The Wall Street Journal reviewed a heartbreaking account of children and adults in the Congo exploited to work in the cobalt mines of Congo, in a book titled Cobalt Red, by Siddharth Kara.  Mark P. Mills writes:

[He] witness[ed] the shocking labor and environmental practices that the world papers over with ... "vacant statements on zero-tolerance policies and other hollow PR" in pursuit of cobalt.

The euphemism "artisanal mining" — "that is, human digging and toting by manual, brute force rather than using trucks and backhoes" — is used to describe the primitive technology employed at these Congo mines.  Kara saw

thousands of people mining by hand, hammer and shovel in vast open pits hundreds of feet deep, most of the pits arrayed with hand-dug tunnels. Mr. Kara reports visiting a typical mine where "more than three thousand women, children, and men shoveled, scraped, and scrounged ... under a ferocious sun and a haze of dust." 

This raises question of how long the other human rights and environmental groups will allow the alleged threat of CO2 to trump their own concerns.  You might say there has been a code of intersectionality among groups that think of themselves as environmental guardians or more broadly "green" or even "progressive."

But that agreement to support each other (and not criticize) benefits the ruling climate fanatics who blame the rise of the atmospheric CO2 for a looming climate catastrophe that is more serious than nuclear war.  Who can top that, especially when the government, big business, academe, and all the other major institutions have signed on?

It's climate supremacism.

Child labor under horrible conditions?  Sorry, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, and besides, they'd die from climate change faster than us because they're such a hot country already.  So relax — they're getting a good deal.

The wholesale slaughter of birds by windmills?  Sorry about that, especially those eagles.  But my cause is more important than yours.  You see, we're all going to die if I don't get my way.    

What about the whales washing up on the beaches of New Jersey and New York, coincidentally exposed to offshore wind power developments?

The list goes on and on.

Lots of toxic substances are needed for the hardware replacing hydrocarbon-based oil, coal, and gas — or, as I like to call it, organic energy.

Then there is the big footprint of green energy's wind farms, solar energy, and other zero-carbon measures.

A 200-megawatt wind farm, for instance, might require spreading turbines over 13 square miles (36 square kilometres). A natural-gas power plant with that same generating capacity could fit onto a single city block.

Lots and lots of new electric transmission lines will have to be built, marring the landscape and eating up copper and other increasingly scarce green energy resources.

Sooner or later, are the progs and the greens going to start calling BS on the Climatistas in order to address their own activist passions?

Richard Baehr suggests that the intersectionality may not last, saying, "The carbon neutral clergy may soon have their hands full with environmentalists committed to fighting  different abuses and causes."  Ed Lasky comments, "It's amazing how liberals believe in calculating costs (social justice, climate change, externalities) but ignore the same when it conflicts with 'clean' energy."

But the climate fanatics remain certain in their belief that the latest round of disaster predictions will come true, despite the complete failure of all previous predictions of disaster.  And the universality of the catastrophe they prophesy, its existential threat, is what gives them the power — that, and the support of the dominant institutional structures of our society.