When Gold Isn’t Worth the Price
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Also, public land is involved, so consider that the public has a legitimate interest in the outcome then it might not have in interfering with a mutually agreed upon transaction between private parties.
There is a lot of money to be made from resource extraction, but most of it does not accrue to workers or local residents. In many cases, employment increases for a while, which benefits a minority of citizens while the external costs of business are socialized, and then eventually the part of the resource that is cost-effective to capture is exhausted, commodity prices change, or for whatever reason production stops.
Meanwhile, there has been less incentive for the state to develop a diverse economy based on taxing earned income then there would have been without the income from selling extraction rights, and everyone who lives near the project is back where they started: the jobs are gone, but the public is often left with a big mess to clean up. In addition there are other major employment sectors and stakeholders that may be negatively impacted, such as fisheries and tourism, and legally guaranteed native subsistence rights. In other words, the kind of industry often results in a "resouce cursed" economy and polity.
I grew up in Alaska, and I own land in Southwestern Alaska. There was a closed mine in my home town. The reality of the situation is, the resource is so valuable that as a political matter, it's virtually impossible for state or local residents to prevent the state from selling extraction rights on public land because the local citizens can't compete financially with an out of state lobby. Several of our state politicians have been convicted of accepting bribes from private companies. There is simply so much money to be made that extraction projects on public land are almost inevitable, with or without the consent of the public.
I'm not certainly not opposed in general to mining or oil production, but if the resource is public, the decision should be made democratically.
Should the state sell mineral rights on public land if the majority of it's population doesn't want to? Shouldn't people who live near the public land get a vote?
And being as there is no way to track gold, couldn't it just be laundered via similar channels?
I guess an analog to the Forest Stewardship Council could make people feel better by creating a system to track the production of certified mines and then allowing the first buyer to use their label.
The nuclei of both natural and synthetic stones were born in the same supernovae, and the environmental and human costs are far smaller.
The diamond industry dug itself a hole with its PR. The best diamonds are supposed to be "flawless", i.e. perfect crystals. The semiconductor substrate industry is in the business of making perfect crystals. Semiconductor crystal growing technology applied to diamond works quite well.[1] DeBeers keeps struggling to build machines which can distinguish synthetic diamonds from natural ones. They claim total success so far. Others disagree.[2] In any case, it now takes about $50,000 in equipment to detect good synthetic diamonds.
As for synthetic diamond abrasives, those are about $165/kilogram.[3] That stuff is produced by the metric ton.
[1] http://sciodiamond.com/ [2] http://www.diamonds.net/News/NewsItem.aspx?ArticleID=46436 [3] http://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-synthetic-diamond-grit...
(Submitted title was "Tiffany Co. CEO on environmental impact of jewelry". Since the original title isn't misleading or linkbait, the guideline would say not to change it, so we changed it back.)
The only solution that I can see that avoids "priveleges" is to actually give mod priveleges that allow a cadre of users to give a [sub-]title iff they respect neutrality of the title.
Going this far seems a bit OTT though whilst there do seem to be less than perfect options that are better than the current position.
Pretty sure those people weren’t ever “impoverished”.
Maybe this particular mine was even a bad idea; Wikipedia at least indicates most Alaskans were against it. But of course in the NYT the opinion of the actual people affected is not considered, just the moral preening over Untouched Landscapes.
West Virginia’s economy is a slightly tough case, because they’re in the mountains and are relatively isolated away from the coast or big rivers, without much productive farmland, and their economy is dominated by chemical production and coal mining (and more recently also shale gas production). Otherwise there’s not too much going on, and WV is the second poorest state (by median household income) in the US and has the second lowest life expectancy, both after Mississippi, and has the lowest proportion of college graduates of any state.
As a matter of national policy, I’m not sure what the best way is to help West Virginia. Better federal support for their healthcare, education, and anti-poverty programs would be a start, but what they really need is a more diversified economy. It’s a hard problem. Coal mining is on its way out one way or another, with continuing low gas prices, dropping solar/wind prices, and increasing national and international concern about CO2 emissions.
That doesn't make environmentalism a bad idea.
You also should read texts better before starting your anti environmentalism rants, because in the NYT the opinion of the actual people affected is indeed considered. The local population was against this mine.
You should really watch this documentary[1], about morality, richness, mining corporations and the local people. Maybe you'll know better next time you make such a generalizing remark.