The DR Congo holds significant amounts of cobalt,yet we hear nothing from the likes of XR (rich kids on a gap year who couldn't go abroad due to covid) about the destruction of rainforests and the child miners developing lung disease due to the poor and unsafe working conditions. I wonder why that is?

You're kinda generalising XR there, there are working groups within XR full of engineers, scientists, lawyers, architects, doctors etc. 

The amount of cobalt actually used in EV batteries is in decline from a technology perspective (battery chemistry depending), the obtaining of those materials from areas like the DRC needs regulatory involvement, in the same manner that the conflict minerals legislation exists.

There's nothing stopping it being a regulatory requirement for cobalt to have an ethical supply chain declaration, from what I've seen, this is being done more so proactively by the supply chain than it is reactively from the regulatory bodies, and I say this because a lot of comments you see on EV adverts relate to the use of hazardous materials and the response from the advertisers broadly supports that they're working on this at a supply chain level. 

But shouldn't we be part of the people who know better? 

Yes I agree in terms of listing the problems out, and I'm happy to get everyones involvement and begin sketching that out to discuss each area in more detail - but as I've said I can't help but feel the public are consistently worried about the climate and from a professional standpoint there's little that actually appears from professional groups to try and support or acknowledge it. 

Look at the recent news, UK PM is trying to green light fracking and is committed to getting every last bit of oil and gas out of the north sea - I didn't realise oil and gas extraction sprouted overnight, I thought oil platforms took a while to build :/ 

well yes, and with friends like the UK govt,  who needs enemies.  For my monies worth we need to be looking at energy storage of a few days times national demand, because if that can be cracked, a lot of the issues that make it awkward to run solar and wind as the main supply start to fade a bit. As part of that, as well as H2, hot sand and compressed air, we should probably be looking again at longer haired things like tidal lagoons - being British it will be the first of some novel kind and highlight all the problems other nations can later side-step, and we can put it under the control of the national trust and do guided tours in the next century ,but for now we really need to be trying stuff, and probably not insisting that it makes a profit on the first attempt. Fracking is a bit of a side show, we still have the basic problem that we use more energy than we have on our own soil and we have used most of  the north sea gas and oil, so what comes out now is better than nothing but we need to understand it is clearly running down. Even if we had so much it was possible to not import fuel, there are pollution reasons for looking at the alternatives.

We also urgently need to get away from the idea that computer models and managing things from behind a desk are the  future and the only skills that need teaching.- at some point we need a new generation of engineers who can actually do practical stuff like climb ladders and use tools and weld so they stop specifying things that are impossible or very hard to make, and we end up subcontracting the 'mere detail' of actually making things to other countries and then wondering why it costs so much and is not quite what we expected.

Mike

If you are really serious about climate change, then you should be endorsing a strict regime of human population controls on a global basis in order to make any meaningful change.

In the meantime, we should wholly abandon all nuclear/oil/gas metal extraction and processing, along with 100% rewilding of the grain prairies across the world.

That should get the c02 down to your preferred levels, but can you really be parted from your Iphone forever?

Indeed, many 'Green prophets' have gotten very fat off the proceeds.

Totally agree Mike.  We as engineers agree that global warming is a fact and sea levels are going to rise but we are beyond being able to stop it now. No point in the greens trying to lay the blame on someone much to late for that

So an action plan to reinforce sea walls etc needs to be undertaken by councils funded by government now. 

The oil/gas price hike is a totally separate issue exaggerated no doubt by the loss of Russian gas that would normally be piped into Europe.  CO2 gas emissions as used in greenhouses is not the problem but running out of hydrocarbon fuels certain is. 

Green alternatives should be encouraged but only if they are proved experimentally to be economically viable by modelling them practically in a laboratory.   

You're oversimplifying the issue. 

There's a lot more to it than that, multiple industries and business functions that need to be accounted for. 

agreed, I just think we should be doing something instead of what appears to be, well, nothing.

But accountability for the likes of multiple industries and business functions is not what the likes of XR/Insulate Britain etc will accept.