Six people are dead and more than 20 missing following the Samarco mine disaster in Brazil. But in the rush to blame we must consider the complexity of such failures.
Bringing coal-fired power to the poor also means bringing pollution.
Biswarup Ganguly/Wikimedia Commons
Considerations of the moral case for coal must do far more than consider whether cheap fossil energy will lift people out of poverty. It must consider the pollution and harm to nature that come with it.
Part of the coal loading facility at Kooragang Island, NSW.
Flickr/eyeweed
The Academy says it will withdraw “millions of dollars” from investments in environmentally sensitive activities, primarily in energy and mining companies.
Bubbles can be worth a lot of money.
Ilena Gecan/Flickr
The bubbles generated by Laureate Professor Graeme Jameson have been worth over $36 billion to the Australian economy. He has just received the 2015 Prime Minister’s Prize for Innovation.
When researchers combined two industrial waste products they created a material that could clean up mercury.
Ashton Claridge/Flinders University
Mining waste rock from historic mines or even treated sewage to find useful metals and minerals could be a sustainable way to meet demand for these finite resources.
A geothermal plant in Kenya leading the way as an alternative power source on the continent.
SHUTTERSTOCK
As the Australian Government pushes ahead with its Northern Development agenda “making it easier to use natural assets”, it’s important to ask how this may affect the Indigenous peoples in whose territories development will occur.
Lots of these: settling ponds precipitate iron oxide and other suspended materials from the Red and Bonita mines near the Gold King Mine.
Eric Vance/EPA
The dramatic wastewater spill in the Animas River is past its critical phase, but given the long history of untreated mine waste, there will surely be more like it.
Coal PR has been promoting coal’s benefits for decades.
Jeremy Buckingham/Flickr
A politician invites coal industry representatives to a celebration of their work at the New South Wales Parliament. The purpose? To push the message that coal is absolutely essential to our economy and wellbeing.
Antarctica is managed by the Antarctic Treaty System, which regulates what states and private companies can do.
The National Guard
If we’re going to mine asteroids, then we need an international treaty to prevent it becoming a wild west. Thankfully we can look to Antarctica to see how such a treaty might work.
Many of the bodies in our solar system’s contain precious resources that could be used here or in space.
NASA
Mining in space is no longer science fiction. But could it end wars over resources, as Neil deGrasse Tyson has suggested?
An oil worker stands on the deck of a tanker at Bonga off-shore oil field outside Lagos. Africa’s extractive industries are committed to local content but universities aren’t producing the right kind of graduates.
Reuters/Akintunde Akinleye
Huge investments have been made to develop Africa’s extractive industry. The challenge now is to forge collaboration between the industry and institutions of higher education to build a skills base.