Do NASA's observations rebut the Greens rhetoric?

[Litespeed]

Mining only produces most of our stuff because our economics is geared that way. Yes some is essential but only a small amount, the rest can be made other ways. And those alternatives make more jobs and pollute far less.

 

 

[pmccarthy]

Made other ways out of what? Steel and concrete for example are 100% mining products. Aluminium for planes. Copper. And all the plastic and fibreglass stuff made from petroleum products which another crazy movement is trying to shut down. We could live on fish caught from wooden boats I suppose, but we wouldn’t have the metal saws to cut the wood.

 

 

[willedoo]

pmmccarthy, you're missing the big picture. We could replace most things with bamboo. It's easy to grow. We could make bamboo implements to grow the bamboo and fertilize it with our own manure. Also we can build houses from it and get some rocks to pound the bamboo into fibre to make our lap laps. Walking everywhere will be good for our health, and we won't need cars anyway because we won't have jobs to drive to unless we are lucky enough to work on a bamboo farm within walking distance. We won't miss the other stuff; who needs steel, concrete, aluminium, glass, titanium and all that other useless stuff anyway.

 

 

[facthunter]

Ever heard of re cycling? We can't be bothered and it goes to landfill. You can get most minerals out of seawater. How many tonnes of rock have to be pulverized and treated with Cyanide to get an ounce of gold.? Gold is used for "ornaments".mostly. Check on how polluting gold mining is. at extra low concentrations..

 

Aluminium is CLAY... Bauxite. extremely abundant. The big cost is energy to extract it refine it./ Like copper. Both easily recycled.. Single use plastic MUST be banned It's now everywhere and even showing in breast milk.. Stuff should last longer and be designed to be recycled at the beginning.. Iron and nickel are most of what the earth is at it's core..

 

Coals like most sedimentary things has impurities that are released when it's burned. Crude oil has a high % of Sulphur. Can be around 8% There are mountains of Sulphur that are of no real value. It's extremely toxic if oxidized, luckily not so in it's basic 3 allotropes. where it's fairly inert.

 

Flax could be used to replace a lot of single use plastic, paper etc. We just use the most cheap way and don't concern ourselves with waste and the tonnes of garbage that affluent societies "create" for each person each year. is just incredible and not able to be sustained on any measure. Nev

 

 

[willedoo]

It would be all right if we were a bunch of hippies living in the hills. But we are a planet of 7 billion people and growing. Most live in cities. To get by on recycling we'd have to shed a few billion people.

 

I agree that we can do without mining gemstones, they are not necessary. A small amount of gold is necessary and present in a lot of high tech applications, but again, only in small quantities. Gold is a very important currency in the world. In my opinion, the U.S. dollar's power is not all used for good. I wouldn't like to see a world with only Fiat currencies; it places too much power in too few hands.

 

I'm not against all these ideas, just being realistic. To do away with a significant amount of mining, we have to do away with a significant amount of people. With current growth, how do we do without steel and the coking coal to smelt it. Re-cycling is a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of steel the world needs to do what we are doing. The point I'm making is that the demand for these basic products is far greater than the amount we can re-cycle.

 

I'd love to dream away about all the alternatives, but I just can't see re-cycling what we already have being able to keep up with the demand. It's quantity of scale that I see as the issue.

 

 

[Litespeed]

Where do I start,......

 

Fiberglass etc can be made from organic sources or just replaced with natural fibres like hemp. Resins can also be from a organic base and they don't burn easy either.

 

Concrete has lots of replacement options which means it can be greatly reduced in use. Ever seen a rammed earth wall?

 

Ever heard of Laminated wood beams?

 

We are now building skyscrapers out of the stuff, all fully reusable or recyclable at end of buildings life.

 

We even have hemp panels which are similar in spec to honeycomb panels made of carbon and aramid. These have been available for over 20 years and have been used in aircraft. Why don't we see more of this? Industry is stuck in old school tech and deeply embedded with big oil and mining products.

 

There is almost no product on the planet that can't be done using organic bases instead of oil- which started as plant matter in the beginning.

