"They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot."
Well, that's almost right. They don't want to pave paradise. They want to mine it.
Here are two phrases that you probably never expected to see in the same sentence: "the Grand Canyon" and "uranium mines."
Two years ago, the Obama Administration realized that new uranium mining in Arizona could destroy the Grand Canyon, and the Colorado River flowing through it. So it issued a proposed rule to prevent that. The rule would prevent uranium mining in an area equivalent to forty miles long and forty miles wide, which is smaller than the Grand Canyon itself.
380,000 people submitted comments to the Obama Administration. Well over 90 percent of the comments were in favor of the proposed rule.
We're talking about the Grand Canyon here. One of the Wonders of the World. Seventeen million years old. Five million visitors a year.
And the Colorado River. Ten million people use it for recreation each year. It provides water to millions of people.
But the mining companies don't care. They want to build a mine wherever they want. And there are Members of Congress who want whatever the mining companies want.
So they introduced H.R. 3155, which would handcuff the Obama Administration, and let the uranium miners run wild. And now the battle is joined.
Here is the worst part. It's not like anyone has to guess how this story ends. There already is a uranium mine near the Colorado River, upstream in Utah. That mine has produced 16 million tons of radioactive debris. The taxpayers are spending $720 million to move that radioactive debris away from the river.
Can't we learn from our mistakes? Or at least avoid bigger ones? "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?"
Arizona's Congressman Raul Grijalva knows what we've got, and he doesn't want it gone. He is leading the fight against H.R. 3155. At a hearing a week ago, he systematically laid out the arguments in favor of protecting the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River. And he exposed the fact that one witness who claimed to be an objective scientist stands to make a fortune if the mining goes ahead.
We have to do something about this. Help save the Grand Canyon. Sign Rep. Grijalva's petition; click here. So that the Grand Canyon can survive -- for the next 17 million years.
Courage,
Alan Grayson
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
They took all the trees and put 'em in a tree museum
And then they charged all the people twenty-five bucks just to see 'em
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
Joni Mitchell, "Big Yellow Taxi" (1970)
Follow Alan Grayson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/alangrayson
http://www.pewenvironment.org/news-room/press-releases/markey-introduces-long-awaited-1872-mining-reform-measures-85899366609
“The Fair Payment for Energy and Mineral Production on Public Lands Act of 2011 responds to these issues by setting a royalty equal to what other industries have been paying for decades. …………..â€
…………..“The Abandoned Mines Reclamation and Deficit Reduction Act would start to address the estimated 500,000 abandoned mines on public lands.â€â€¦â€¦â€¦â€¦
“The mining of gold, uranium, and other hardrock minerals is still governed by a law signed by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872. This statute gives mining companies “free and open access†to the majority of public land in the West, and in 2010 alone it allowed at least $2.4 billion in valuable metals to be taken from public land without taxpayer compensation, according to the House Natural Resources Committee’s correspondence with the Congressional Research Service. The Obama administration and members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have called for modernizing the law. The Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxics Release Inventory has identified the hardrock mining industry as the nation’s top polluter. More than $2 billion in federal spending went to mine cleanup in the past decade.
â€
I'm not in favor of harming the Grand Canyon at any price. I'll have to look at the details of this issue.
Thank you, Rep Grayson, for bringing this to my attention. It's going to give me a headache.
http://www.motherboard.tv/2011/11/9/motherboard-tv-the-thorium-dream
The Earth Mother is sending a unambiguous message and GIFT.
Earth friendly Technologies require REE (Rare Earth Elements)
so necessary for all those wonderful Earth Friendly Technologies,
wind mills, electric cars, etc., are buried in mounds of THORIUM!
Thorium the fuel used in Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reacror(LFTR)s!
One ton of thorium will produce nearly 1 GW of electricity for a year in an efficient thorium cycle reactor. Thus current coal energy technology throws away over 10 times the energy it produces as electricity. This is not the result of poor thermodynamic efficiency; it is the result of a failure to recognize and use the energy value of thorium. The amount of thorium present in surface mining coal waste is enormous and would provide all the power human society needs for thousands of years, without resorting to any special mining for thorium, or the use of any other form or energy recovery.â€
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4971