Posts by Idiot Savant
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Rich: that's certainly what mining companies think. Mining economics is all about optimising extraction to maximise your long-term rate of return.
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Background geologists reports for the areas on Great barrier Island and Coromandel are here. Short version:
* The Parakawai Ecological Area only has aggregate (in other words, they want to destroy a reserve for a fucking quarry)
* They have no idea what is in the Otahu Ecological Area, but there's gold nearby, so obviously it must be valuable (this is how geologists "think").
* they think there's 14 tons of gold and 550 tons of silver still on Great Barrier, but gettign it would require digging up, crushing, and pouring cyanide over 4.3 million tons of rock (which is a pretty big hole). The value of this is estimated by the dumbfuck method at over $1 billion, but as noted above, that's the wrong method, and its not how a mining company would do it. -
The figure that I/S cited was of the value of "economically utilised" resources - minerals with mine shafts already sticking out of them.
Not quite. "Economically utilised" means "someone in NZ is digging it up". The actual value is based on the lifetime of the resource, i.e. total stocks. For minerals with "unknown but large" stocks (e.g. aggregate), they assume a lifetime of 100 or 1000 years, because it makes very little difference to the value.
What they're doing is that instead of going "x tons at $y per ton", they're treating the "resource rent" of a particular mineral - the net operating surplus of all companies extracting it minus cost of capital - as an annual income stream for the lifetime of the resource, and then taking the NPV. Which tells you why the analysis doesn't include unutilised resources - there's no way of computing the resource rent.
Brownlee's BOTE method treats minerals as a bank account. StatsNZ treats them as an annuity. The latter reflects reality far better than assuming we can extract them all at once.
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And yet many of the same folks who are horrified today voted for National last election
I suspect many of them thought National had changed. Others just thought Labour had gotten a little too comfortable. Hopefully, many of them are now regretting that decision.
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Both gold and coal mining produce mountains of toxic waste full of heavy metals
That's putting it mildly. For those who don't know, gold tends to be at very low concentratiosn - to get an ounce of gold (they're pre-metric), you have to dig up a ton or two of rock, crush it, and pour cyanaide all over it.
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Has anyone modelled tourism and trade impacts yet?
Not of this specific proposal. But IIRC there's ben some work on environemtnal sensitivity of tourism revenue, and it tuns out to be quite high.
DoC has done some assessment on the value of national parks, here. (PDF)
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Sustainable as long as we reseed the ground with gold every few years so that more gold can grow? Um, yeah...
That only works for oil (at least according to curent wacky right-wing dogma)
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In the meantime, perhaps the Sunday Star Times could see about reporting some real news stories.
"But real news doesn't sell papers..."
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It actually appears that while the RWC is on there may not be room on TV for anything else ....
Another reason to use bittorrent.
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Rich: yes, the metaphor leaves a little to be desired. It breaks down because chickens are not usually invisible, equipped with ECM, or hunted in the dark at maximum range.