THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Environment? What environment? Federal inaction at Mt. Morgan is brewing a toxic disaster

Environment? What environment? Federal inaction at Mt. Morgan is brewing a toxic disaster

A mine tailings dam about to fail is a REAL environmental problem but is not "sexy" enough to attract the attention of the grand people of the Gillard government, apparently -- but it could be a disaster for a lot of people. Sen. Barnaby Joyce comments below

Well we do not have a problem as long as the 7,000 mega litres of water held back by the tailings wall does not break. In total there is 11,500 mega litres in the Mount Morgan Mine pit laced with cadmium and other heavy metals which would flow into the Dee River, then into the Don River, into the Dawson River and down into the city of Rockhampton's water supply on the Fitzroy. To understand the scale Lake Burley Griffin holds 33,000 mega litres.

They say that the cyanide that was used in processing is now inert but it is the acid rock drainage (ARD) that is the real problem. The water has a ph between 2.8 to 3.5. Understandably those downstream are a little anxious as the water is pouring through the tailings wall.

Because of the wet weather it would have been a good idea if the water course leading into the mine could be properly diverted around it.

The Government management could be described as a kiss it better job on a train crash. The State Environment Minister, Kate Jones, is almost pathological in her defence of bats. Maybe we could tell her that bats go to the river on the weekend. The locals are scratching their heads as to whether Kate has even visited the site. If she did it was low key.

Stirling Hinchcliffe, the Mines Minister, said how I dare impugn Kate's portfolio. Good-o. Well Stirling, apt name for a minister responsible for a mine which extracted 247,000kg of gold, 360,000 tonnes of copper and also 40,000kg of silver, what are you going to do apart from saying in a "yes minister" like form, nothing to see here, move on please.

When a ship the Shen Neng 1, ran onto a reef near Gladstone creating approximately one kilometre of damage, an aerial circus of everyone including Kevin Rudd, Bob Brown, Peter Garrett and Anna Bligh flew back and forth over the site crying tears of blood all over the cabin of the plane. It was a shame the planes with pollies instead of flying east to sea did not fly north west to Mt Morgan.

Later, cyclone Yasi knocked out, on a conservative estimate, 20,000 sq km of reef virtually shutting down sections of the much maligned fishing industry. An act of nature, sure, but there were no tears for the fisherman, apparently.

I do not recollect if we had spent all of Mr Garrett's, sorry your, $2.5 billion at that stage on ceiling insulation. If we had kept back $120 million of that we could have treated the water, emptied the pit, filled it in and covered it up.

Now, instead of a solution we are catching the water in dams that spills out and pumping it back in so it can spill back out again. Let me assure you that the little boy who stuck his finger in the dyke to save Holland had far more effect than the remedial work at Mt Morgan Mine. They have constructed a treatment works for 650 mega litres a year. Pathetic when compared to the enormity of the task at hand.

The locals down stream say they are looking up the hill to one of the greatest potential environmental disasters in Australia. The Dee River is already the most polluted in Queensland. The wealth of the mine was critical in the formation of BP and on a benevolent note, the Walter and Eliza Hall Trust. Unfortunately, it is becoming Australia's version of the former gold mines of Montanna and the environmental disaster they have bequeathed on the Bitter Root River. The Zortman-Landusky Mine was one of the first in the USA to attempt large scale cyanide heap leach extraction of low grade gold ores, unfortunately the water got out.

Where it really, counts the Labor party have deserted the environment. If the Labor Party, Mr Hinchliffe, Mr Garret or Ms Jones, who champions cleaning up our rivers, don't want to do it for the farmers or the people of Rockhampton, then possibly they may want to do it for the bats or the Barrier Reef. But wherever their motivation is, they should please do something more.

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Environment? What environment? Federal inaction at Mt. Morgan is brewing a toxic disaster

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