Welcome to: Mining Home

Read it today! Mining on Public Land - Most mining is on public land, who should benefit?  Mineral rights and property rights can and have been divorced from each other over the years.  Mining often impacts the surface property though and raises the question of whether or not compensation should take place when the act of mining encumbers surface property owners. With increasing pressure to extract petroleum and mineral products from public land, how should public losses be compensated?

With the discovery of malleable metals humans could begin forming tools and eventually complicated machinery.  Today the ravenous industrial machines demand more metal than ever before to satisfy the needs of consumers.  So where do all these metals come from?  What impact is recycling having on metal mining and refining? 

Many blame the extraction associated with the mining of and use of mined materials to be the greatest sources of pollution.  The separation of gold from other materials is often accomplished using mercury which often leaves lethal quantities surrounding mining sites.  Fossil fuels extraction can be polluting in the form of spills, but the use of fossil fuels also represents the largest source of "greenhouse" gasses.  Are the benefits of extracting and using these natural resources exceeding the costs?

A products of oceanic plankton decomposition, fossil fuels are used to power our economy and provide locomotion for many of us. While the processes that develop fossil fuels continue, civilization currently consumes many times the amount of fossil fuels each year than are developed.  Despite the fact that the limits to the supply of fossil fuels are now apparent, there continue to be new uses for fossil fuels from plastics to automobile fuels and electricity generation, and worldwide consumption continues to rise. What will happen when fossil fuels "run out?"