The mind reels.
From the middle of a discussion of exceptions to the (very complex) legal rules regarding groundwater extraction:
The largest mine [in northern Nevada], American Barrick’s Beze Pit, is being dewatered at a rate of about an acre-foot every eight minutes. Excavation of more than a billion tons of rock in this mining operation will produce a pit nearly 2000 feet deep; once mining ceases, the pit will fill to form the largest lake wholly within Nevada, two-thirds as deep as Lake Tahoe (which is one of the ten deepest in the world).
–Legal Control of Water Resources, Joseph Sax, et al.
That’s an enormous amount of water – water which will, alas, almost certainly be rendered unpotable as a result of the mining operation.
There’s a FB group meme going around today: boycott BP until they fix the oil spill.
I don’t get it.
I mean, I can understand “BP hosed us really badly so we should boycott them as punishment.” That’s consistent, and it’s basically what I did to Exxon after Valdez (and, while I now believe that I was wrong to do so because the people who were most hurt by it were the service station owners, I can understand the impulse). It’s not clear that an oil company which operates no branded service stations can effectively be boycotted – it’s not like I know who extracted the oil that was refined into gas/plastic/etc that I buy – but modify it to ‘boycott Arco because BP hosed us really badly and they deserve to suffer’, and there’s at least something understandable there.
But boycott them until they fix it?
That only makes sense if you believe that BP could fix it but hasn’t – if you ascribe to them some deliberate delaying action which they would abandon in response to the economic pressure of a boycott.
But that’s not really a reasonable way to look at it. The blowout is on the order of a mile below the surface of the ocean. It’s in a place where very few manned vessels can go, under intense water pressure which makes everyday activities slow and complicated. Fixing a leak of this sort at this depth is something which has never been done before; as far as I can tell, they have some theories about things which might work, but it’s not like those theories have ever been put into practice. They don’t know how to fix it; they’re trying the ideas they have until one of them works. Trying to use economic pressure to get them to do it faster isn’t going to help.
What was that, again?
Dan Walters has a rant in today’s Sacramento Bee about downtown pedestrian malls (streets without traffic and parking which have been converted to pedestrian use only) and how they appear to have accelerated the economic decline of the districts in which they were seated.
Bizarrely, though, he didn’t mention Santa Monica’s wildly successful Promenade, which somewhat makes his argument useless: if he can’t acknowledge Santa Monica’s existence and present a theory for why it succeeded while Fresno and Sacramento failed, he doesn’t really understand the forces driving those failures.
[I can't articulate the theory; I don't have the necessary data. But I don't need a theory of my own to be able to spot the emptiness in his.]
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