Obviously, geology is not the oldest profession, but I wonder if, as the science of very old stuff, it’s logical that we practitioners would so easily sell ourselves? What on ‘earth’ am I talking about? I’m not talking about a miner plunking his mercury-soaked chamois pouch of gold on the bar and going on a bender until it’s gone. Well, I guess that does mimic the behavior of some modern mining companies. No, it’s about the willingness to do just about anything for a buck or a job, to go along to get along.

 

I started my career on the premise that I was aiding society and civilization’s march of progress by lending my skills and training to the discovery and exploitation of minerals. You know, the Mineral Baby thing.

 

 

 

 

 

I began to have my doubts over the years as I read and experienced more history and found out that this baby is doing a lot more than just living, eating, sleeping and making cute noises. Maybe this baby needs to change its diet and consume a little less, too. I’m not talking about eating bugs instead of meat and going carbon net zero. Nor am I advocating the kind of proposed dietary change involving a massive consumption of lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel, graphite, silicon and rare earths, either, which the above diagram does not yet reflect.

This is what I mean: We don’t need salt on the highways when locally sourced sand will work fine and doesn’t kill the trees along the side of the road. We don’t need nearly as much potash and phosphate if we stop producing subsidized and inefficient ethanol fuel and return to more traditional crop rotations. We don’t need our military to be the single largest consumer of oil in the world, spewing depleted uranium projectiles and raining remote control fire and brimstone constructed from rare materials sourced from around the globe in pursuit of multiple undeclared wars. Etc. Etc.

I guess I just feel that my role as an economic geologist shouldn’t be just to satisfy the latest fool’s errand; in today’s world, errand should be plural.

I wish I could open a Mining Engineering magazine without seeing headline articles like “The postcoal transition in Germany and the U.N. sustainable development goals”– articles geared toward pushing the impractical agendas of elected and unelected global bodies down to industry workers, professionals and scientists. Or in another issue, “ESG issues overtake commodities risk; KPMG report highlights the importance of ESG to mining”. Here are our marching orders—kill coal, oil, anything that runs on, or contains carbon. Isn’t this a little bit insulting to our intelligence, and aren’t we collectively ashamed? Carbon, the building block of nearly all life, the fuel for plant growth to be banned? Where’s the push-back? Well, after seeing the uncritical thinking exhibited by many colleagues and mining leaders during the recent Plandemic, I guess I’m not surprised.

 

I thought that an important role of professional societies like SME, MMSA, SEG and others should be to provide a “safe space” for science, to borrow a term from our snowflake generation. A place for examining some of the premises of the whole green and sustainable narrative with real science and real engineering method and facts. Instead, our professional groups are repeating and incorporating these U.N. terms, some of which are subjective (e.g.; “sustainable”) in articles and talks as if they are settled science, or as if they make any sense at all in economic and engineering respects.

 

I really like Mining Engineering’s Annual Review of mining that includes data and discussion of the USGS work on the uses and sources of dozens of mineral commodities. That’s real data. Where’s the discussion of huge gaps in supply with respect to the silly and/or scary, depending on your point of view, projections for the re-make of the energy grid, the electric cars and the massive technology spend to make humans obsolete and machines sentient? Not to mention any push-back we collectively might have about this. When I brought up the issue of the need for our societies to challenge some of the newspeak garbage surrounding ESG and the role of critical metals in a webinar on the subject offered by one of them the moderator responded that that particular society is not a lobbying group. It’s not generally considered lobbying to simply present facts and analysis unless there is pecuniary gain, is it?

I don’t expect anything from mining companies who are only after profits. It’s actually embarrassing when big companies make a big show of implementing Sustainability programs, not to mention all of the Human Resources stuff dressed up as Diversity and Inclusion, Unconscious Bias Training, and respectful pronoun guidelines. The little companies on the other hand really showed great resilience 10 years ago jumping off the gold bandwagon into cannabis when the markets for the former turned down and the ones for the latter opened up. In the stodgy old days, it would have been a switch from Acme Mining to Acme Gold when base metal prices would turn down. But gold to cannabis??? OK, whatever. So, companies: Go chase your cobalt, lithium, nickel, rare earths and unobtainium. But let’s not pretend that this is good for the Mineral Baby, or us. It’s just a racket, isn’t it? C’mon man! What we see though is how this nonsense crosses over to the professional societies where Job One is now to apply the lipstick to the pig.

 

 

Looking back in time, this all seems to have started in the heyday of industrialized imperial America in the late 1800’s when the prominent mining engineers and geologists of the time formed their societies to assist in the building of the American empire. A lot was accomplished to set high standards for professionals and provide frameworks for the advancement of science and technology. It doesn’t seem to have been a period of reflection or self-doubt.

