The front page of today’s New York Times features a big article clearly intended to get the readers riled up about the latest environmental horror that must be stopped. The headline is “The Illegal Airstrips Bringing Toxic Mining to Brazil’s Indigenous Land.” Subheadline: “The Times identified hundreds of airstrips that bring criminal mining operations to the most remote corners of the Amazon.”
Wow, this is bad. The airstrips are “illegal.” The mining is “toxic,” and not only toxic but also “criminal.” And it’s all happening in the most pristine place left in the whole world, the “remote corners of the Amazon,” much of it inhabited by the most innocent of all innocent indigenous people, the Yanomami.
So what is driving this big rush of miners into these remote regions? Could so-called “green energy” — with its vast demands for raw materials like nickel, manganese, aluminum and iron — have anything to do with it? If so, you won’t learn anything about that from the Times.
The obvious purpose of this lengthy Times piece is to get you outraged about the criminal mining wildcatters now said to be swarming the Amazon jungle. The piece starts with research conducted by the Times, using satellite photographs, that has identified a large number of airstrips — close to 1300 of them — that have been carved into the Amazon jungle, and that are now being used to bring in supplies to support the development of new mines.
Hundreds of airstrips have been secretly built on protected lands in Brazil to fuel the illegal mining industry, a Times investigation found, including 61 in this Yanomami Indigenous territory. The Times identified more than 1,200 other unregistered airstrips across the Brazilian Amazon — many of them part of criminal networks that are destroying Indigenous lands and threatening their people. . . . Carved into the dense, lush landscape, [the clandestine airstrips] . . . operate largely unchecked. . . .
And you will not be surprised to learn that this outrageous and illegal activity is all being facilitated by the callous and uncaring right-wing government of current Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
Since taking office in 2019, Mr. Bolsonaro has championed industries driving the rainforest’s destruction, leading to record levels of deforestation. He has both loosened regulations to expand logging and mining in the Amazon and scaled back protections. He also slashed federal funds and staffing, weakening the agencies that enforce Indigenous and environmental laws.
The illegal mining is causing extensive harm to the indigenous people of the area, at least if you believe the Times:
A recent study by Hutukara, a Yanomami nonprofit, estimated that more than half of the people living in Yanomami Brazilian territory have been hurt by illegal mining. The fallout, according to the report, includes malnourishment because of destroyed or abandoned crops, and malaria spread by the proliferation of mosquitoes in open mining pits and deforested areas.
OK, but why exactly this sudden rush of mining businesses into these remote areas? The Times offers little clue, basically just one line saying that the illegal airstrips are “pushing the illegal mining of gold and tin ore” into remote areas. But gold and tin are relatively small volume commodities on the world markets. Could these really be the main drivers?
For a somewhat different perspective on the situation of mining in the Amazon, try this February 28, 2022 piece from a publication called Undark (put out by MIT), with the headline “U.S.-Backed Companies Poised to Expand Mining in the Amazon.”
As of November [2021], nine major mining companies considered key players in the extraction of rare metals for electric vehicle batteries had 225 active applications to expand operations into or near Indigenous territories in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest.
Aha! The “key players” in the mining rush into the Amazon are big companies looking for “rare metals for electric vehicle batteries.” Why am I not surprised?
So are the materials people are looking for mainly just gold and tin, or are there lots of other, higher-volume things to be found? From a publication called Mining Technology, February 12, 2018:
The Amazon rainforest in South America has large quantities of copper, tin, nickel, bauxite, manganese, iron ore and gold, making it attractive to mining companies all around the world.
Nickel and manganese — those are the big inputs to the electric vehicle batteries. Bauxite is ore for aluminum, the main material needed, along with copper, for the huge amounts of new electric transmission lines that need to be built to support wind and solar power. Iron ore? Vast amount of that will be needed for the coming onslaught of wind turbine bases.
Undark tells us that all the major American financial institutions — the same ones that are now boycotting the fossil fuel industries — are lining up to finance the big new mines in the Amazon:
U.S.-based financial institutions are among their top funders, according to a new report by Amazon Watch and the Association of Brazil’s Indigenous People, or APIB. . . . The report focuses on nine mining companies, including Vale, Anglo American, Belo Sun, and Glencore. . . . Capital Group, BlackRock, and Vanguard, which collectively invested $14.8 billion in the mining companies, are the top U.S. investors named in the report. The leading U.S.-based creditor is Bank of America, which provided $670 million in loans and underwriting services to the companies. Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase were also named as top creditors.
Hey, this is for EV batteries, transmission lines, wind turbine bases, and all other kinds of good things to make the world “green.” Of course all the big financial institutions are behind it. It’s ESG investing!
