What is Reddit's opinion of Glitter & Greed: The Secret World of the Diamond Cartel?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

It's a tough question, especially given the wealth of the people mining diamonds artisanally in Africa. So you stop that and you unethically hurt a lot of vulnerable people, but you keep it going and you damage a lot of riversheds, pollute a lot of water, and hurt a lot of animals.

Now I strongly believe that there has been and continues to be a lot of unethical behavior by large diamond mining corporations, well documented by the UN, the US State Department, BBC, Human Rights Watch, etc.

Let me ask your opinion - say we applied a proper carbon tax to the large diamond mining corporations, and industrial mining were to phase out over the next 20 years - would that not be a good thing for the price of diamonds and the livelihoods of artisanal miners?

To be clear, most mining is necessary: the human race needs lithium for our batteries, iron ore for our buildings, oil for our transportation, metal for our power lines, and rare-earth elements for the device on which you are reading this article. Diamond mining, by contrast, has now been made unnecessary and obsolete by modern technology. Humanity can culture diamonds in laboratories that are objectively superior to the diamonds cultured in the chaos beneath the Earth’s surface, neatly avoiding potential corruption, conflict, and ecological damage at the same time.

Unfortunately, the unsustainability of diamond mining is accelerating; each marginal carat mined is more difficult to extract and more energy intensive than the last. Despite the best efforts of the mining industry to expand diamond mining operations around the world, humanity has already passed ‘peak diamond,’ extracting 25% fewer carats in 2016 than we extracted a decade ago. Quite simply, all the easy to get diamonds have already been extracted.

Here's a great read by a former BBC reporter about the industry: Glitter & Greed (Amazon)