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Money That Grows On Trees
parvez1 submits this piece about a process that uses plants to soak up and accumulate contaminants - and gold - from near gold-mining sites. Then the plants are harvested for their metal content. The plants aren't bio-engineered - he's taking advantage of the natural tendency for certain plants to accumulate heavy metals.
... how much do you spend to get a dollar-worth of gold/other metals to grow on a tree. The article does not say that.
In the USA, we've moved off of the "Gold Standard" years ago. Fort Knox sill has a large gold reserve to prove that the US Government controls some riches, but there's no static exchange rate anymore. That's why the price of gold changes on a daily market basis just like the conversion between dollar and any other currency.
The best part is that both groups should be happy that he came up with a much more environmentally friendly way to mine - but they won't be.
Modern evnironmentalist organizations are nothing but anti-corporate, anti-progress, anti-technology, socialist whiners who would cut off mother earth's nose to spite anyone in a three piece suit.
Are there any environmental groups left that still think? Seriously. Greenpeace has fallen prey to the suck as well.
Not only do we have to worry about how much gold/heavy metals will be left in the plant, a much more important question is how this material will be extracted. I assume that to get rid of all the carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen that make up most of the plant, they would burn or heat the plant in some way, which could posssily contribute to pollution (since the Nitrogen containing compounds don't necesarily always go into Nitrogen gas). Also, since the plant is basically contaiminated with heavy metals, it really has no other side use, and so its only purpose will be for this mineral extraction. Is this profitable or feasible?
What about deeper down in, say, the water table? What about runoff into rivers and streams? What I dont' like about this process (or maybe just this article) is that it seems to give a green light to irresponsible mining and toxic watest disposal by saying... "It's OK. We have these plants now. You can go crazy with the heavy metal polution."
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
This idea isn't really new, but it is interesting to see it applied to metals in soil. Fast-growing trees with tap roots have been used to extract contaminants from groud water for years.
The thing the article does not mention is how many harvests it takes to remove metals and the final concentration left in soil. Neither does it mention the processes effectiveness at removing other harmful metals frequently associated with gold deposits (silver, arsenic, lead, etc.). Metals like mercury and lead have human health and environmental impacts in very low concentrations. I'm not sure I would return this land to farming use without adequate analysis of post-remedial soils, but forestry may well be viable.
Is there a difference? Or is he pissing off the same people twice as much?
This is not a sig.
for years. Mainly using water hyacinth to clean up polluted bodies of water.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Look for small organizations without government funding that concentrate their efforts in one state and do things like buying land for preserves and cutting hiking trails.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Exactly. By the time anything becomes national or global, it has already become more of a beurocracy than anything else, by the very nature of organizations of that size. The people at the top are too far disconnected from people on the ground doing real work, and even if they have good intentions, they're not going to be able to make proper decisions. Although it's cliched, the saying "think globally, act locally" is some of the best advice for environmentalists.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
if Gold was actually scarce, the reality is it is not uncommon at all, why go through a complicated refining process to extract grams when the same amount of extraction energy would be better put to extracting tonnes
It's not so much about getting every last bit of gold through an involved process.. The process is there to clean up the ground from all the contaminants from the mining, so the land can eventually be used for food crops.
I'm no zoologist/biologist/ environmental impact assessor or environmental engineer but I do know that the concentration of the heavy metals and the likes increases up the food chain, i.e., the herbivores feeding on these plants would suffer from a higher heavy metal concentration which would not even be half as bad as that suffered by the carnivores/omnivores (think local human population) feeding on them...
Now, I'm sure that this person is very knowledgeable and will have tried to make sure that animals aren't able to feed on them, but as any engineer, I'm trained to be skeptical. It strikes me as difficult a thing to ensure, specially in such remote areas as the article mentions (Amazon... might also be of use in somewhere like Zambia/Congo, South-East Asia, Madagascar, etc.).
Furthermore, fast growing imports (shrubs, etc. which I presume would be of use here) could well outgrow the localised regions of the mines and start competing with the indiginous flora. Tropical forests take a long time to rejuvenate and tropical trees have very slow growth rates, which puts them at a sever disadvantage when having to compete against fast growing imports for space and sun...This phenomenon is to be blamed for the disappearance of the local ecosystem from such small tropical islands (e.g. Mauritius, Indian Ocean is one victim that I'm aware of) and so it is something that has to be borne in mind when you want to implement such a scheme.
I hope all of these are/will be factored in whenever such a scheme is to be implemented/ someone tries to "help" Nature recover.
Anti-progress sums it all up. Here is an interview with a psychologist who studied a certain breed of environmentalist (anti-nuke) and describes their psychopathologies.
Uh huh. Interesting that the liberal media let that one slip out.
