Posted on 08/04/2022 5:02:14 AM PDT by MtnClimber
The front page of today’s New York Times features a big article clearly intended to get the readers riled up about the latest environmental horror that must be stopped. The headline is “The Illegal Airstrips Bringing Toxic Mining to Brazil’s Indigenous Land.” Subheadline: “The Times identified hundreds of airstrips that bring criminal mining operations to the most remote corners of the Amazon.”
Wow, this is bad. The airstrips are “illegal.” The mining is “toxic,” and not only toxic but also “criminal.” And it’s all happening in the most pristine place left in the whole world, the “remote corners of the Amazon,” much of it inhabited by the most innocent of all innocent indigenous people, the Yanomami.
So what is driving this big rush of miners into these remote regions? Could so-called “green energy” — with its vast demands for raw materials like nickel, manganese, aluminum and iron — have anything to do with it? If so, you won’t learn anything about that from the Times.
The obvious purpose of this lengthy Times piece is to get you outraged about the criminal mining wildcatters now said to be swarming the Amazon jungle. The piece starts with research conducted by the Times, using satellite photographs, that has identified a large number of airstrips — close to 1300 of them — that have been carved into the Amazon jungle, and that are now being used to bring in supplies to support the development of new mines.
Hundreds of airstrips have been secretly built on protected lands in Brazil to fuel the illegal mining industry, a Times investigation found, including 61 in this Yanomami Indigenous territory. The Times identified more than 1,200 other unregistered airstrips across the Brazilian Amazon — many of them part of criminal networks that are destroying Indigenous lands and threatening their people. . . . Carved into the dense, lush landscape, [the clandestine airstrips] . . . operate largely unchecked. . . .
And you will not be surprised to learn that this outrageous and illegal activity is all being facilitated by the callous and uncaring right-wing government of current Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
Since taking office in 2019, Mr. Bolsonaro has championed industries driving the rainforest’s destruction, leading to record levels of deforestation. He has both loosened regulations to expand logging and mining in the Amazon and scaled back protections. He also slashed federal funds and staffing, weakening the agencies that enforce Indigenous and environmental laws.
The illegal mining is causing extensive harm to the indigenous people of the area, at least if you believe the Times:
A recent study by Hutukara, a Yanomami nonprofit, estimated that more than half of the people living in Yanomami Brazilian territory have been hurt by illegal mining. The fallout, according to the report, includes malnourishment because of destroyed or abandoned crops, and malaria spread by the proliferation of mosquitoes in open mining pits and deforested areas.
OK, but why exactly this sudden rush of mining businesses into these remote areas? The Times offers little clue, basically just one line saying that the illegal airstrips are “pushing the illegal mining of gold and tin ore” into remote areas. But gold and tin are relatively small volume commodities on the world markets. Could these really be the main drivers?
For a somewhat different perspective on the situation of mining in the Amazon, try this February 28, 2022 piece from a publication called Undark (put out by MIT), with the headline “U.S.-Backed Companies Poised to Expand Mining in the Amazon.”
As of November [2021], nine major mining companies considered key players in the extraction of rare metals for electric vehicle batteries had 225 active applications to expand operations into or near Indigenous territories in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest.
Aha! The “key players” in the mining rush into the Amazon are big companies looking for “rare metals for electric vehicle batteries.” Why am I not surprised?
So are the materials people are looking for mainly just gold and tin, or are there lots of other, higher-volume things to be found? From a publication called Mining Technology, February 12, 2018:
The Amazon rainforest in South America has large quantities of copper, tin, nickel, bauxite, manganese, iron ore and gold, making it attractive to mining companies all around the world.
Nickel and manganese — those are the big inputs to the electric vehicle batteries. Bauxite is ore for aluminum, the main material needed, along with copper, for the huge amounts of new electric transmission lines that need to be built to support wind and solar power. Iron ore? Vast amount of that will be needed for the coming onslaught of wind turbine bases.
Undark tells us that all the major American financial institutions — the same ones that are now boycotting the fossil fuel industries — are lining up to finance the big new mines in the Amazon:
U.S.-based financial institutions are among their top funders, according to a new report by Amazon Watch and the Association of Brazil’s Indigenous People, or APIB. . . . The report focuses on nine mining companies, including Vale, Anglo American, Belo Sun, and Glencore. . . . Capital Group, BlackRock, and Vanguard, which collectively invested $14.8 billion in the mining companies, are the top U.S. investors named in the report. The leading U.S.-based creditor is Bank of America, which provided $670 million in loans and underwriting services to the companies. Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase were also named as top creditors.
Hey, this is for EV batteries, transmission lines, wind turbine bases, and all other kinds of good things to make the world “green.” Of course all the big financial institutions are behind it. It’s ESG investing!
And please don’t blame the people at the New York Times for undermining their own incessant and strident advocacy for green energy. They’re just following the essential principles of the official New York progressive orthodoxy as brilliantly distilled on the Manhattan Contrarian “About” page, first posted back in 2012 — particularly this part:
[U]sage of energy is a human right, but all actual known methods of producing energy are environmentally unacceptable. . . .
It’s way to much to expect them ever to concede that having a modern society requires that some trade-offs be made.
The real goal is to eliminate private vehicles and to have the government in control of where you will travel by public transportation.
