All renewables thus require a material throughput – from mining to processing to installing to disposing of the materials later as waste – that is orders of magnitude larger than for non-renewable energy sources.
I was shaped by a pit environment and the Second World War. My playground was on the pit tip at Clay Cross and I grew up with that mining background. My father was a miner and my granddad was a miner, and I would say three out of ten on the street where I was born were working in the pits.
Native people – about two-thirds of the uranium in the United States is on indigenous lands. On a worldwide scale, about 70 percent of the uranium is either in Aboriginal lands in Australia or up in the Subarctic of Canada, where native people are still fighting uranium mining.
One winter, I went to Erfoud to research trilobites and got to know the quarries, the dealers, and the remote mining villages. They are not easy places to visit, and this was a completely unknown corner of the world economy: children slaving away on desert cliffs to furnish wealthy collectors in San Francisco.
Cargo shipping, cruising, mining, oil drilling, fishing – all these industrial activities could expand to the Arctic, one of the last remaining wild places, and with potentially devastating consequences.
I opposed bad policies like any responsible citizen and business can. The carbon tax and the mining tax were both bad policies that, combined, worked to make Australia more over-regulated and less cost competitive.
The mining towns I describe in the ‘Helium-3’ novel series are not unlike Coalwood, but there is one major difference: Those towns, rather than being located in the Appalachian coalfields, are on the moon.
If it can’t be proven that mountaintop removal mining is safe, we shouldn’t allow it to continue.
My father, a mining engineer and colliery manager, gave his brood many advantages not least of which, for me, was his love of singing which gave music a central place in our lives.
The bitcoin protocol is about mining bitcoin, not pricing bitcoin. There is nothing in the protocol about establishing a market price for bitcoin; you need a market for that, but what if all the exchange markets are shut down?
Ferdinand was a gold trader. He was a lawyer for mining companies. When he entered politics in l949, he had tons and tons of gold. When Bill Gates was a college dropout, Ferdinand already possessed billions of dollars and tons of gold. It wasn’t stolen.
We didn’t have movies in this little mining town. When I was 12 my mom took me to New York and I saw Bye Bye Birdie, with people singing and dancing, and that was it.
Then there was the whole concept of coal mining, which is a culture unto itself, the most dangerous occupation in the world, and which draws and develops a certain kind of man.
With the mining sites, I found a subject matter that carried forth my fascination with the undoing of the landscape, in terms of both its formal beauty and its environmental politics.
My maternal grandma was a tough, tough lady and a stern woman, who lost her husband young and raised six kids by herself. She lived in a mining community in Upstate New York and ran a boarding house for miners. She took care of an entire family and miners who lived in the house as well.
Rainforest land is mistakenly valued solely for the worth of its timber, mining and oil resources by short-sighted corporations and governments.
I viewed black musicals before ‘Jelly’ as a form of cultural strip mining. The exterior remained, but all the culture that signified where the people had come from and their connection to the earth was absent.
Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data.
I think it is true that, post the global financial crisis initially – and for some period after that and particularly with how the mining investment boom and commodity prices played out – there was a dislocation that occurred in some of the more traditional mechanisms.
I came from a poor Pennsylvania coal mining family and the only way I was going to get an education was through an athletic scholarship.
Pages: 1 2