In any case, let's lay out your logic:
A is a subset of E.
There exists subset C of A such that every member of C has property P.
Therefore every every member of A has property P.
In this case the bindings of the variables are:
A = Anti-nuke environmentalists.
E = Environmentalists at large.
C = The crackpots tested by the the psychologiest.
P = the property of having psychologists.
Now according to the laws of logic, if your argument is valid, it is likewise valid for any values of A,E,C,P, provided the set containment relationships hold.
Now let's let
A = WW2 era Nazis.
E = Everybody who opposed communism.
C = The lunatic fringe of A.
P = Belief in the occult and the desire to exterminate Jews.
You've just proven that everybody who opposes communism also believes in the occult and wants to kill all the Jews. Wow, thanks, I never knew that!
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
In theory, to use gold as currency, one equates the amount of gold in market with the value of the rest of the goods and services in the market. If both gold mining and resource development are going at the same rate, the value of gold stays approximately the same. However, since there is only a fixed amount of gold on earth, the mining yield would exhaust one day, possibly before other goods and services are exhausted so, especially considering that one can associate value with services as well, not just goods. Goods are constrainted to the amount of natural resources, but services can be provided as long as people will do so.
The implication in using gold as currency is that the value of goods and services will actually deflate in terms of gold as more goods and services are provided! This would bother some people, especially the government, who often uses inflation as a form of taxation.
I once had a signature.
to piss off tree-huggers
And why would that be?
Understand: tree-huggers is your name for them. Granted there are probably some neo-druids in the bunch who would get pissed off. However, what most of these folks (both people who want to preserve forests and those who want to keep mining regulated) are concerned about is the fouling of habitat. Just like hunting enthusiasts or fishermen (like me) are, but for different reasons.
It's the shameless fouling of habitat, leaving somebody else to clean up after them, that gets the "anti-mining" (your word for them again) people pissed. It's when the clean water regulations are rewritten so that miners can dump their tailings in streams that gets them pissed. Hell, that gets me pissed, but I'm not anti-mining. Mine all the hell you want but clean up after yourself and keep your crap out of the public's way. By your logic I'm anti-shitting because I don't want you to take a dump the sidewalk in front of my house.
Most environmentalists (including many who are engineers) want to create closed cycles (recycling get it?) in which waste products are reprocessed into goods. Like this guy is doing.
So, no, there aren't going to be many "tree huggers" objecting to this.
Sorry for the rant, but I'm getting pretty sick of right wing nutcases who "score points" with each other with arguments that are just plain stupid. I don't have a problem with guys like Bob Dole or John McCain who are intelligent and principled conservative. For chrissakes there's nothing that shows what a sorry state the Republican party is in than the fact they could have had McCain and they chose Bush (oh crap now you really got me going).
Getting back to this post, it's an intellectually slimy exercise: make an incredibly stupid argument, and dress it up as a joke. This is Rush's excuse when he's caught saying something that is utterly stupid: he's not a political commentator, he's an entertainer. Understand I have no problem with making a political point with a joke, but if you want to make a political point, have something at least minimally logical to say, no matter how you say it. Just because something is a joke doesn't man it has to be stupid. You don't get a fricken pass if you say your bullshit with a smirk.
I'm sick and tired of truth getting trashed, and I'm not gotting to let that crap pass anymore. Sorry to the rest of your folks, you didn't need to hear that.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Wow, you can write in the needlessly complex and formal manner of a statistics textbook, you're my hero.
Your entire argument can be summed up as follows:
"Don't ascribe to an entire group a property that applies to only a subset of it."
Don't try to be clever. You're not.
Nix absolutably seriousness.
With a match.
The ashes from burning the harvested plants {which does put CO2 back into the atmosphere, but only as much as the plants took out while growing -- and you can do something useful with the heat you generate, thereby saving you from having to burn a quantity of fossil fuel which would have produced the same amount of CO2 without taking it out first} will contain the metallic elements absorbed by the plant, either in their pure states {if they are particularly unreactive, e.g. gold} or as oxides. A book of physical and chemical properties of substances, something like Kaye and Laby for instance, would give you all the information you needed to devise suitable processes for separating the remains.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
"Cut off mother earth's nose"? Just what do you think is happening to "mother earth" now? With intentional extermination of vast ecosystems, the obliteration of coral reefs, the tainting of every inch of the earth with poisons and heavy metals, with fertilizers causing massive algae blooms, with fresh water being wasted and rivers being run dry, with a large part of the worlds forests being burned to the ground, with fish being driven to extinction because countries are too stupid to stop massive overfishing, with the greatest extinction since the dinosaurs under way right now .... the just what the hell does it take for people like you to WAKE UP!
