If the environmentalists in Cornwall that have a say in Mining proposals, are anything like the ones we have in the Agricultural departments,then it says it all.

These clowns want to reduce our food production,with a growing population= more foreign imports,

Go back 25yrs,that was our Coal Industry,now we are reliant on foreign coal for energy,while there is a growing unemployment situation.

To clear a deficit,you need to export products you produce,

Reckon its going to take a while at this rate.

I'd thoroughly agree!!! It's no wonder that the Mining History interest in Cornwall lags so far behind other areas in the U.K. When any interest in met by a wall of 'Daily Mail type' invective, it's no wonder that the authorities ignore the 'enthusiasts' and carry on without their possible imput. You need to work with the 'authorities' and not deride their every move. It takes some years to gain their confidence but it is the 'authorities' who have the purse-strings and the power to influence the mining landscape.

A good point. There is a tendency west of the Tamar to put head between knees and gaze into nearest dark hole.

Mentioned some time ago on another thread the loss of Holmans, Old School of Mines, Tramway Depot and Offices. All spendid buildings with history attached. Replaced by Tesco, Tesco then Argos, and McDonalds respectively. And that's only Camborne.

John, with all due respect, our country is totally and utterly beyond the point of return with it's finances. We have a state that is so big and so parasitic, it threatens the quality of life for many. Essentially, those who depend on it are going to have to adjust things, those with savings are going to be subject to huge devaluation of them with inflation/devaluing relative to other currencies.

I am a pragmatist and I have no time for first-half-only keynesianism. The fact is that Britain has to make cuts and it has to get some sort of wealth generation going on. This WILL be via exports and devaluation of the currency. Watch it happen.

I reserve the right to use the term yoghurt-weavers, as that pretty much typifies the sorts of people you get in environmental departments. It's all well and good saving every last habitat and respecting the life of every last lesser spotted dragonfly but sadly, in order for a totally overpopulated island to survive this ongoing financial and structural predicament, the last thing we need is bloody yoghurt weavers with no idea about how the economy works buggering things up.

Sadly, socialism, the state and environmental romanticism are luxuries which we as a nation really cannot afford at all. It's not very nice and I too would rather the population had been managed and all the little bunnies could twitch their noses in the daisys and we could all have a sustainable way of life powered by a low carbon wind-turbine.

But it is totally unrealistic.

However, since I have been reasoned into my viewpoint, I am prepared to be reasoned out of it. :)

I'll have a go, Stuey!

Firstly, I completely agree that the UK is right up **** creek WRT finances, but I do not see how your next sentence or the one after is relevant to that. I have a completely different take on the whole thing that I will try to set out.

Firstly, there is a basic principle at work here that modern economics has failed to consider - which is why the economy is buggered. That is that you cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet when that growth has to be based on non-renewable natural resources. This is so simple but economists/bankers exist in some kind of ethereal bubble where they can create and then transmit huge numbers from database to database. That is what money has become.

Now, with respect to resources, there are a number that we do have: Sn/W in Devon and Cornwall, Zn, Pb and Ag in Cardiganshire and so on and we now have the technology to extract them minus severe damage to surrounding areas. I too have worked with the EA and the people I have worked with (this was in connection with a possible opening of Clogau some years ago) have been nothing like your description: they were helpful, unpatronising, with a good technical understanding of the issues and the most effective ways to tackle them. I am all for carefully-run, small-scale mining ventures and there are likely still deposits of such a nature that may be worked at a profit.

Such metals are not a problem in what I call the Infinite Growth Paradox. But there is one thing that is: cheap energy and more specifically the low-hanging fruit that was, up until the mid-2000s, the glue that held everything together: cheap conventional crude oil. There are many things that exist within our infrastructure that relied upon that one source. Crude oil will still remain for a very long time, of course, but the era of it being cheap is over - hence the economic interest in drilling in very deep water or, as climate change removes more and more sea-ice, in formerly inaccessible parts of the Arctic. I think we all understand that bit.

Oil going from cheap to very expensive on the global markets represented a tipping point in an already dangerously poised global financial system - create money in huge amounts and lend it to people only just able to pay it back, then double the cost of one of the most basic commodities - plus the follow-through cost increased in oil-intensive products, food being the obvious one, and you have a disaster on your hands from which recovery in the traditional sense to an economy run on the same principles is impossible. This the economists have failed to grasp and instead the whole system is top-heavy, favouring the giant corporations over pretty much everybody else including the medium-size businesses of the kind that could get some of our mines restarted. This in turn creates more problems: large corporations historically have a poor record when it comes to environmental protection.