And please don’t blame the people at the New York Times for undermining their own incessant and strident advocacy for green energy. They’re just following the essential principles of the official New York progressive orthodoxy as brilliantly distilled on the Manhattan Contrarian “About” page, first posted back in 2012 — particularly this part:
[U]sage of energy is a human right, but all actual known methods of producing energy are environmentally unacceptable. . . .
Minerals need to be mined somewhere. I would argue that the real issue is that many countries have nationalized mining rights, so the local inhabitants have no interest in mining.
If the Yanomami were getting royalties for the mining rights, they would be much less opposed. But as almost all greens are also socialists, they have a minor little problem on dealing with rights, period.
Countries that care about the environment have significant regulations that makes mining these minerals very expensive. Mining with no concern for the environment dramatically increases profits in the same way that fake pharmaceuticals made from fentynal increases illegal drug profits. Notice that China is heavily involved in both.
in both… arbitrage by labor including practical and actual slavery, diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry) and environmental including recovery and processing of disparately distributed minerals and Green misdeals through shared/shifted responsibility are ESG standards of the modern model: one step forward, two steps backward.
Corrupt countries allow “illegal” mining when bribes are paid. Green? Yes, as in dollars.
Princess Tom your opinion is worthless unless you’re a legal citizen of Brazil. Haha
The fact that you don’t even try to refute anything that Tom wrote is a good indication that even you know that you can’t.
Why am I not surprised?
Solar and wind only exist with massive amounts of toxic waste, environmental destruction and slave labor.
Environmental destruction in the Amazon is acceptable as long as it is for wind turbines and solar panels. The hypocrisy here defies belief.
Bigotry: sanctimonious hypocrisy, albeit consonant with the selective, relativistic, fluid principles of the ethical religion (e.g. human rites in lieu of human rights), a wicked solution.
yeah. I remember when they tried to bust Chevron’s balls & it spectacularly backfired on them.
The unintended consequences of insanity…
Unintended necessarily implies unexpected. This may be undesirable to the hypocrites pushing the insanity, but it’s certainly not unexpected.
It’s unexpected by the ignorant masses, but not to those of us who are paying attention. This is the nature of the problem, where people have been so emotionally triggered with constant claims of a climate catastrophe, they don’t pay attention and are fooled into acting against their own best interests in the name of a false greater good. This isn’t just affecting climate science, but nearly every issue promoted by the left.
Maybe NYT can produce the minerals their Green wet dreams need by pulling them from an unlikely orifice.
“We have to destroy the environment in order to “save the planet”. Priorities, you know.
Yes, and people must quit reproducing in order to save the Planet for their children and grandchildren.
Thought control is getting tricky these days with all the unintended consequences building up. Don’t forget to blame grid instability on the last 0.5% of the fossil fuel generators and unaffordable cars and housing on greed of the 1%.
You’re not implying NYT subscribers are easy to manipulate and fool are you?
If they’re reading the NYT, they are by definition easily fooled.
Fooling by omission seems to be a major tool for editors and reporters on a mission to find news that fits their storyline. That omission includes a lot of facts and insights left on the cutting room floor. I know this from experience with national reporters more so than local ones.
That many NYT’s readers do so every day means they want to be lied to and delusional.
hell, the whole state is like that about everything
Yes, but at least they publish Wordle daily!
Nah, they just need to wrap a lot fish with the fishwrap of record.
YUP! Progressives never think these things thru, they just see a marxist utopia future and do not think about the consequences.
“You can fool all the people some of the time, and half the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
Real Wealth comes out of the ground. Always has, always will. Food, minerals, fiber and water, all the rest is fluff. If you don’t grow the food and mine the raw materials, then you fight to take them from those who do. Such is the condition of humans.
Writing a program that increases worker productivity produces no wealth?
If the economy is restricted by inadequate resources, then making workers more productive just puts some of the workers out of a job. The base of the economy is the availability of essential natural resources.
There is no such thing as an economy where nothing is inadequate. By definition, all resources are always restricted.
Making farming more efficient did not result in an unemployment rate of 90%.
The base of the economy is labor, without labor no resource has any value.
Labor can be physical or it can be intellectual.
Actually, Mark, efficient farming did in fact result in high unemployment, about 50% in the U.S. Rural populations have been bleeding away and flocking to the cities for close to 100 years, especially the late-20th century U.S. Why?
USDA says, “The U.S. agricultural workforce has long consisted of a mixture of two groups of workers: (1) self-employed farm operators and their family members, and (2) hired workers. Both types of employment were in long-term decline from 1950 to 1990, as mechanization contributed to rising agricultural productivity, reducing the need for labor. Since 1990, employment levels have stabilized.”
