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People eagerly give money to rich environmental groups. The Natural Resources Defense Council has $463 million in assets.
It claims it uses law “to confront the climate crisis.”
What it really does is pay lawyers to torture people who try to do useful things.
Example: America needs minerals like copper and silver to make things. Even President Joe Biden made a speech saying America will need 400-600% more such minerals to make “solar panels, wind turbines and so much more!”
An iPhone alone requires aluminum, iron, lithium, gold, copper …
But when investors dare try to dig up such minerals in America, the NRDC objects and uses political connections to stop them.
Twenty years ago, entrepreneurs tried to open a mine in Alaska. Before they even got the application in, the EPA vetoed it.
Why? Because groups like the NRDC say the mine “would be a catastrophic threat to the wildlife and … fragile ecosystem.”
They get their way because when Democrats run the EPA, they not only support NRDC’s positions, they even hire NRDC employees.
The next Republican administration removed the EPA’s veto. The Army Corps of Engineers then studied the mine and concluded that it wasn’t an environmental threat.
So, is Pebble a bustling mine today? No.
Democrats got elected and vetoed it again.
Physicist Mark Mills wonders why anyone would try to open a mine in America today. “Why in the world would you put millions, maybe billions of dollars at risk, spending those decades to get a permit, knowing there’s a very good chance they’ll just cancel a permit? How in the world do you build mines in America knowing that that’s the landscape you have?”
Well, you don’t.
America now ranks second to last in the time it takes to develop a new mine — roughly 29 years. Only Zambia is worse.
“You start applying for permits,” says Mills, “You’re going to be waiting not months, not years, but decades!”
Waiting while the NRDC sues and runs frightening anti-mine ads, saying nature will be “destroyed by a 2,000-foot gaping hole in the ground!”
Mills points out their deceit. Today’s mines disturb “a tiny infinitesimal pinprick in the landscape” and we do need to disturb the landscape a little, because “we need metals and materials and minerals to build everything that exists to make society possible!”
I confronted NRDC spokesman Bob Deans, saying the NRDC killing mines also kills people’s opportunity. He responded that “clean” energy creates jobs.
“We created 50,000 new jobs in this country, putting up wind turbines, solar panels, building the next generation of energy efficient cars. This is where the future is!”
“But also, you need copper and gold,” I point out.
“That’s right,” says Deans, “And we have to weigh those risks.”
But the NRDC doesn’t weigh the risks. They just oppose American mines.
I asked Deans, “Are there any mines that the NRDC doesn’t complain about?
“Sure,” he replied.
He said he’d send us some names. But he never did.
I asked again this month. Again, no names.
“Don’t hold your breath,” says Mills. “The mines that they implicitly support are in Africa.”
“Implicitly” because they don’t actually say mining should be done in poor countries.
“They don’t say that,” says Mills, “But the green movement has been perfectly happy outsourcing mining to disadvantaged countries where thousands of children in bare feet, working by hand with shovels, dig minerals out of the earth.”
At least in America, children wouldn’t be digging with their hands, advanced equipment would make mining safer and our rules would reduce pollution. You’d think environmentalists would want more mining done in America.
“To have a sane world,” says Mills, “We should be doing a lot more of it. Not all of it. But not none.”
Allowing America to do more would definitely be good. Our future needs minerals.
“Society can’t exist without mines,” concludes Mills.
Similar situation in Australia. Our Aboriginals – who lived primitive lives (no clothes, no houses, no industry,) – scream every time someone plans a new road, mine or town. They claim the development will disturb their mythical ‘rainbow serpent (waugyl) or destroy the waugyl’s tracks ‘(song lines’) which are invisible. PATHETIC!!! And yet our stupid politicians give in to them every time. No mention that mining in particular provides the money that is used to build them houses (which they trash) and cars etc.
The NRDC, Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club, Etc. are always asking us the JU$T $END CA$H to $AVE THE EARTH FROM FAKE THREAT$ LIKE CLIMATE CHANGE KAH-CHING KAH CHING KAH CHING
I remember when the Sierra Club sold out for cash. They went from opposing illegal immigration to supporting it, along with all the destructive environmental consequences, like illegal drug gangs setting up camp in the vast areas of government owned wilderness in California. Using illegal pesticides which went into rivers and streams, etc.
They refuse o face the reality they never mention: they ARE mining. Every chance they get. they are mining the pockets of we citizens.
The environmental movement and sustainability has become corrupt to the core and when it isn’t openly corrupt it is full of hypocrisy.
Locally the owners of a woodland of approximately 5000 trees wanted to destroy it and their “environmental” experts stated that the woodland contained zero birds.
Their reports were lies and it took the local people to protest against it and point out the corruption.
The Muslims and such in that region were good at mining millennia ago. One defense against terrorist tunnels might be counter-mining.
If you are old enough you will remember along with me the ‘Crying Indian Ad’ and message don’t pollute. It is hard to believe but at that time, environmentalism was a ”both party’ issue. The reduction in air pollution in our cities etc. was nothing short of spectacular. Cars switched to unleaded, then the catalytic convertor, then scrubber on coal burning smokestacks. Hugely expensive clean up of old toxic sites, rivers cleaner than they have been in a 100 years. The hijacking of environmentalism by the left has been a disaster.