The effects of environmental degradation, from climate change through to marine pollution, in turn have another knock-on effect: they push food prices up again. This we will see in the coming months following appalling harvests in many key northern hemisphere growing regions as the Rossby waves that normally progress across the hemisphere became stalled at critical times, leading both to the US Midwest drought (the whole area stuck under an upper ridge for months) and to the hopeless UK summer (much of the UK stuck under an upper trough for months). There is growing evidence that such patterns are changing due to the exceptional warming that is going on in the Arctic: if that is the case we may already be stuck with this situation, featuring very prolonged periods of one weather-type or another, neither of which is conducive to good crop yields. Food prices keep going up globally leaving less and less disposable income to ordinary people - the very 'consumers' that this failed economic model depends on to go out and spend that disposable cash and keep things ticking over.

The solution is a more localised approach to economics and food production - that is not socialism, but a rather conservative, tried-and-tested model. We are already seeing the costs of both irresponsible resource-use and a deteriorating climate and they are going to hit us harder in the pocket in the coming years. That we can work around with radical relocalisation. However, a complete deterioration of the environment is another matter altogether. Considering that it produces three things we cannot do without - edible foodstuffs, drinkable water and breathable air - it is not a vast jump of faith to conclude that if it goes, it takes all of us with it - yoghourt weavers and all!

Well said, John. I too was tiring of the unnecessarily negative rhetoric expressed here which I find as unrealistic as the alleged attitudes being moaned about! Caricatures have their place in debate, but never be fooled into believing they are a true representation of reality.

They do exist though John & Peter. One that readily springs to mind is the so called "problem" of people walking their dogs in parts of Snowdonia. How is this a problem you may ask. Well, the dogs tails do untold damage to certain lichens!

There are others I can think of, but that one popped up in my head first.

So please stop generalising. If you despise the "extreme" views of such people, then how does taking an extreme opposite view help anyone? I think John hit the nail on the head. I think that caricatures are entertaining, but like jokes, they wear thin quite quickly and are counter-productive with repetition.

As regards the drought and wet weather don't forget the sunspots.
As for economic growth it goes up and down and up and down always has and always will do.
This country seams to have turned into a large service industry.
The powers that be like doing the smoke and mirrors bit, no income tax for those earning up to £10,000 thus more money in the pockets of the poor, know doubt to be spent on stuff that attracts a nice rate of VAT or other form of tax thankyou very much.
Yes lot's of lost buildings, what happened to the Bickfords Fuse Works? It's been years since I was last down that way, last time I saw it it was in a sorry state.
On the other hand it is we that are interested in this old mining stuff, not Joe public, the powers that be have to be seen to be doing right for Joe otherwise no re election.
It's all dificult at the moment, more cuts the same old record trying to make the countries finances sound like a household budget, what is that all about, buisnesses need to borrow to grow, I bet when all's said and done they end up borrowing as much or more than the last lot did.
I'm digressing...anyone remember Pattern Recognition and Cligga Head? Could create umpteen jobs...Could, being the operative word.
Another few words if that's ok...."Cornwall sticking it's head between it's knees" etc etc maybe it does maybe it does not.
All I can say is that there has been quite a few lost opportunities down hear for whatever reason, the "green" industry may not be a bad idea, we are geographically placed for such ventures, remember Dr Batchelor and the hot rocks project, what happened there? Tourism seems to be the thing now, great, most of the tourism workers earning the minimum wage, that's really going to get things buzzing...
It is down to our leaders, I suspect not a lot will change but then again it didn't in France in the 18th cent. 'till something happened.
Anyway the lights are going to go out soon if nothing is soughted out, we consume to much energy in our homes, no need to really but that's down to the powers that be...remember the dash for gas, there will be another one if something isn't done.

Lozz.

Interesting points Lozz.

Sunspots-wise, nothing very important is occurring: we left solar minimum in 2010 (which on many datasets was the warmest year to date) and we are at or close to a weak solar maximum. The forcing just from albedo-loss in the Arctic due to sea-ice loss and low spring snow-coverage is far greater.

But you are right - and not just a service industry - a financial service industry, pushing new wacky ways of moving numbers around from one database to another. This isn't real. It is abstract.

What would be real would be small well-run mines, serving local manufacturing industries staffed by skilled people, turning out not "stuff" but real, useful tools, with which local woodlands could be managed, smallholdings run and so on. The sort of well-made tools my Grandfather used to use and I do still, to help provide a sustainable (wasn't the word back then - 'common sense'?) way of life where we ate seasonal produce, played outside in the dirt to let our immune systems develop as they should do and were not constantly distracted by advertisements and what the multiple vacuous celebs are doing/wearing/snorting up. Yes it was not always easy - but neither did anyone expect it to be. At 50 I can say I was born into the tail-end of it and it was a reasonably happy time: I think there are a lot more pissed-off people now than there were then.

