Green Group discussion

Controversial gas from Peruvian Amazon arrives in UK

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-envir...

Thanks for the post Robert. Yet another reason, in a long line of reasons, why I am coming to the opinion that we should focus on the preservation of ourselves and our community instead of prevention.

The story about Peru is being repeated in spades in the US, China, Mexico and other locattions. Methane is 86 times as powerful GHG as CO2 over a 20 year period. Fracking is producing lots of it and keeping the prices low on Nat Gas, discouraging any real significant change.

Don't mean to be a depression pill here, but the reports and studies that I have been reading over the last few weeks are not giving me much hope for a decent life for the 99% of us in the upcoming decades.

I don't believe we even got 10 years before the weather really starts to turn around.

Robert,

Yup.. probably triggering more social unrest.. etc.. etc...

Time for me to watch cat videos for a while..

Ken :)

Fracking is thought of as a product of the petroleum industry but it turns out that the method of pumping chemicals into the ground to extract mining products is not limited to the petroleum industry.

Take a good look at the any smart electronic appliance, computers, phones, routers, server farms, smart appliances, they all have one thing in common, they use rare earth elements to work. Home electronics, communications, TV screens and monitors, the list now applies to anything. Even farms use smart equipment.

The source of a lot of these rare earth materials is extracted from the ground by pumping chemicals straight into the ground and then leaching the minerals out of the liquid which affects the water and ground above the surface and the water and ground below the surface. There is no attempt to recover the the spent chemicals. This is the exact mechanics of fracking. The next time we complain about fracking perhaps we should consider that there is much more to it than just being a petroleum problem. Who knows how many other products are mined in this fashion?

https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-...

Excellent point, Robert. Mining REEs is so filthy that it is banned in most countries, with the exception of where it has been ongoing for decades, such as Brazil, or where the environmental regulations are lax or non existent, such as China. Even if the REEs are mined in one country, the processing and its byproducts are not acceptable. This is why the world's REEs are substantially mined and refined in China.

The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age

China's exports of REEs. China has 70% of the world production according to this page.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chin...