THE REAL PRICE OF GOLD

The following is an environment update from me. Respecting your time, I've heavily shrunk an article from the National Geographic

In the U.S. an activist-driven "No Dirty Gold" campaign has persuaded many top jewelry retailers to stop selling gold from mines that cause severe social or environmental damage, but such concerns don't ruffle the biggest consumer nation, namely India, where a gold obsession is woven into the culture. For all of its allure, gold's human and environmental toll has never been so steep. Part of the challenge, as well as the fascination, is that there is so little of it. In all of history, only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools. Now the world's richest deposits are fast being depleted, and most of the gold left to mine exists as traces buried in remote and environmentally fragile corners of the globe such as the Peruvian Andes and Indonesian rain forests . Mercury used to separate gold from rock, spreads poison in both gas and liquid forms. UNIDO estimates that one-third of all mercury released by humans into the environment comes from artisanal gold mining. Two to five grams of mercury are released into the environment for every gram of gold recovered—a staggering statistic, given that mercury poisoning can cause severe damage to the nervous system and all major organs. Even vast, open-pit mines run by the world's largest mining companies wreck the environment in a different way. A typical wedding ring requires the removal of more than 250 tons of rock and ore. No other metal generates so much waste per ounce.No technology can make the massive waste generated by mining magically disappear. A mere 16 hours shift, at a big mine inside the Indonesian rain forest, accumulates more tons of waste than all of the tons of gold mined in human history. The waste comes in two forms: discarded rock, which is piled into flat-topped mountains spread across what used to be pristine rain forest, and tailings, the effluent from chemical processing is piped to the bottom of the sea.

Will we still enjoy buying gold? Saving the environment can no longer be the concern of only tree hugging, sandal wearing, tofu eating bearded types.