There are really good bits of now that we have developed - advancements in healthcare for example, just as decent sanitation was a huge step forward 150 years ago. But we could go back yet bring the good bits with us, abandoning the superfluous nonsense.

Globalisation was the biggest balls-up of the lot IMO, because different things are bound to work differently in different countries, and it has to a large degree resulted in this mess. The oil-spike and consequent financial and food-price crises we have seen are global in nature. Perhaps that is the biggest hint that localisation of economics is the answer, and perhaps we need to take another look at the whole concept of economics and money. They have gone way beyond what was originally intended. An economy should serve us, not (apart from a small elite) the opposite.

In fact John, I agree totally with your points about growth. Totally and utterly.

I've forgotten the authors, but there are a couple of good current books I've read about the matter. Growth is very much a predicament, not the problem they are pretending it is.

We do need to adjust ourselves accordingly.

I do worry that rather than taking a very cold look at the facts and making serious decisions, the politicians are fiddling around the edges, making personal hay and acting in the interest of a sub-group, the political class and their cronies.

I am sceptical about CO2 driven climate change because of the whole furore behind it, from rotten peer review perversions, to cherry picked data, to vested interests to climategate. My paranoia makes me believe that the whole UN IPCC is in fact a noble lie as a reaction to the peak oil situation. It was doing fine until various other holes appeared in the data and methodology.

I firmly believe that man is a pretty disgusting virus of an organism and ecology is bloody important. However, this has been diverted with plant-food-gas hysteria. I was following a debate on a well known website between several people, including an Oxford Professor and a couple of IPCC staff, it made me take up an interest in critical thinking. Running through the main themes, there is an awful lot of arguing from authority and strawmen. I once (arguing from authority) worked alongside a chap who was IPCC sulphides man. Needless to say, our rational debate ended in him showing his communist streak and Plymouth Universities very own sulphides man got that hysterical about climate change his parting words were "If you had children, you'd understand".

The other day, I picked up a book about extinctions, which was hugely interesting. Climate change, including catastrophic climate change is real and a feature of our globe. We cannot stop it, nor can we avoid evolution or extinction. All of this is a feature of the life of the planet, which will be bombproof and continue, until liquid water has gone.

If we were going to attempt to manage our progress, it would probably best be done via populations and then very real ecology/conservation. The warped mess we find ourselves in is a result of us being unable to manage ourselves adequately. My original point was that people who do see this and can appreciate it often put eutopian ideals, both economic and behavioural too much in the forefront of their thinking.

Since we have failed to manage our population and have got ourselves into this mess at the end of a credit fuelled period of luxury, it is all very unsustainable and needs proper management. I'm not sure what those in Brussels, Westminster or Bilderberg Hotel are doing, but it seems to me to be fussing about Jimml fixit, gay marriage and scottish devolution.

The consequenses of us not dealing with this financial predicament are above and beyond everything else. From the books I've read, to the things I observe, it's a mess.

The End of Growth, Richard Heinberg, IIRC.

Anyway, I think that primary industry should be looked at very carefully to see that it is viable where possible, even if the local flora/fauna suffer in the short term.

Interesting points Lozz.

Sunspots-wise, nothing very important is occurring: we left solar minimum in 2010 (which on many datasets was the warmest year to date) and we are at or close to a weak solar maximum. The forcing just from albedo-loss in the Arctic due to sea-ice loss and low spring snow-coverage is far greater.

But you are right - and not just a service industry - a financial service industry, pushing new wacky ways of moving numbers around from one database to another. This isn't real. It is abstract.

What would be real would be small well-run mines, serving local manufacturing industries staffed by skilled people, turning out not "stuff" but real, useful tools, with which local woodlands could be managed, smallholdings run and so on. The sort of well-made tools my Grandfather used to use and I do still, to help provide a sustainable (wasn't the word back then - 'common sense'?) way of life where we ate seasonal produce, played outside in the dirt to let our immune systems develop as they should do and were not constantly distracted by advertisements and what the multiple vacuous celebs are doing/wearing/snorting up. Yes it was not always easy - but neither did anyone expect it to be. At 50 I can say I was born into the tail-end of it and it was a reasonably happy time: I think there are a lot more pissed-off people now than there were then.

There are really good bits of now that we have developed - advancements in healthcare for example, just as decent sanitation was a huge step forward 150 years ago. But we could go back yet bring the good bits with us, abandoning the superfluous nonsense.

Globalisation was the biggest balls-up of the lot IMO, because different things are bound to work differently in different countries, and it has to a large degree resulted in this mess. The oil-spike and consequent financial and food-price crises we have seen are global in nature. Perhaps that is the biggest hint that localisation of economics is the answer, and perhaps we need to take another look at the whole concept of economics and money. They have gone way beyond what was originally intended. An economy should serve us, not (apart from a small elite) the opposite.

