All Posts Tagged With: "energy"

Now that the Western Australian government has introduced legislation to ban uranium mining in WA, foreign investors are indicating they’ve had enough. Canada’s Mega uranium said it will walk away from its $2 billion investment in its WA uranium project because it “cannot continue to invest in projects/jurisdictions in which it has little or no chance of a return.” Pretty simple. Of course, if the people of WA decide they don’t want a uranium mining industry, that’s fine too.

Dear Dan, Your answer (June 7) to the subscriber who questioned the need for rampant growth, is just appalling and quite mad.

Australia’s deepest on-shore drilling effort doesn’t have anything to do with oil, gas, or mining. It is energy related though. Geothermal hopeful Geodynamics (ASX:GDY) finished drilling its Habanero 3 well in early February to a depth of 4,221 metres. Even if you don’t get all the way through the Earth’s crust at that depth, it’s still pretty hot down there, which is the whole point. Geodynamics hopes to be operating Australia’s first commercial geothermal electric generating plant by the end of this year.

Think of the global economy as a system of systems. Food, energy, credit, transportation, information… all these systems are interconnected and interdependent. Energy is what keeps them all connected. As energy prices increase, the connections become stressed and frayed. A world with more expensive energy is a less connected world. When you stop throwing cheap energy at an economy, its total growth slows down.