The switch to unleaded WAS a good thing. Friend of mine was working to help document lead in the enirnoment and the evidence was rock solid it was from motor fuel. We tracked the volume of tetraethyl lead produced and put into motor fuel, each year since use of it began, which precisely matched lead measured in deep ice cores around the world. That one I’m fine with, even am in favour of it.
The issue there was the metallurgy needed to make valve seats last in gasoline engines was not yet developed thus engines began to have issues along those lines as lead disappeared. There were “cures” rerofitting hard valve seats, but that was rather dear.
As to the rest of it all.. NOx was nowhere near the issue they mde it to be, and the cataslysmic pervertor was a boondoggle. Even today, dirtbags are creeping about cutting the convertors out from under parked cars. The value of the platinum in them is so high. I have known of cars that had to be totally written off by the theft insurance coverage because there WERE NO CONVERTORS to refit.
The one gadget that WAS effective was a sleeper. I remember my Dad deciding to retrofit one to his 1962 Ford Falcon. It was the Crankcase Ventilation trap system. As cars age, and hey did so far more quickly than they do today, the piston rings allow oil to get past them, which then burns in the combustion process and goes out the tailpipe. As a car gets old and “ring sick” the volume of the plume of partially burned oil smoke can be massive… I’ve seen a literal cloud of oil smoke following an old car down the road. I’ve owned some like that. and engine rebuild cures it, but until then… That oil vapour smoke is full of all manner of nasty stuff, acidic compounds, and especially in warmer climates can form a devastating amount of acrid smoke. You have to have experienced it to believe it. I grew up near Smog Angeles during the 50’s and 60’s, I lived it. It seriously effected my health.
By fitting that EGR device, that acrid blowby smoke was burned along with the gasoline as it went through the engine. THIS device is what reduced LA’s smog to a fraction of what it was in he early 1960’s.
And the Crying Indian was actually a white guy actor…. Iron Eyes Cody (born Espera Oscar de Corti, April 3, 1904 – January 4, 1999) was an American actor of Sicilian descent who portrayed Native Americans in Hollywood films,[2] including the role of Chief Iron Eyes in Bob Hope’s The Paleface (1948). He also played a Native American shedding a tear about pollution in one of the country’s most well-known television public service announcements from the group Keep America Beautiful.[3]
During WW2 the United States went into over drive and produced more goods than almost ALL the munitions that armed the Allied side. This included food, manufactured materials such as aircraft, tanks, ships, etc. We also exported petroleum products to support our allies.
Today, unless WAR is declared (we have not been at WAR since 1945), our ENVIRONMENTISTS will stop production of almost anything we need to defend ourselves! Ya know it will hurt our environment! I suspect that if any our those that invade us are from the left we will have to arrest our protestors so that we can defend our country>
Greenpeace is still sailing all over the World in Fossil Fueled Ships(Arctic Sunrise, Rainbow Warrior II)and still has shown no signs of ending this
Rainbow Warrior
yeah, and hey left her abandoned when they had dry chartered her out of Vancouver BC to go protest the A Bomb testing down near Fiji and Bikini Atloll. Burned up all her fuel, had run her into very poor condition, had “better things to do than return her to her ownes so just left her, in really rough condition. ended up stiffing the owner. There was no enough value left in her to warrant the cost of repairng and sailing her back to her home port.
I’ve NO USE for the Green Peas outfit.
We had almost all the industrial productive capacity in the world after WW2. So we defended the free world and helped them get their economies going. No gratitude to us for that. Instead they hate us. No good deed goes unpunished.
Earth Day circa 1960-61 turned out to be a money maker for lefties.
Earth Day was founded and started by the Late Ira Einhorn(The Unicorn Killer)who Murdered his Live in Girlfriends
Without Petroleum/Plastics/Rare Earth Elements modern life is impossible not to mention the medicines.
Late 1940’s my Grandfather and some other men formed a group and bought ten contiguous mining claims in the Alpine Lakes region in King County Washington. They would head up for the summer, developing the claims, mining ore and bringing it back with them. they had proved out the claims and knew there as a tremedous quantity of gold up there. My Dad surveyed a lake and used that as the source of water for a pelton wheel, which developed power for a ball mill, overhead tram lines, etc. to bring the ore out of the mountain and down the hill. I’ve seen the assay reports, there was a LOT of gold up there, and they had the rights to it. Dad also did the survey for he Mine to Market Road and they applied to King County for the permit to build it, on their nickel;. That application was made in 1947. King COunty sandbagged for decades until the group got too old to even think about developing it. Never did provide a reasonm just “not yet”.
Good Ol King County. Today’s Forest Service Road prety much follows the design my Dad did. Now the whole area is a wilderness area. precluding mining. Some of my brothers and I talked about heading up and hand mining like one of the original team did every year, even into his late eighties. He never worked a job other than spending his summers mining that gold ore up in those tunnels. He was a wealthy man, and fit right up to his end.
King COunty have long been known for being very viased.. once they dcide NO it will never change.he volume of gold up there would have been able to make all my extended family perhaps not wealthy as in lighting cigras with thousand dollar bills, but none f us would ever have HAD to work a day job.EVETl