No, you'd rather put down people who want to salvage some part of the planet from our "extinction-event" ways.
Socialist? No, I think of myself as a public property advocate. Those rivers? The sky? The public lands? Even the animals? They're mine! (all mine, I tell you, mine, mine, har, har, har). Yeah, I share it with about a bazillion people, but why should I give corporations (or governments, or individuals, for that matter) free rein to rape and plunder it?
Do you ever think? Or do you just "fall prey to the suck"?
In addition to having a mediocre grasp of psychology, this guy has a less than mediocre grasp of the effects of radiation on life.
i.e.
If it's just the sun and its solar radiation, if I happen to live in Denver instead of living in Washington, and have five times the background radiation, that's all right, because nobody's doing that.
There are a few probelms with this. First of all, low level gamma rays and alpha particles aren't tremendously harmful to humans since our bodies have time to repair. Background levels of radiation have actually been shown to increase the longevity of rodents slightly (I don't know the mecheanism.)It's cases like three mile island where there's more intense radiation released over a breif period of time where the damage is greater than the human body can repair.
Also, the fact that the incident at Three Mile Island was covered up makes people edgier.
If people arn't given full information, it's not surprising that they're going to be suspicious/paranoid. And the gov. is notorious for censoring data related to radioactive disasters. It's like how they told people "Don't touch remains from the shuttle" after the recent disaster with Columbia but didn't warn them that it was because they could have been contaminated by radioactivity.
Furthermore, his notion that 'there are no dead bodies' is a bit odd. Chernobyl had plenty, but it's hard to attribute deaths directly to radiation even if radiation is a contributing factor and even if its presence is known. Kidnof like how lawn pesticides cause cancer, but aren't typically listed as a 'cause of death' on the coroner's report.
Likewise, he says that nuclear power plants can't explode. They may not explode like a nuclear weapon does, but the runaway nuclear reaction at Chernobyl was enough to literally blow the top of the reactor a few feet up. When the several ton concrete slab crashed down into the main core, it sent up a dust cloud that could be detected around the world.
Furthermore, his logic sounds similar to the logic of those in charge of the shuttle program shortly before the destruction of challenger. Cracks in the turbothruster fans 1/3rd of what it would take to break the fan does not equate to a 'saftey factor' of any kind. If your machines are operating outside your expected paramaters, that means you did somthing wrong and if you continue, worse things will happen.
Finally, we have no effective means of dealing with nuclear waste except for leaving it alone for hundreds of generations and hoping that noone and nothing disturbs it. The ethical diellema of leaving these problems for future generations while enjoying the benefits in our own age are real enough.
Nuclear power is a good idea, but this guy seems to be doing more to try and pacify people and insult the opposition than to address the actual issues.
Did you ever notice how psycologists usually have screwed up kids? Maybe we should take some time to examine their 'psychopathologies.'
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Then the plants are harvested for their metal content. The plants aren't bio-engineered - he's taking advantage of the natural tendency for certain plants to accumulate heavy metals."
Kinda reminds me of the 'knife plants' in 'Saucer Wisdom' by Rudy Rucker.
Eg: "Jose and Amparo are no longer careful about harvesting every last knife. Here and there dried stalks rustle, with rusting knives..."
The book's an excellent 'stab' at what the future may bring - recommended to
That's a nice posting and all, except for the fact that a 13 year study by University of Pittsburg found there was no statistical increase in occurrences of cancer around the Three Mile Island plant in Harrisburg PA.
Secondly, the reason you cite for not touching the Challenger fragments was because of (1) the temperature of the metal on re-entry and (2) the hazardous fumes from the aforementioned burning material. Although a local Texas sheriff claimed there was "radioactive material on board" (picked up by reporters with little fact checking), NASA has since said that the only radioactive material on the shuttle at the time were in the smoke detectors.
How do you check for deaths by radiation? By measuring the increase in cancers with respect to a "control group" of those that were not exposed to the radioactive source. For example, population of Seattle vs Chernobyl. If cancer rate is statistically higher, then you're golden.
Oh, and we have a great way to store radioative waste, it's called Yucca Mountain. Find a mountain of volcanic minerals, surrounded by more mountains and deserts, with an non-existent water table in a non-populated area, on government land with a 110 mile radius. Seal the crap underground, and post a guard for the next 6,000 years.
Hell, in another 100 years, we may find methods to "refine" the nuclear waste for more fissionable material, much like we do now in extracting uranium from ore. Just as we aren't going to run out of oil, we're going to run out of cheap oil, then we retool for more extraction. Our children's childeren will be thanking us for taking the time to concentrate all the material into one site for easy processing, just as we build trash-to-steam generating plants (sorry, "reclamation centers") at trash dumps today.