The push to supply the materials deemed critical for the advancement of society and its expansion was massively accelerated with the help of state propaganda and government control during the frequent periods of 20^th century wars. The question of supply of raw materials in the defeat of perceived enemies and the establishment and maintenance of world dominance by America was at the forefront. It consumed much of the energy and focus of the professional societies. Those big long-range guns required molybdenum! Government policies facilitated business combinations that reduced competition and increased the links between corporations and governments. Mining companies produced and sold materials to one country and then, when war was declared, they sold to the other antagonist country. There was little serious questioning by society about the mining industry’s role in the whole paradigm of empire and geopolitical machinations until the late Vietnam era. Since I was just coming into the workforce then, I don’t know if self-examination or re-assessment by the mining profession about its proper role, if that even occurred, resulted in any changes. I just remember a lot of moaning about low prices, over-regulation and the environment of serial layoffs and turnover after Vietnam, a situation that persisted during much of my professional career from 1976 to present. In the period of complacency that began in the 1980’s, any and every commodity was OK, no matter its use or destination.  There has been lots of discussion in the interim about import dependence, but little about the merits of the end use.  And that seems to be the case now, for sure, even though we are collectively going over a cliff.

There is no doubt in my mind that the economic system in place in 2019 was unsustainable. We are poisoning and radiating the planet, destroying or modifying the natural life that we need to sustain our population, and concentrating wealth into the hands of a few individuals and corporations. The carbon take-down is a wrong-headed scam that will smash most of humanity and leave what’s left to the big combines. There are no serious counter-proposals to right the sinking ship. Do we professionals think we are not going to be affected by our complicity and acceptance of the global agendas? If our professional societies are still operating under the directives and illusions offered by the United Nations and various and nefarious NGOs by the end of the year, I am opting out. I’m not going to help. No uranium, no cobalt, no lithium as of now. I like copper wire, galvanized steel, and silver dollars, so I guess I might be up for work in some select commodities, but no illusions about the common good in that.

In my opinion, we will not in the conceivable future replace the plentiful, efficient and relatively clean fossil fuels, which are, after all, fossilized and concentrated products of solar energy, and which are the key factor in our heretofore unheard of prosperity. I remember once about 40 years ago when I was on a low-budget trip to see a tungsten mine in the Yukon. My colleague and I camped by the side of the road and there happened to be a thin, exposed coal seam in the road cut. That night we had a fine campfire fueled by coal. I remembered an economic geology class lecture which covered the fact that the U.S. has hundreds of years of coal resources and reserves. Do I like big oil companies? Absolutely not. I worked for one and based on that experience and subsequent events I believe they are a bunch of overpaid, mediocre, lazy so and so’s, an international problem, and several of the executives, e.g.; executives of today’s Chevron and other companies in the past (BP, Exxon) should be in jail for a long time for their environmental crimes and political corruption. That has nothing to do fundamentally with oil, gas and coal; rather, it’s just the system in place by which they are produced and the inherent corruptive influence innate in a rich resource.

I don’t know what to counsel younger geologists and mining engineers to do about the current situation that I have outlined above, and more importantly, their own particular situation. I started out with high motives but I worked a long time with real doubts just to keep working and because the money was good. I’m not a paragon of virtue. I’m an Economic Geologist Hit Man. The only line I ever drew was not to aspire to run one of these large enterprises and I just concentrated on the technical challenges. But it’s not a comfortable place is it, knowing where some of this stuff you help mine ends up and the uses made of it? And the technological future offered to us, the surveillance, control and dystopian perpetual war (by the way, Слава Україні, just to get my virtue signaling in there) which depend on mineral sourcing…what’s there to say? Isn’t our participation even a little bit disturbing, dear Reader?

Maybe I’ll just bag it for a while and figure out something less destructive, and maybe more productive, with what’s left of my time here on green Earth.

 

 

I’m with the buffalo…

 

With apologies to John Perkins.

 

Footnote (7-31-22)  I ran across an interesting link in the Epoch Times to a paper put out by the Transport&Environment, a Brussels, Belgium-based clean energy lobby group ( “…vision is a zero-emission mobility system that is affordable and has minimal impacts on our health, climate and environment.”).  The 17-page paper (Analysis of the Climate Impact of Lithium-ion Batteries and How to Measure It) attempts to sort out the climate and environmental impact of the mining, manufacturing and packaging of the batteries needed for an electric fleet through a review of over 100 papers dating from 1999 to 2019.   The results from these studies are hard to analyze and interpret.  They indicate that a diesel-powered vehicle could be driven between 7,000 and 54,000 miles before there was any net reduction of CO2 emissions from an electric car alternative.  Obviously, this range is unacceptable, and there are so many uncontrolled variables in most of the studies that the writers put little stock in them.  The bottom line is that the studies to prove that green energy is clean and more efficient have not been done.  This is an admission from a well-connected lobbying firm that boasts on its website: “We got the EU to set the world’s most ambitious CO2 standards for cars and trucks but also helped uncover the dieselgate scandal; we campaigned successfully to end palm oil diesel; secured global ban on dirty shipping fuels and the creation of the world’s biggest carbon market for aviation – just to name a few. Just last year T&E’s campaigning led Uber to commit to electrifying much of its European operations.”

So, we are changing the entire world economy, lifestyles and work opportunities for millions of people, and enduring a new barrage of mandates to migrate to an unproven technology that has unknown benefits, dubious supply chain, and possible disastrous environmental consequences…