Using Google Earth to See Destruction

An anonymous reader writes "On Monday, an environmental advocacy group [Appalachian Voices] joined with Google to deliver a special interactive layer for Google Earth. This new layer will tell "the stories of over 470 mountains that have been destroyed from coal mining, and its impact on nearby ecosystems. Separately, the World Wildlife Fund has added the ability to visit its 150 project sites using Google Earth."

The real story

[argoff]

... should be that the US has a 200-800 year supply of coal, and if OPEC or anyone else in the world says "screw the US", the US can just turn around and say "screw you". Coal can be processed to make fuel too. We shouldn't sell our independence and liberty down the river for the sake of some enviromental cause. Even if we used all the coal, only the tiniest percential of mountains would even have noticable changes.

Re:The real story

[mdmkolbe]

Um ... Hydrogen isn't a renewable energy source. It is an energy storage mechanism. So we'll probably burn coal to make Hydrogen that we can than use to power our cars. (Hydro and wind don't yet scale up well enough, and most people are scared of nuclear.) Coal plants generally burn cleaner than gas cars due to efficiencies of scale so it's still a net win, but people need to stop thinking that Hydrogen fixes all our energy problems.

Re:The real story

[TheGavster]

Excellent plan! Then we can burn the coal to make electricity to electrolyze water. Or, we could liquify the coal, and crack it to generate hydrogen.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:The real story

[Nimey]

It's not efficient, is it? It wasn't in the 1940s when Germany was producing ersatz low-quality oils and fuel from coal.

Then there's the environmental impact of coal strip-mining. Even deep mines will have problems with sinkholes and where to put the tailings. The stuff's awful when burned, much dirtier than even diesel fuel, unless you gasify it first.

Re:The real story

[rubberchickenboy]

We shouldn't sell our independence and liberty down the river for the sake of some enviromental cause.

Ignoring environmental causes will "sell our independence and liberty down the river" quite thoroughly, thank you.

And I think you have it backward: others are saying "screw the US" because we have said, so often, "screw you."

Re:The real story

[Mark_MF-WN]

Coal CAN be extracted from the earth in a less destructive manner. It can even be burnt in a relatively clean fashion with minimal emissions, if one is willing to build plants that are marginally more expensive.

Granted, nuclear beats coal on all of those counts and the US is VERY friendly with two of the nations with the largest supplies (Australia, and everybody's favourite exploiter of Yankee overpopulation, Canada). Still, with just a bit of effort and will, America could satisfy both environmental concerns and industrial concerns using coal. Nuclear power and America's bountiful wind and tidal resources just make the picture that much sweeter.

Only Firepower Will Save the Earth

[Anonymous Coward]

Cute 3-D pictures generated by Google will not stop the destruction of the earth. Companies and persons intending to rape the earth will laugh at environmentalists' puny efforts to save it.

How can we save the earth?

Google should arm leftist guerillas in key areas with high-value ecosystems: e.g., the rain forest. In exchange for arming the guerillas, they agree to help the environments by killing poachers and blowing up companies that rape the environment.

Suppose that Google gives 10 shoulder-fired missile launchers and an arsenal of 200 missiles to the guerillas in Peru. In exchange, the Peruvian guerillas agree to kill 50 poachers and blow up 10 Korean fishing vessels.

Re:The real story

[bergeron76]

Friend - we haven't sold our independence and liberty down the river. We've squandered it away to rich Oil Companies and knownothing voters.

We've been too busy worrying about Linux vs. Windows to worry about old-fashioned buzzwords like Freedom, Liberty and Independence.

We are reaping what we are sowing. Most Americans care more about movies about comic book heroes, Latte coffee drinks, and purporting to be holy while cursing the latest football/spectator sport game. We don't have time for silliness like, OUR FREEDOMS and WHAT THEY WILL HAVE MEANT WHEN THEY ARE GONE.

So, who's up for a game of WoW?