 

But what about say a fire door? Yes been made in Asia and Europe from hemp and resin for 30 years and much higher fire rated than the old school ones and weigh a lot less.

 

Most mining is completely redundant. When we need a refined mining product either recycle it or use renewable power to create it.

 

 

[octave]

I do think mining of some sort will be with us for some time but it is interesting to see where engineering is going. Concrete is extremely energy intensive and its use is a substantial contributor to co2 production. Wood, on the other hand, is renewable and it locks up CO2 for at least the life of the building. The wood, of course, would have to be harvested in a sustainable way.

 

Vancouver is home to the world’s tallest wooden building...for now

 

https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/wooden-skyscrapers-timber-trend-catching-fire-duplicate-2/index.html

 

 

[Litespeed]

An awefully large amount of that steel we keep making is used for wasteful purposes- just look at all the ghost cities in China. That represents a massive amount of coal, steel and concrete that may never be fully utilised, if at all.

 

When we don't account for the true costs of these materials it is all too easy to waste the natural, financial and human capital of the planet.

 

 

[Litespeed]

How do we make steel with coking coal?

 

It is called carbon, ......those green things in the forest make it. Just use pyrolysis you get gases to burn for power or use a reactor for long chain molecules and make plastics and also gives you carbon. Not real hard and have been doing it for centuries.

 

 

[spacesailor]

"Gold is used for "ornaments".mostly".

 

ALL the contact's in this laptop re gold plated, Gold the Only metal that doesn't corrode.

 

Thats why its good to hang around your neck, No rust or other stain.

 

spacesailor

 

 

[coljones]

List of countries by carbon dioxide emissions - Wikipedia

 

If China wanted to increase their per capita emissions to equal Australia or USA its total greenhouse emissions would be enormous. There is a moral obligation on the US and Australia to reign in their per capita emissions to at least that of Europe or even China.

 

I lived in Newcastle for a while. We once (only once) left a window open. BHP never offered to clean to house, the furniture or the washing as their compensation for the foul pollution they were dumping through the house and the rest of Newcastle..

 

 

[Yenn]

Some funny things here.

 

Keatings 17% mortgage rates, that's when I bought a house. Since then rates are at a ridiculous low, but there are many repossesed houses in this area. Due to low rates allowing idiots to build houses in a boom time and not being able to keep up the re payments in the bust which followed. All the experts said there wouldn't be a bust.

 

Population density in Australia is 3 per sq. km according to OME, but wherever I look it is way higher. Even where I am it is 20 and that is nowhere near average for the settled areas. That 3 per km includes vast areas that are just not worth settling in. but I bet the Sydney or Melbourne are are way higher and in my opinion, not worth living in.

 

Todays news is that there is a senate committee looking into the extintion rates for Australian fauna. we are supposedlly obliterating fauna at a very high rate compared with the rest of the world. Nobody stopped to think that Asia, Europe and the Americas have already caused the extinction of more species than we ever had.

 

 

[Marty_d]

Australia's land area: 7.692 million square km

 

Australia's population: 24.6 million people

 

24.6/7.692 = 3.198 people/square km.

 

However there's a hell of a lot of square km with no people at all in them.

 

 

[Bruce]

Aborigines used to poison desert waterholes.

 

An effective way to feed your kids, but just imagine the hue and cry if whitefellers did it.

 

 

[Marty_d]

From what I've read, the poisoning of permanent waterholes was by use of a mild vegetation-based poison which stunned the fish (was this where "stunned mullet" came from?)

 

Hardly compares with decades of irrigation mis-management leading to a million fish dying.

 

 

[storchy neil]

your are not the only one to buy when 17% was there yenn

 

cant build dams greenies made shore off that marty neil

 

 

[spacesailor]

Put the dead fish thru a dryer, then a shredder. & sell to the gardener's as "fish fertiliser"

 

There's money to be made even after death !.

 

sounds MAD but No different to seaweed, (dried (by sun, ground up, then rehydrated, ))

 

I buy it all the time.

