The process results in both short- and long-term environmental impacts. More than 500 mountaintop removal sites exist throughout the Appalachia region, impacting nearly 1.4 million acres of land. Mountaintop removal, a particularly destructive form of surface mining, involves stripping all trees and other vegetation from peaks and hilltops, and then blasting away hundreds of feet of the earth below with explosives. Surface mining involves removing the overlaying soil to access the coal below, devastating local environments. The resulting drainage water is detrimental to human, plant, and animal life. And acid mine drainage at underground coal mines can be a long term environmental management issue according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), if active and abandoned coal mines are not properly managed, water can sometimes flow through the mine and become highly acidic and rich in heavy metals. Mine fires also occur, particularly in abandoned mines. Mines can collapse or gradually subside, affecting surface and subsurface water flows. Īdverse impacts to the environment are another significant cost of underground coal mining. The disease was responsible for the deaths of approximately 10,000 former miners between 19, and continues today. Black lung disease (pneumoconiosis) continues to be a common ailment among coal miners. In addition to job site accidents, coal mining can lead to chronic health disorders. Many coal miners are injured, sometimes fatally, on the job each year according to the Mine Safety and Health Administration, fatalities at underground coal mine sites in the United States totaled 77 from 2010 to 2013, including a 2010 explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia that killed 29 miners. The most obvious and severe cost of underground coal mining is the threat it poses to the health and safety of coal miners. Surface mining, which is only effective for shallow deposits, often employs highly invasive techniques, including area strip mining and mountaintop removal. Over the past several decades, there has been a gradual shift from underground coal mining to surface mining in the United States. Understanding these impacts is critical for evaluating the true cost of fossil fuels-and for informing our choices around the future of energy production. Even the waste products are hazardous to public health and the environment.
When the fuels are burned, they emit toxins and global warming emissions. Transporting fuels from the mine or well can cause air pollution and lead to serious accidents and spills. Extraction processes can generate air and water pollution, and harm local communities.
Many consequences are far removed from our daily lives and may only affect a minority or marginalized subset of the population.Ĭosts accrue at every point of the fossil fuel supply chain. Known as externalities, the hidden costs of fossil fuels aren’t represented in their market price, despite serious impacts to our health and environment.Įxternalities are sometimes easy to see, such as pollution and land degradation, and sometimes less obvious, such as the costs of asthma and cancer, or the impacts of sea level rise. Those represent the direct costs of fossil fuels money paid out of pocket for energy from coal, natural gas, and oil.īut those expenses don’t reflect the total cost of fossil fuels to each of us individually or to society as a whole. Now, I’m not megapixel fiend - far from it - but I wouldn’t trust my identity to a thing with such mean data allocation.We’ve all paid a utility bill or purchased gasoline. Yeah… so as it turns out, this thing takes pictures at 640×480. What the hell? That leaves like 100KB for each profile. This machine, supposedly state of the art, has a grand total of 256MB, that’s megabytes, of internal storage for biometric profiles. I hope they’ll settle for two out of three, I can’t imagine it’s got a 100% hit rate on all of them, all of the time. It checks your iris, your face, and your fingerprints. Watch out, replicants.Īctually, the HIIDE (stands for “Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment”) won’t detect whether you’re a synthetic human, only whether you’re you.
You know, the one with the Voigt-Kampff machine? Yeah, that’s pretty much this thing.
#SOURCES HIIDE PORTABLE#
So I read about this portable biometric scanner (it’s been around for a while, but the Pentagon just ordered $10 million worth of them) and immediately looked up the first scene from Blade Runner.
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