For more information, see https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor
A pure service economy is a complete myth, except for traders. Someone has to be the middleman with a suitable markup. But even that is completely reliant on primary production from somewhere. Minerals, energy, food, raw materials. Even IT wonders such as smart phones are constructed of processed raw materials.
Of course, labor is essential to making it happen (production, manufacturing, processing, warehousing, transportation, delivery), but efficiency reduces labor demand. I’m not saying that is a bad thing. Eighty years ago, you and I would have likely been subsistence farm laborers, as was my paternal grandfather and my wife’s maternal grandfather.
Mark W,
No. It might reduce waste, though.
You have to differentiate creation of new wealth and shuffling of existing wealth.
Geoff S
Making existing materials more valuable creates wealth.
Applying intelligence to your labor creates wealth.
Yes, $200 per barrel crude oil has the potential of making the suppliers more wealth, but it doesn’t do much for the consumers. Furthermore, there is a risk that the sales will go down, meaning that the suppliers make the same or less than when the crude was priced optimally.
That may be true. But, as I pointed out above, that may be shared among fewer people.
What are they working with?
This is also how we will tame Mars or supposedly any exo-planet we inhabit.
Internally, I LOL. People at large are very risk adverse, frightened animals that just want their ears scratched told, “you’re such a good-boy.”
The article presents no evidence to refute the claims by the New York Times
You don’t think the boom in EV’s and “Renewable” energy may have something to do with it?
I made a true statement about the quality of the article.
I have no idea what is going on in the Amazon
Nor does the author.
Could be illegal mining for gold and silver
Could be part of the drug trade.
If it is mining for minerals needed for solar panels and batteries,
I’d expect the Times to celebrate. Legal mining is time consuming and may already be up to 10 years behind schedule for
NUT ZERO mineral requirements
Eliminating the responsibility of the first party’s requirement to provide proof, solid proof, for their claims?
Let the NYT actually provide proof.
e.g., Visit each and every airstrip to document that is all the airstrip supports.
e.g. 2, Visit every alleged mine to photograph mining and processing.
Part of the proof is that they must prove this for all 1,200 alleged illegal airstrip. Plus a visit to the governing entity to seek proof the specific airstrip is illegal.
Of course the Times had minimal evidence and jumped to conclusions. That’s what they do.
That does not mean it’s easy to refute them.
Leftists can throw mud (and BS)
faster than sensible people can refute them.
I don’t consider the Times a reliable source on any subject.
Refuting a Times article requires more effort than writing it
in the first place.
As known liars and propagandists, the New York Times hardly gets the benefit of the doubt. I don’t believe a word they print unless independently verified and strongly recommend everyone adopt the same attitude – if you read them at all. Honestly, I don’t know why you would seek out a source known to mislead you, but as long as some suckers actually believe them someone should debunk their garbage I suppose.
One of my three blogs’ home page includes the motto:
“Is that true? Or did you read it in the New York Times?”
Election Circus
This article is by an exceptionally good author, but failed to provide
evidence the Times was wrong. I am concerned that Mr. Menton pays
for the New York Times and reads it. I don’t believe conservatives
should financially support leftist biased media like the New York Times. An author named Hansen does that too (here). They both get partial credit for criticizing the Times after paying to read it.
Your post presents no evidence to refute the claims by the subject article.
(doing it this way is easy….)
You’ve got this bass ackwards.
It is the author who has to support his claims with facts, data and anecdotes. I merely pointed out that he filed to do that.
I am the editor of three blogs where I publish the best articles I’ve read online every day. One blog is on climate science and energy and had had over 330,000 page views. My only skill is deciding if an author knows what he is talking about and effectively supported his conclusion(s).
This article does not qualify.
I don’t trust the NY Times
I do trust author Menton
But the evidence is missing.
Is that really the best you can come up with? If so, you really should be ashamed of yourself.
At no time did the article ever try to refute the claim that illegal mining was going on.
The point is to ridicule those who are surprised by it.
The article implied there was illegal mining for critical minerals for solar panels and batteries. The Times insisted this was illegal gold and silver mining. No one mentioned the possibility of illegal drug production.
No one mentioned the possibility of illegal gemstone mining. No Brazilian experts were consulted. No first-hand or second-hand anecdotes were provided. No quotes of any people involved. No names. No data.
The author merely jumped to a conclusion.
That is poor journalism.
All they know is how to complain. Old sayings come to mind: You can’t have your cake and eat it too. There is no free lunch. And watch out what you wish for.
The green new deal is a wasteful disaster and if the Times likes it they shouldn’t complain about the consequences.
