God Bless the BBC. Today, they have an absolutely brilliant news article up in File On 4 called Who pays the price of platinum? It, like all news articles, offers a simplified glimpse of the whole picture. They talk about Platinum mining, specifically, when it is actually just one of the three expensive noble metals that do the work in catalytic converters. Palladium and Rhodium are also at play, and all three are often refined from the same ore.
It is hopefully no longer an argumentative fallacy to say that everyone knows mining is environmentally devastating, but this article speaks more generally of the human cost, with particular emphasis on the social devastation of claiming and destroying the homeland of a person, family, or community.
The unfunny irony pointed out in the story is that increased environmental awareness is partly responsible for the increased cost and mining of these metals. They do a fantastic job of helping the conversion of bad exhaust fumes to … less bad exhaust fumes. That’s a good thing. But the mining process is a bad thing. And reclaiming the metals from spent catalytic converters is not cost-effective. It’s much cheaper to just move a bunch of South Africans off this valuable ore, and place them somewhere that they’ll surely prefer, if they know what’s good for them. Then we can pull all that valuable metal out of the ground where God intended us to find it. Then Riches!
Hooray!
Fret not, my friends. Soon, we will be rich enough and life will be easy enough that we can truly be happy.
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