Tag Archives: mining

Not making it any more

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by Economics, Environment • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Don’t know if you saw the recent tv program on the geological history of Australia. Some early stuff I didn’t know. For example that enormous mass of iron ore in WA was deposited when the first primitive organisms that could generate oxygen began doing so and all the iron in the seas rusted. The iron and other ores around Broken Hill generated in the deep seas which then ran through this part of the continent. Coal and gas of course laid down when the then lush tropical vegetation died and rotted and was buried far underground by sediments. All flukes really, that the deposits occur in Australia, and flukes dependent on conditions that can never be repeated from millions, even billions, of years ago. No more of that stuff being made on this planet.

On top of the land surface Australia had a rich biodiversity of abundant plant and animal life, also the result of millions of years of evolution and ecosystem development. This biodiversity sustained Aboriginal people in considerable comfort for around 50,000 years, and then provided the basis for English colonists to fell timber, graze sheep and cattle on the extensive grasslands, and grow crops where the soils were deep and organically rich. Not building diversity and rich soils any more.

There’s an old, sorta joke, which says “Want to invest in a sure thing? Buy land, they’re not making it any more”. It’s a message that should have been given to every citizen of Australia to use as a reminder that resources are limited. Instead we have behaved for two and a quarter centuries as Australia Unlimited. Big country, plenty of soil, plenty of trees, plenty of mineral resources. Now the crunch is coming, and there are a couple of urgent responses we need to make. We need to ensure that a good proportion of the staggeringly huge profits being made from digging up those made-once-only mineral resources come back to benefit the 21,999,997 of us who are not mining billionaires. That they are used to create a stronger better Australia as a solid home for us when resources start to dwindle or the demand for them disappears. One of the things we could do with it is sort out infrastructure needs as the climate changes – infrastructure like efficient irrigation, like decent efficient transport, like support for large scale renewable energy projects. And support for individuals in education, health, aged care and so on. The recent budget, trying to balance all those needs, pulling up the blanket to cover the head only to expose the toes, is a classic example of failure to use the mining resources wisely.

And the other response is to stop destroying remaining forests and to start restoring soils to good health. Not least because we need the environment as healthy as it can be to meet the changing climate.

What’s that other saying? Oh yes,”A stitch in time saves nine. Time we started urgent stitching.

Rare Earth

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by Economics, Environment • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Don’t know if you saw the report about “rare earths” a group of, obviously, rare minerals now apparently essential for all sorts of electronic goods and military purposes. China has pretty much cornered the market on them and other countries are trying to find other sources so as to have a competitive market. Trouble is they are hard to find, and are in low concentrations so you need to dig out huge volumes of soil/rock and process it, and there are waste products notably radioactive ones which need to be somehow disposed of. Now given all that you would think our government would get scientists on to finding alternatives to rare earths, but no, some Australian mining companies are gearing up to find and mine the stuff and to hell with the damage they cause. Money to be made.

This approach of getting stuff you can’t eat from underground, while wrecking the land above that can produce food, is already in operation with the fight over coal seam gas extraction. Tony Abbott got himself into trouble the other day, wavering between appeasing his own party’s supporters the miners, or the National’s supporters in the farmers. He finished up satisfying neither. But given the lack of really good deep rich soils in Australia, the proposition that we should wreck some of the best in southern Qld and northern NSW, extracting gas in a process that pollutes soil and water supplies and will add to greenhouse gas production when burnt, seems, politely, insane.

On the other hand we can actually improve our farming land. Starting in the 1930s when Louis Bromfield discovered the benefits of minimum tillage and retaining humus in the damaged farming soils of America, the benefits of such an approach are rediscovered every few years. But in recent years an added incentive, if one was needed, for retaining and building organic content, is the idea that such practices can help in removing CO2 from the air and “fixing it”. The government and Greens have just passed a bill (opposed by the Coalition) in which farmers will be paid a price per tonne of carbon sequestered in the soil. At the time of writing I don’t have the details of the bill and while it is a win-win situation for farmers and the environment, the price will need to be high enough to not only encourage farmers to build carbon levels in soil, but to maintain those practices over decades. In addition, for it to have any significant impact on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the areas needed will be huge (say a million hectares or more). So it isn’t any kind of “answer” to climate change but every little helps, and being paid to build soil organic matter seems like a good deal to me.

Anyway, it’s certainly better than digging huge open cut mines and spreading thorium, or injecting stuff into coal seams and polluting the water table.

Mark Twain said “Buy land, they’re not making it anymore” or, more importantly, I say, “take care of your farming land, they certainly aren’t making any more of that.”

War of the Worlds

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by Economics • Tags: , , ,

I often feel that when those tv advertising executives have their meetings to work out who the audience is for another piece of misleading advertising for a product that is doing the world more harm than good they forget me. “What about me?” I want to scream, referring, subconsciously, to yet another ad that wasn’t produced with me in mind. Take the recent advertising rushed out by the impoverished mining industry after holding a chook raffle to cover the cost. There is a scientific graph showing the outrageously high taxes these poor fellows are going to have to pay for removing pieces of my continent and sending them to China, compared to, oh, I don’t know, Canada, to pluck out a country with a far right government at random. I mean, I know what I am supposed to think when I see those bars of different heights, but what I do think is – “How stupid the Canadians must be to want to rip all the resource wealth out of their soil as fast as possible and get so little return for the people of our sister country in the north”.

And when I hear threats of the miners picking up their buckets and spades and taking them to another more corporate friendly country if we won’t play nicely, I tend to think, well, good riddance, close the door quietly behind you. Keeps happening, doesn’t it – this bank moving its call centre overseas where it can pay pittances and pretend they are wages; there a manufacturer sets up a factory overseas because the peasant workers are getting uppity, wanting decent working conditions; once a company with asbestos dust on its hands moved its head office to a distant land, coincidentally at the time that former workers wanted some compensation for dying of mesethelioma; and now, if the country wants a share of the rapidly growing profits (purely the result of demand, not some virtue of the mining company performance), well then, they’re off to dig a hole in some other country with less interest in money.

And then there was the Business Council, prophesying they would all be rooned, go out of business, if paid maternity leave and improved superannuation was introduced. If these guys had their way we would be back to small children working in factories and climbing up chimneys; back, probably to slave labour (check out the objections raised over the original reforms to factory work conditions, and to the abolition of slavery, if you don’t believe me).

It is as if these people are Martians, have dropped in, conquered the planet, stealing its resources, without a concern for the original inhabitants who are Earthians, quite unrelated.

It would be nice, just for once, if these big, and rich, mining and business leaders said “Look we are all Australians, all in this together, we are rich enough now, and we think it is time the riches were spread around a bit and families supported. Time to improve health and education for all Australians, fix up infrastructure, look after the environment we have damaged in 200 odd years of pretty much unfettered corporation activity. Make a better country for all of us.”

Should I hold my breath?