You can have your cake and then eat it.
You cannot eat your cake and then have it.
(well not in a form you want)
So, if you eat your cake, this too shall pass?
LOL!
A couple of positive things tumble out the NYT article.
First, in years gone by, this would largely have gone unnoticed until it was too late and enormous illegal mines had been excavated.
Thankfully, the NYT has access to fossil fuel powered aeroplanes (or even fossil fuel launched satellites) to scour the Amazon and discover the 1,300 airstrips. Frankly, that takes an awful lot of air miles to traverse a vast area of the rain forest to find them.
So well done NYT for burning lots of fossil fuel to retrieve the situation. I’m not sure how else it could have been done, even hot air balloons need heated air to function, which, to my knowledge, can only be provided by fossil fuels.
Second, being that I’m fairly certain the NYT would have accurately plotted the locations of each of the 1,300 airstrips, that information would have been turned over to the Brazilian authorities immediately so the airstrips could be investigated and closed down.
Perhaps the NYT will furnish the public with an expose of the Great Barrier Reef success reported just recently; y’know, just to add some environmental balance, and splash that across their front pages, celebrating a momentous occasion.
Anyone who has ever flown low altitude cross country can tell you there are tens of thousands of private strips all over the USA. Is that bad too?
The NYT is the one claiming the air strips are illegal.
BTW, if someone in the US were to build an air strip in an Indian reservation, without the permission of the tribe, it would also be an illegal strip.
It’s EVs that are the main source behind this mining as the article states. Earlier this year the IEA published its Global EV outlook 2022 ‘Securing supplies for an electric future’
It noted that EV batteries were responsible for almost half of global lithium demand in 2021 and that by 2030 this demand could rise to 70 or 80% which would require 30 – 50 new lithium mines.
Nickel is the dominant cathode for EVs and demand for it would require 41 – 60 new nickel mines.
Cobalt is also essential for EVs and would require 11 – 17 new cobalt mines.
So that’s 82 – 127 new mines to get to a total of 200 – 250 million EVs by 2030.
(They conveniently ignore the fact that they have also previously said that on average it takes 16 years to bring a new mine into full production)
So replacing the over 1.4 billion ICEVs in the world with EVs is going to require a very much larger increase in mining.
“It’s EVs that are the main source behind this mining as the article states.”
An unsupported personal opinion.
No evidence of lithium, nickel, or cobalt mining was provided.
It was merely assumed.
Without hypocrisy the greens would have nothing…
In the July 29 issue of Science there is a book review that hits on this subject. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add0714
New Yorker’s ignorance is something to behold. Reminds me of Michael Bloomberg’s comment: ‘I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer, It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that,’
Ignorance can be overcome. Stupidity and hubris, no.
They are much better at manipulating markets, taxing the manipulators and their specialized trading markets, and funding social programs with proceeds from the manipulators tax that can’t be reproduced nationally or in other states and regions.
Oh?
But if they are mining diamonds, emeralds, gold, tourmaline or any of the magnificent gems found in the Amazon, it is all right?
That is, I am unaware of NYT’s denouncing the Amazon gem trade, active since the mid-20th century.
The truth is NYT’s zealots have zero clues about the airstrips, whose existence they assume must be bad. For all the times knows, the airstrips could be bringing in doctors, nurses and medicines.
It doesn’t matter, the times has declared users of these airstrips to be toxic and criminal.
The NYT should immediately divest itself of all products that requires mining or fossil fuels to produce.
No computers, printing presses, machine woven cloth, synthetic shoes, all vehicles and their composite rubber tires plus anything resembling a battery.
Any other action by the NYT is pure charlatanism.
Those demanding population control/reduction never seem to lead by example do they?
They hope with religious… moral… ethical conviction that they can abort the baby, cannibalize her profitable parts, sequester her carbon pollutants, and have her, too. In Stork They Trust
Sorry Francis, I am reasonably sure that all illegal mining in the Amazon has been for gold and tin, which occur in alluvial deposits and/or surface-enriched deposits, and can easily be mined by manual labour or simple mechanical equipment, and recovered by sluicing or panning. This illegal mining by “garimpeiros” (as they are called in Brazil) has been going on at least since the 1970s, long before Bolsonaro appeared on the scene. But of course Bolsonaro is a Trump-like figure, so he has to be demonized at every opportunity.
Most folk tend to assume that “Amazon rainforest” is all in Brazil, but there are significant slices of it in Venezuela, Colombia and Peru. Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana have smaller slices. Never mind, “Bolsanaro Bad” is a good theme for the MSM.
