Quote:
Originally Posted by Varn
I have to disagree with the sense of putting someone else's garbage dump outside of where they live. We live rural by choice and have experienced in the past power companies coming in and generating large amounts of power and pollution without benefit to the local community.
The world economy is like that, In the US we enjoy the cheaper goods but don't have to pay for the dust and pollution, it is all invisible to us consumers. We don't have the mines or "dirty" industries for the elemental ingredients that make up our society.
Hitting on China, they have some virtual slave workers, much of it based on religion.
Anytime we are releasing energy to be used as work there are changes to the environment around us.
I doubt if there is any industry that operates without consumption of water. It is a red herring in the big picture.
|
Well there wouldn't be a Colstrip Montana without a massive strip of coal running on or near the surface there. The community was built there because of good paying mining and power plant jobs. There are tons of similar no-man's land all over the west, Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. The benifits to the community are the same benefits Delaware gets from having big banking corporations headquartered there, or Detroit got in it's prime making cars there. Power generation certainly uses less water than food generation in any of those areas. In a power plant the water doesn't go anywhere. Any water vapor you see rising from a cooling tower is just condensation from the surrounding air. It's a radiator like on your car, the coolant inside is permanently recycled.