Send Maggie down there.
Glencore....that was or is Marc Rich’s company, same one that received Saddam Hussein oil vouchers.
They really don't want human beings to exist with any sort of comfort or security at all.
Reliable, relatively inexpensive energy = freedom
BTW, PRC China is leading the effort!
https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/chinas-global-push-resources-makes-waves-amazon-basin
Your not suppose to mine for those rare and dangerous minerals need for greenie battery’s.. Your suppose to wish for them, and then Mother Nature will provide them for everyone......free of charge.
The rare metals for electric vehicle batteries is the driving force behind this rape of the Amazon Basin. Do not make it so urgent to locate, extract, transport and refine these rare earth metals, by maybe not putting the all-out push for electrifying all road vehicles using exotic storage batteries as the propellant.
In terms of engineering, using electric motors to propel road vehicles is an excellent idea. But the means of providing this electric wattage to drive those motors is still sadly lacking, and shall remain so until a means of generating the electricity on-board as needed is made widely available. The hybrid internal combustion engine driving an electrical generator, to power the electric motors at the wheels, was one such approach, but is being quickly abandoned in the haste to phase out ALL “fossil fuels”, a fool’s errand if ever there was. We shall be using various forms of hydrocarbon-based fuels for decades if not centuries to come, because as an energy source, these fuels are compact, easily stored, and have an energy density per pound that just about outmatches any other system, except nuclear.
It’s way to much too much...
The end game is taking away the commoners’ private vehicles.
The question I keep asking (to myself and/or my dog) is whether or not enough Americans still have strong enough of a thirst for freedom and enough resolve to fight this effort for a global socialist government.
The thought of global socialist governance should make our skin crawl. The thought of anyone or anything impeding our God given freedom should quickly bring anger. This assault on sanity (climate change, gender madness, etc.) should be met with ridicule and a hard stop. This incessant campaign on the left to silence Christians, destroy normalcy, create racial strife, destroy what’s left of our good institutions and culture should also make us want to fight.
I think conservatism is a small rudder on a very big ship. It’s going to take a lot to turn this mess around.
I wonder if The Times reporter is aware that the Yanomami practice the most primitive and destructive and polluting method of agriculture known to man — “slash and burn”? Is he aware that they hunt monkeys, and that they use poison-tipped arrows to kill them with the slightest scratch? Oh, the horror!
“There was a man in the jungle trying to make ends meet
Found himself one day with an axe in his hand
When a voice said “Buddy can you spare that tree
We gotta save the world, starting with your land”
It was a rock ‘n’ roll millionaire from the USA
Doing three to the gallon in a big white car
And he sang and he sang ‘til he polluted the air
And he blew a lot of smoke from a Cuban cigar.”
- Joe Jackson, Obvious Song
And well on its way to becoming a sensible reliable type of vehicle. With an appropriately sized smaller battery module and a powerful small displacement turbo engine, the car (or pickup) would have the best of all worlds; good high performance, good gas mileage, all wheel drive and extreme longevity.
Small, constant RPM engines have better fuel economy, and the turbo can provide decent power on demand to drive the electric motors. The best advantage shown by hybrids is the elimination of the obvious weak spot in modern vehicles....the automatic transmission. Most cars in the junkyard are there for that very reason.
Of course longevity and reliability would be the enemy of the manufacturers and the industry. Maybe that's why they are phasing them out.
Wind Turbine blades have an inner scaffolding of Balsa Wood. All the plantations growing Balsa wood have been emptied.
The Amazon Rainforest is being clear-cut for Balsa Wood for Green Energy.
Now, they are going to cut down the rain forest to mine for Lithium, cobalt, nickle and its okay because it makes green batteries.
I agree with your assessment of the hybrid drive vehicles. I would consider buying almost any TOYOTA hyrid vehicle at this point. I wish they would incorporate them into their Tacoma pickup truck. I am on my third Tacoma. Currently driving a 2012. I am staring to consider a replacement.
Typical. Leftists have no concept of the details of any technology, nor the indirect costs of their stupid schemes to “go green”. Yes, let’s all stop mining coal, which in a good deposit, cones out of the ground basically ready to use, and switch over to mining rare earth minerals, which require extracting tons of material to then refine a few pounds of rare earth elements; most of which are toxic if inhaled.
Anything that riles up left wing NYT is ok by me. Waiting for the smell of burning hair.
“Refining involves separation of an element from its ore through the removal of impurities. So as to decrease the cost of transportation of the huge quantity of ore needed to refine, refining is often done at the mine itself. Refinement occurs through physical separation of the REEs by various chemical techniques, sometimes involving thousands of steps. Unfortunately, all REEs and their respective ores are different and require different chemical techniques for refining (depending on melting point and vapor pressure, as well as other physical properties of the element).
Typical techniques for refinement include milling, where ore is ground down to fine particles and then separated in a variety of ways, followed by cracking, where the it undergo a series of chemical treatments. Due to the large number of steps the REEs must go through to be purified requiring many different chemicals and reagents for these processes, there is a huge amount of toxic and radioactive waste generated from byproducts, which must be handled either through recycling, or by pumping it to a holding tank. The waste presents various health and environmental issues that must be dealt with at the mining site (see green mining page). “
https://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/elements/ree.html
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