We must be the change we wish to see. -Ghandi

uranium mining

[falconwolf]

Coal CAN be extracted from the earth in a less destructive manner. It can even be burnt in a relatively clean fashion with minimal emissions, if one is willing to build plants that are marginally more expensive.

Granted, nuclear beats coal on all of those counts

Have you ever seen what uranium mining does? Many of those who live where it is mined are opposed to the mining, such as the Diné or Navajo [sric.org] and those in Saskatchewan [accesscomm.ca]. Aboriginals in Australia have fighting mining since before it started, the Mirrar and Jabiluka [eniar.org] have been fighting it since at least the 1970s.

Falcon

Re:The real story

[Kadin2048]

This doesn't exactly make sense.

If you were able to produce energy from renewable sources at prices that were less than non-renewable sources, only a fool would keep using the non-renewables. Now, it might in fact happen, that once everyone had switched over to the new, cheaper, renewable energy source, energy consumption would actually increase, because with it being cheaper, suddenly things that weren't practical before, would be. That's all pretty straightforward capitalism-in-action.

The problem, is that nobody has ever found a renewable energy source that's cheaper than non-renewables, in anything other than very particular cases. (Obviously, if you're standing atop Niagara Falls, you'd be a fool to not use what's in front of you, but that's not something that people elsewhere can easily replicate.) So non-renewables are cheaper, and people use those instead.

What's more likely to happen, barring the discovery of some incredibly cheap renewable, is that people will continue to use non-renewable sources until they begin to dwindle, at which point the price will go up, at which point suddenly renewable sources will be competitive and will begin to become popular. However, because the overall price of a unit of energy has increased, some activities that were once possible, will no longer be practical, and will be terminated for cost reasons. (E.g., if the cost of commercial airfare goes up, people will stop flying places on vacation, etc.)

Blaming "capitalism" for these effects makes about as much sense to me as blaming Boyle's Law for a hurricane. What's going on here is nothing but a lot of psychology; individual people trying to do whatever produces the best outcome for themselves at particular instants. If you don't like the outcome, the solution isn't to rail against the models that predict it, it's to try and modify in some way the input conditions so as to make the desired outcome more likely.

Fine, 'till they go bankrupt.

[Kadin2048]

The problem is that many of the mining companies don't last long enough to put the mountaintop back where it belongs; they remove the mountain, take out some or most of the coal, and then go bankrupt.

There's a lot of finger-pointing when this happens, usually wherein management will blame astronomically expensive union employees and contracts, and the union negotiators and employees will blame mismanagement. (I suspect the truth is a combination of both, as usual.)

But the end result is that the company will go bankrupt and the mountain will get left torn apart. The same thing happens with some strip and open-pit mining operations; I know of a few places (mostly Pennsylvania) where there are open pit mines sitting around that were supposed to have been filled in, but the companies disappeared when the mines petered out.

IMO, the solution here is to require that before the first shovelful of earth is dug, that the mining company secures a bond for the cost of the environmental cleanup and restoration. If they go bankrupt or fail to restore the area within a certain number of years, the government takes over, calls in the bond, and has someone do it for them. The beauty of this is that it doesn't create a giant "trust fund" sitting around somewhere, for sleazebag politicans to raid for their own pork-barrel purposes, and it ensures that mining companies who don't fulfill their obligations will be pushed out of the marketplace: if you blow it and a multi-billion-dollar bond gets called in, you can bet nobody is ever going to underwrite anything you do again.

I don't know if this sort of bonding is anything like current policy, but it seems like the simplest way, and one that avoids actually delving into why the mining companies fail, which is a can of worms better left sealed.

Organisations should make more use GIS like this

[FromTheHorizon]

I think this sort of think is a great example of how Non Government Organizations (NGOs) can make great use of GIS (Geographic Information Systems).

More NGOs should follow this example and use technology like Google Earth to show where they are working, and what they are doing. This gives people a better idea of where the money they donate is being spent. It also gives people a better idea of what work needs to be done, be it to protect the environment, or to reduce poverty (although the two are fundamentally linked) - this is how technology should be used to make the world a smaller place. What would be great if WWF included on the ground photos of their program activities, so people could take a virtual tour of what was being done.

