Mining’s old guard needs strong medicine
A new report details subpar investor returns in the mining industry over the last decade, particularly big cap diversified companies which have not adapted to new realities.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg who has a personal fortune of some $18 billion joined with the environmental lobby group Sierra Club on Thursday in a $50 million, four-year plan to cut one-third of US coal-fired power plants.
“If we are going to get serious about reducing our carbon footprint in the United States, we have to get serious about coal, ” Bloomberg said. Rolling Stone reported that he was standing on a boat on the Potomac river not far from a 60-year old coal-fired power station to drive his message home.
“Ending coal power production is the right thing to do, because while it may seem to be an inexpensive energy source the impact on our environment and the impact on public health is significant. Coal is a self-inflicted public health risk, polluting the air we breathe, adding mercury to the water we drink and the leading cause of climate disruption, ” Bloomberg added.
The Guardian reports the bequest still falls short of the sums the Koch family has dispensed to defend oil and coal interests. According to Greenpeace, the billionaire oil brothers have donated $55m to the climate change scepticism cause.
Image is by lev radin / Shutterstock.com
2 Comments
lynns
why not put that $50 million and the $55 million into cleaner ways to burn coal?is it because green is really greed?
Bob Ashworth
Bloomberg may be wealthy but apparently knows very little about science. Coal, oil, natural gas and biomass are the only green fuels on the planet. Carbon dioxide is responsible for life on earth. Without it, no plants and no animals (no humans). Next thing they will be wanting to do is eliminate oxygen.
Windmills kill birds, nothing green there. Solar panels cover land where plants could grow. Nothing green there. But then again, except on those rare occasions when God makes him/herself a body and enters into the world for the rest of us “Stupidity is the prerequisite to birth”. However, some are more stupid than others.
In closing, although Bloomberg doesn’t know this, all gases in the atmosphere cool the earth, they don’t warm it. Why, because some of the radiant energy from the sun hits the gas molecules in the atmosphere and is reflected back into space. This includes carbon dioxide although its concentration is so small you could never measure the cooling effect with man’s instrumentation. Further, if we were to eliminate all manmade CO2 being emitted in the United states it would reduce the concentration in the atmosphere by 0.80 ppmv. (Lisa Jackson, Director of EPA, thinks this is significant???) The total CO2 in the atmosphere is 392 ppmv and according to IPCC data man contributes only 2.9% to the atmosphere, nature the rest. Of man-made CO2 in the atmosphere then the United States contributes 7%. (392*0.029*0.07) = 0.80 ppmv.
Global warming is the biggest scientific scam ever perpetrated on the people of the world. There is absolutely no science behind it. It is all being done to eliminate cheap power and replace it with more expensive power so a few can profit at the expense of the many!!!!!
Bob Ashworth
Chemical Engineer
Member American Geophysical Society