Let's visit on the Porch II (Victor: 2015, how much, home)

[Senah]

Originally Posted by Reziac

Something interesting from Senator Daines:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-hOnGzFhQ0

Really interesting. He says a lot of true things. Don't know if I'm 100% down with the "clean coal" idea, growing up so near the WVa border, but there is a lot of valid stuff he brings up that we simply can't ignore.

[Reziac]

Some years ago I saw a documentary on how modern strip-mining is handled, and it's not much like the old methods. Any existing topsoil is preserved and replaced when the pit is retired, but more often there really isn't any good soil or grass atop coal deposits; it's just naked rock and scrub. So a lot of the retired pits wind up becoming reservoirs, a net benefit since you can never have too much freshwater storage and waterfowl habitat. Mining is of necessity kinda messy while it's ongoing (but so are most industrial processes, tho nowadays there's a great deal more dust control done), but ten years after a pit is retired you'd never know it wasn't a natural lake.

And coal is a natural mineral that often occurs at the surface. Spilled coal is not intrinsically worse than spilled gravel.

And the fact is, we can either have cheap energy and a first-world economy, or we can have expensive or absent energy and a third-world economy. There's no realistic middle ground on this. The major difference between first and third world is general availability of inexpensive energy, because from inexpensive energy flows everything else.

[Threerun]

If you have never seen mountain top removal mining, please google and image search it. It's possibly one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen. Wholesale mountain destruction. It's hard to get anything to grow on it, let alone trees.

In essence, you forgo for the immediate and foreseeable future of timber resource management to extract a deposit of unreplenishable coal. On top of that you fill the soil rich valley below with rubble.

Makes no sense.

[Reziac]

I've seen an entire mountain removed so a mall could be built. That's even less replenishable. (What's really bizarre is that the entire job was done by one guy on a bulldozer. Took most of a year.)

But a lot of our western coal is under neither timber nor mountains.

'Course, if you're willing to pay a whole lot more for energy (estimates run from 40% more to 5 times as much), and be content with only population centers getting any, we could switch to wind and solar tomorrow (remember, the anti-coal forces also want all those hydroelectric dams removed), and given 30 years to approve each new reactor, perhaps also to nuclear, with its waste disposal issues... BTW, solar installations in the high desert are rather more scorched-earth destructive than open-pit mining.

[Clark Fork Fantast]

Originally Posted by Reziac

I've seen an entire mountain removed so a mall could be built. That's even less replenishable. (What's really bizarre is that the entire job was done by one guy on a bulldozer. Took most of a year.)

But a lot of our western coal is under neither timber nor mountains.

'Course, if you're willing to pay a whole lot more for energy (estimates run from 40% more to 5 times as much), and be content with only population centers getting any, we could switch to wind and solar tomorrow (remember, the anti-coal forces also want all those hydroelectric dams removed), and given 30 years to approve each new reactor, perhaps also to nuclear, with its waste disposal issues... BTW, solar installations in the high desert are rather more scorched-earth destructive than open-pit mining.

Yep! We have a hobby: movie location hunting. We track down locations from favorite movies and take pictures of what they look like now. We were looking for a certain famous Hollywood location where a bunch of action movies had been filmed in the 1930s, and we finally found it, but something wasn't right: a whole mountain was gone from the view! We realized that it had been removed so they could put in a new development. Not just the top--the entire mountain! By the way, that famous location that we found (Lasky Mesa) was about to be sold--to developers. People in the movie industry got together and petitioned the city council, and now it's a park.

(Not much to do with strip mining! But it just shows that money can move mountains! )

[Reziac]

That sounds like what they did along the Simi Valley freeway -- there was a big swath of rough country that was once used to film cowboy flicks, but a few years ago they leveled it and now it's a mall and development.

[Threerun]

Originally Posted by Reziac

I've seen an entire mountain removed so a mall could be built. That's even less replenishable. (What's really bizarre is that the entire job was done by one guy on a bulldozer. Took most of a year.)

But a lot of our western coal is under neither timber nor mountains.

'Course, if you're willing to pay a whole lot more for energy (estimates run from 40% more to 5 times as much), and be content with only population centers getting any, we could switch to wind and solar tomorrow (remember, the anti-coal forces also want all those hydroelectric dams removed), and given 30 years to approve each new reactor, perhaps also to nuclear, with its waste disposal issues... BTW, solar installations in the high desert are rather more scorched-earth destructive than open-pit mining.

I'm not against coal. I'm not really for blasting the sh*t out of a mountain top and filling the stream bed below with rubble to get at it.

Shortsighted to say the least.

[Reziac]

How we'd be building our upscale homes, did we lack electricity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P73REgj-3UE

(This guy is really good at all this primitive living stuff. IIRC he's in Australia.)


Being this close to town and since there must be kids here somewhere (at least, the school bus stops at the corner) I thought I'd get a few trick-or-treaters, so I hung up some, uh, decorative eyeballs and prepared candy to trade for more eyeballs... alas, the kiddies saw through this scheme and no one came to my door. Fortunately, I only got the kind of candy I like.

[Reziac]

Originally Posted by Threerun

I'm not against coal. I'm not really for blasting the sh*t out of a mountain top and filling the stream bed below with rubble to get at it.

Shortsighted to say the least.

Better mining than malls. At least you can cover up the mine when you're done. Malls tend to object to such treatment.

[Reziac]

An interesting article:

The Oldest Divide by Victor Davis Hanson, City Journal Autumn 2015