The Great Copenhagen Cock-up (Politics)

[Mick Harper]

At last Brazil is doing something about the destruction of its rainforest by illegal gold miners. This is how it is done according to an (admiring) Al-Jazeera special report.

* A crack helicopter team flies above the canopy looking for illegal gold mining operations.

* When they spot one, they swoop down, forcing the miscreants to flee into the rainforest.

* When they do capture one of the illegal miners, they tell him they don't have room in the helicopter for him and there is no other way of getting him out. They leave him with enough food and water to survive until his comrades return.

* Meanwhile they destroy all the equipment forcing the illegal miners to seek a fresh part of the rainforest to start up their operations again.

[Boreades]

[Mick Harper]

Here's some very good news. It concerns a coupla beeg problems Australia has been having lately:

1. Its soil is being degraded big time, partly because of declining precipitation, partly because of overgrazing (and in certain circumstances, undergrazing).
2. Wool prices worldwide are so low because of competition from manmade fibres it is not worth shearing sheep -- but they still have to be expensively sheared.

[Mick Harper]

A coupla weeks ago I watched an inspirational YouTube about a wrinkled Malian farmer discovering that it was useless planting trees in the Sahel--like wot the Big Aid Donors were doing. What you had to do was find the old trees still just about alive under the sandy surface and give them some TLC. Any old Sahelian farmer could do it and produce lush green fields.

Today I watched another YouTube telling the same inspirational story only this time it was an Australian working for one of the Big Donors that made the discovery.

[Mick Harper]

Another YouTube, another desert transformed by unlikely means. Twenty thousand acres of Utah had become a barren wasteland thanks to... who knows what. There were desultory noises off to do something about it. So they sent in the consultants to do the sums.

[Mick Harper]

Questions For Our Times

What's the biggest private infrastructure project in Britain?
The Woodsmith mine
What overtook the Northern Line as Britain's longest tunnel?
The Woodsmith mine
Where is the world's largest known source of polyhalite?
The Woodsmith mine
What keeps going bust despite getting through billions of pounds?
The Woodsmith mine
Which incredibly valuable piece of British infrastructure is nine years behind schedule?
The Woodsmith mine

You'll prolly want to know what polyhalite is when it's at home. It's a form of potash that can be crushed into pellets and, without further ado, be spread on fields as a fertiliser. It's so 'natural' it can be used by organic farmers! The whole world is gasping for the stuff.

You're prolly wondering why such a bonanza keeps going bust. Well, Britain's stupendous deposit of the stuff happens to be slap bang in the middle of the North Yorks National Park so it only got the go-ahead when the operators agreed to

(a) disguise all above ground workings as agricultural buildings
(b) construct a thirty-seven mile tunnel from the deposit to an industrial park on Teesside
(c) constantly rip off previous investors by selling the project on at bargain basement prices to new investors just to keep the project on the road.

Meanwhile, just down the road, a bunch of polyhalite extractors are operating a perfectly ordinary potash mine but started doing it in the days before everyone was determined to get any and every environmental knicker-in-a-twist they could think of.

[Mick Harper]

This Week's Extinction Quiz