I mentioned sunspots because I listen a lot to HF Radio Transmissions, another pastime of mine, more spots means normally more solar activity, there have been a few X flares of late, a lot of these bursts contain a lot of energy, if they are earth directed then we get the effects, there is still a lot we don't understand about solar events. spaceweather.com is normally pretty good for up to date info including asteroids we might or might not need to be concerned about.
I agree with what you say it's all numbers and paper and a lot run the same buisness model...screw the customer.

As for the mining down here only time will tell, there has been many a false dawn in the past, it would be good see something come of it though.

Lozz.

I think the important point, Stuey, is to critically identify the manipulators and the cherrypickers. From your comments, I can see echoes of the climategate affair running on through. To me, the way the opposition dissected these emails and arranged the juicy bits suggests they were playing to an audience. It happened to me in March when the Skeptical Science management back-stage (of which I am a part) got hacked. Some of our subsequently-quoted posts were edited by removing sentences so as to completely alter the context of what we were saying (in private, to put first things first). I'd be delighted to sit in a pub/stope or wherever to discuss climate change, but please understand where the dirty tricks primarily come from - USA right-wing corporate interests - and their Tory lapdogs who to my knowledge have never done a bloody thing for the good people of Cornwall.

I think the important point, Stuey, is to critically identify the manipulators and the cherrypickers

add the word 'Group' to the word 'Bilderberg' and you'll not be far away from the answer

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I think the important point, Stuey, is to critically identify the manipulators and the cherrypickers. From your comments, I can see echoes of the climategate affair running on through. To me, the way the opposition dissected these emails and arranged the juicy bits suggests they were playing to an audience. It happened to me in March when the Skeptical Science management back-stage (of which I am a part) got hacked. Some of our subsequently-quoted posts were edited by removing sentences so as to completely alter the context of what we were saying (in private, to put first things first). I'd be delighted to sit in a pub/stope or wherever to discuss climate change, but please understand where the dirty tricks primarily come from - USA right-wing corporate interests - and their Tory lapdogs who to my knowledge have never done a bloody thing for the good people of Cornwall.

John, this has been going on and on with both sides.
The end product is that ordinary folk now tar all scientists with the same brush.

The bit that I am puzzled about is how a thread on reopening a mine can lead into arguments about climate change.
:lol:

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The state of our flora and fauna says a lot as to where we are heading.
Ironically long abandoned mine and quarry sites can offer a good sanctuary, as do the verges of the motorway....

Lawrence.

lozz in the 80s i had a transistor radio (was Russian cant remember its name) that had tons of short wave wavebands among others and some of these picked up what id term as "harmonics" is that sunspot or earth's magnetic field it sounded weird anyway.
back to subject on opening a mine considering the state of the world economy unless the powers that be turn their backs on small time mining ventures red tape will always halt the attempt due to safety/pollution issues not that im advocating polluting rivers near your lead mine but it does happen and thats why the red tape.

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lozz in the 80s i had a transistor radio (was Russian cant remember its name) that had tons of short wave wavebands among others and some of these picked up what id term as "harmonics" is that sunspot or earth's magnetic field it sounded weird anyway.
back to subject on opening a mine considering the state of the world economy unless the powers that be turn their backs on small time mining ventures red tape will always halt the attempt due to safety/pollution issues not that im advocating polluting rivers near your lead mine but it does happen and thats why the red tape.

Hi, I don't want to get to far OT so will be brief, probably not harmonics you heard, there are lots of wierd noises in the radio spectrum to most folk, most can be explained no problem. Solar emissions can severely hamper radio propagation and some types can enhance it, all depends on the freqencies in question and the type of solar emissions and the time of day, for a basic understanding of the daily effects of the sun on propagation (with or without sunspots) google gray line (or grayline?) and radio.

Lozz.

Forgot to add: if you grasp the basics of the effect of the different layers of the earths atmosphere on electromagnetic radiation you will see why VHF?UHF comms. is line of sight.
The subject of VHF/UHF comms. has been mentioned before on this forum so I hope I am ok with this post.

Lozz.

i had a jumbo jet and a cobra gtl cb and depending on the weather at the time limited how far round the world i could transmit....but this is off topic so ill shut up.. :offtopic:

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Some ideas:

Restore leat-systems in Central Wales and elsewhere 🙂 - in the long term they will enable mines to be operated quite a lot of the time using renewable energy, with non-renewable as the backup. Properly designed, such systems could also generate power for the National Grid - and a bubbling leat is a lot nicer to look at than a wind turbine....

Use modern exploration-techniques in areas in which they have never been applied.

Determine likely cut-off grades with the modern regulations costed-in.

Develop a portfolio of hot targets that will become hot property when shortages emerge.

Think of it, as they say in some sports, as a long game...