The idea the the nine major mining companies referred to have been operating illegal mines, which would require large concentrating plants (we call them “mills”) and could not possibly be supplied by single airstrips is absurd to anyone who knows anything about mining. Such installations would easily be visible on Google Earth , and in any case, big mining companies don’t operate that way. They have (as the article correctly pointed out) active applications – note the word “applications”.
Again, anyone who knows how the metal mining cycle works will appreciate that most of those 225 applications are almost certainly for exploration projects. The proportion of exploration programs that result in the discovery of viable ore deposits is very small. A minority may be for definition or development work.
Francis Menton’s articles are usually quite good, but in this case he has wrongly tried to conflate illegal surface mining for gold and tin by garimpeiros with a supposed rush to mine “critical minerals” for the future all-electric paradise that we are being promised. The 225 applications are nothing more than mining companies doing what they have always done – exploring for new resources wherever the geological and regulatory environments look favourable. Mining companies that didn’t focus on looking for new resources would eventually run out of resources.
The NYT article appears to imply that some of the 1300 airstrips support illegal logging. You don’t need to know anything about forestry* to appreciate that you need a road to get your logs out. And roads are visible on satellite imagery, so the absence of mention of roads implies that most of the 1300 airstrips are there for the garimpeiros. And I suspect that many more than a few are for cocaineros in the Colombian part of the Amazon Basin.
Thank you for a very intelligent, well-informed comment
@Smart Rock
I also suspected there was a difference in product and approaches of major mining companies and artisanal mining.
There seems to be an indication that small airstrips can be used to bring in mining supplies for small scale miners. I can see that Gold at around $1700 and ounce, if able to be separated by panning, could conceivably be flown out; but it is hard to imagine tin–with a value 3 orders of magnitude less–not requiring some more practical ground or water transport as indicated as well for logging?
I understand that there are new, battery-powered airplanes being designed expressly for carrying payloads of logs. 🙂
It does make you ask the NYT a basic question.
If they are so upset at mining taking place in remote areas of Brazil, where exactly are they happy for mining to take place?
Without mining there is no green energy revolution. They must know where the mining will take place, so where is it?
Leftists are never happy
They think everything is broken and needs to be fixed
With leftists in charge
Who will ruin everything they touch
The Amazon Rainforest is not a Rain Forest any more.
It is quite perfectly fuqqed.
We know as much because a little while ago, that Dazzling Beacon Of True Facts And Honest Journalism called The BBC, informed us that it was OK for farmers in the Amazon to light fires to clear their land ready for planting.
Especially OK because they only lit these fires during the Dry Season
First significant wrong = Because they were ‘clearing the land‘ meant they were growing annual crops like wheat, corn or sugar they could not have been in a Rain Forest as rainforests are perennial things.
Second significant wrong is that places in The Tropics, especially rainforests, Don’t Have Seasons. They have times of the year & calendars, but a true rainforest is timeless
We really are on Planet Dumb and the only real question is: Will it be any smarter when we have extinguished ourselves via junk science such as that.
Silly question really and I know I shouldn’t say this but, This Planet could not get any dumber than it is right now.
C’mon Data Miners – have we reached Peak Dumb yet?
Point proved, Planet Dumb.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/05/thames-water-shut-emergency-drought-plant-save-money/
Perhaps they are planning to “Build Back Better” the Amazon?
Look at the scales. The Amazon is a vast area, Google say 6.7 million sq km.
I just happen to have an image with a world class metalliferous mine put inside a sqaue of 5 X 5 km. That is 25 sq km. which is 0.000037 % of the Amazon area.
A tiny pinprick. Even includes the airstrip.
http://www.geoffstuff.com/rum25sqkm.jpg
There was once a time when more than 90% of the world’s supply of molybdenum came from less than 1 sq mile in Colorado. That is the nature of most of the world’s mineral deposits.
Clyde,
Agreed, Climax had the lead in the moly race. However, there was no shortage of lookers to topple it. My first geochemical survey was in 1962-3, forst at Ravenswood Qld and then at Mt Tennyson near Bathurst. Some of the first stream sediment geochem conducted in Australia. If we had found a better deposit, Climax would have to share the lead or close down. Either way, there was enough Mo for the world to use at a price the world was prepared to pay. Geoff S
The green solution is to destroy the Earth and cover its surface with the environmental equivalent of those giant white crosses you see in southern states.
We have a tremendous amount of copper, iron, and other minerals in northern WI, the UP of Michigan, and the arrowhead of Minnesota. Almost all of the mines were closed down by the various government agencies and green lawfare. Now they want to mine many of the same things in the Amazon because of all of the greenness here. Some people can’t see the unintended consequences of their actions.