 

spacesailor

 

 

[spacesailor]

#41

 

your are not the only one to buy when 17% was there yenn"

 

It was NOT 17% when I bought, but greedy keeling pushed it as far as the courts, were it was called "profiteering" & the bank told to reign it in.

 

( house owner @ Brighton-Le-Sands NSW)

 

It made me put ALL my wage on that mortgage & live on the wifes small wage.

 

The Bank took a hit when people I know paid off that mortgage super quick. ( and had to repay excessive interest they Thought I would be paying over the next ten years).,

 

spacesailor

 

 

[Bruce]

There is a bush called "poison emu bush" which the aborigines used to use. I bet they would have used something more powerful if they had it.

 

Yep, space, I remember those excessive interest rates. Ours was capped at 13.5 percent but some new ones were up to 17 percent.

 

The mortgage was only 40,000 dollars though. No way could kids these days pay big interest on their colossal mortgages.

 

 

[Bruce]

litespeed, it would be a wonderful project to make a car or plane from only natural materials. I don't see how it could be done, but I didn't know about some of the things you mentioned either.

 

 

[facthunter]

I think the "stunned mullet" is from a process of flogging them near the back of the head in shallow water. I could be wrong but I've seen it done. White fellers do poison waterholes and creeks and rivers and AQUIFERS (even worse) with CSG and fracking. Notable case In point, Mc Arthur river NT. mineral mining, Cockle Creek north lake Macquarie years ago with Sulphide Corp.. OK Tedi Mine in PNG. There are thousands of ruined rivers particularly in areas where gold has been mined Phosphates from detergents also everywhere and unused medicines dumped in toilets We are trashing the world. Remember the plastic island in the pacific.Nev

 

 

[nomadpete]

Regarding plastics...

 

I vaguely remember reading about Henry Ford developing a source of plastic not made from oil. Vegan plastic?

 

He wanted to have control over the source of the material. And that was back in the days when plastic only represented 2% of his cars!

 

 

[Litespeed]

Most will not know that Henry Ford never wanted his cars to be petrol powered but preferred bio fuels which were common up to the 1940's. He had a estate at mount Michigan were he grew Hemp and made products including car parts from it for prototypes and fuel.

 

He was forced literally at the barrel of a gun to stop by the government as it had made growing hemp illegal in the 1930's after a campaign by Randolf Hearst and the Dupont family. These guys controlled the chemical oil plastics industry and newspapers, with Hearst having been given free access to Nth Americas forests to make paper from- a extremely polluting process that used products from Dupont.

 

Here is a video about Fords Hemp car, there are better videos out there I will search.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srgE6Tzi3Lg

 

We must keep in mind this was a cellulose based plastic.

 

Also note a lot of information on the web and elsewhere is written and created by those with a bias against hemp and other bio products as it is against there current business model just as it was 80 years ago.

 

 

[Litespeed]

Here is a vid of a guy making a hemp based aircraft , don't know his current progress. Vid also has other stuff as well, very gimicky vid but its American

 

 

[Litespeed]

Here are some vids on Hempcrete which is a low cost waste product from fibre making added with lime and water. The videos tend to say it is new but that is all bullshite, just a company flogging their stuff. It has been around in various forms thousands of years and ages to go rock hard and will last thousands of years as it naturally petrifies.

 

Also the homes they are building are only a half way tech as they still use a lot more timber than is necessary, but that is because the are still in the modern building mindset.

 

Also note the clever home block building machine in Thailand, could pump out thousands a day for low cost, let the dry and bingo, load supporting low weight blocks. Hempcrete can be fully load supporting when done to its best. It is also fireproof, vermin proof and pretty much idiot proof.It is also very light weight so loads in the structure are far lower and much easier on the worker building it. The use of Hempcrete can even be seen back in roman times and many of these structures still stand today.

 

 

And yes Hemp is now been grown in Australia so the materials are available and will become cheaper as more farmers get into it. Remember this is actually a waste material from making fibre. So potentially can be extremely cheap- think bagasse from sugar cane cheap.