to manufacture  of those EV batteries, with a relatively short window of time before consumers are  encouraged and subsidized, but also forced, to own electric vehicles. The corporations extracting those minerals cannot afford to be too concerned about the local environment, and the government-media-EV industrial complex cannot afford to be too concerned about how tons of desperately needed nickel, cobalt, and lithium are mined and processed.

“In Chile, massive evaporation pools extract lithium from the salt flats of the Atacama Desert, sparking debate over water use and Indigenous rights.” Cobalt mining operations in Congo cause so much disruption  locals are forced to relocate. “The race for nickel in Indonesia is so intense,” RoW observed.

The RoW report was cited on Monday by the auto technology website Jalopnik as “the latest example of how the EV transition is not as eco-friendly as the industry makes it out to be.”

“And in many places, including China and surrounding areas, the EV transition is woefully reliant on fossil fuels – not just for charging electric vehicles, but also for their production,” Jalopnik added, bringing up another deeply unsettling question about the rush for electric vehicles: where will of the electricity poured into those batteries come from, especially if the environmentalist movement continues to oppose nuclear power.

Looks like the dream of a Green New Deal is turning up to be the Filthy Earth Killing Deal!