The next step is for NGOs to use GIS to help them with their work. A good example which I came across was in a refugee camp in Uganda, where they plotted to locations of Cholera outbreaks, and then compared this to the location of all the wells. Some of the wells showed high concertrations of outbreaks around them, indicating that they were contaminated - and so they were closed down. This is just a basic example, GIS could be used to make really interesting correlations between education, poverty and the environment.

However I work for an NGO and know how slow they are to adopt new technology, but that's a whole different story...

Re:uranium mining

[c6gunner]

Buddy, if we could find some way to turn Roses into the most efficient fuel known to man, there would be people opposed to having rose-plantations near their house. It's called "NIMBY", and you'll find that a case of it exists for any project worth pursuing.

Useless link

[Tweekster]

Why link a summary of content to a summary of content.

how about dropping that link right to something useful, not just another link site?

Re:The real story

[timeOday]

Blaming "capitalism" for these effects makes about as much sense to me as blaming Boyle's Law for a hurricane.

Bull. Markets are not natural laws like physics, they're created by legislation. E.g. property and contract law. Policy can greatly impact markets. The trillion-dollar subsidy of oil happening in Iraq right now will never be fully reflected in the pump price of gas. The costs of building levies to keep Florida and New York above water will certainly not be paid by today's oil companies and drivers.

Re:hydrogen

[jrockway]

Manufacturing algae is probably more efficient than manufacturing solar panels. In addition, compare what happens to a solar cell when it's reached its end-of-life to an alga that's reached its end-of-life.

Re:The real story

[complete loony]

Well not no value, but very little. You could have posted your whole summary here, plus the link on your blog doesn't work anymore. I just found going to RTFA a little annoying so figured I'd give the next person a shorter path.

As a native of Appalachia

[anomaly]

I grew up in appalachia, and have a deep love for the mountains of which you are speaking. While I do agree with you completely that the term genocide is wildly inaccurate, and in principle, rearranging rocks is not a big deal, even when done on a big scale; I take issue with the idea that mountaintop removal has no real environmental impact.

Please note that I am FAR from an environmentalist. I believe that we need to be responsible with the environment, balancing that with the energy needs that we have. We cannot return to an agrarian society which uses only renewable resources.

Factually, abandoned mines do leave acid runoff which does affect streams. While I make no assertion that the Charleston Gazette is unbiased in this matter, the linked article [wvgazette.com] also contains links to a report from the Department of Environmental Potection about the cleanup costs.

In summary, while I believe that your points are valid, it's also valid to acknowledge that a legitimate business cost is the cleanup efforts which must be undertaken after the coal is removed so that the streams are unpolluted.

Respectfully,
Anomaly

Re:hydrogen

[njh]

You'd be surprised I think. The hydrogen producing algae need fairly special conditions and fairly special algae. This means that they would need to be encased in light transmitting, long life, hydrogen proof panels of some sort - and quickly you're looking at panel technologies that are going to be more expensive than simple coatings approaches required for PV. Concentrating approaches that work for PV would kill the algae too. The algae will need nutrients and waste handling as well as hydrogen separation, large areas of leak free plumbing and tight quarantine to prevent random other species from muscling in and killing your colony. Such a large scale monoculture would be quite sensitive to mutations and parasites.

We're not talking a pond filled with green slime.

Re:Scary and revealing

[c6gunner]

Says a lot. "better people" -- are you saying that military people are better than civilians? That's funny because constitutionally, the military is subserviant to civilian rule

Yes, I, as a man who offers his life for his nation, am subservient to the drunken bum sleeping in a puddle of his own feeces, and the college student who wants to turn my nation into a Communist Dream (tm). Just because they have power over me, doesn't mean that they're in any way better than I am. We GIVE you power over us precisely because we wish to REMAIN better men - we have no desire to turn into power-hungry tyrants ruling over a military dictatorship. Just don't for a minute imagine that these allocations of power somehow make YOU superior.