conservation

The Australian Government has recently announced revised, reduced targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. There has been some objection to this but it should not really be surprising.

Governments around the world have shown that they just don’t get it. They don’t see environmental protection and enhancement as fundamental to economic well-being. They have the traditional view that environmental conservation is a luxury that should be thrown over during times of economic difficulty.

This digression takes another journey over ground traversed in the post “Digression - Resource Consumption, jobs, and ‘Hands Off’ ” and in the Foreword.

In the foregoing discussion of pensions there appears to be a contradiction - the current trend of pension payments threatens severe economic dislocation, but such dislocation slows throughput and conserves wealth. This conflict is general - anything which dislocates economies conserves wealth by slowing throughput or locally halting it. This unfortunately includes war and terrorism. The destruction caused by these is mainly to throughput facilities, rather than to the wealth base. This should not be taken as an argument in favour of the evil, destructive side of human activity, rather as a way of pointing up the conflict between present economic systems and the earth’s well-being, on which those very economic systems depend.

Another misleading idea used to be that capitalism and communism represented opposite extremes, opposite poles of economic theory and practice.

Proponents of communism used to believe, inter alia, that if only the world were communist there would be no more environmental degradation, no more pollution, no more problems in that area.

There was a tendency for environmental conservation movements to become subsumed into the political “left” so that advocates on this side of politics regraded themselves as the only legitimate spokespeople for environmental matters, and conversely many environmentalists felt obliged to support general left-wing causes and to side with communist and socialist nations in the world political and ideological wrestling.

The extraction of minerals often leads not just to the consumption and depletion of the mined material, but also to the unintended but unavoidable consumption and depletion of rich and necessary biological resources, which are quite wasted in the process. This happens when minerals are located in nature reserves and national parks.

All the earth’s resources, animal, vegetable, and mineral, should be useable for the human economy according to the limiting criteria discussed previously. Parks and reserves are certainly conserved by banning mining in them, but this is not satisfactory because it locks up the mineral resources and causes negative attitudes to the conservation of biotic resources, with consequent careless destruction of them in impatient “break-outs”.

This technology promises to expand the amount of fissionable fuel available from natural uranium by a factor of about 60, by “breeding” more fuel than it consumes. This doesn’t change the non-renewable nature of the total uranium resource, but it does promise to make it so abundant as to encourage a casual attitude towards energy conservation.

“Fast Breeding” consists in using the stream of neutrons released by the fission of readily fissile uranium 235 to “breed” fissile plutonium from the relatively stable, only slightly radioactive uranium 238, which actually makes up 99.29 percent of natural uranium and cannot itself be used as nuclear fuel.