This has been previously discussed.
the way I see it, anyway.
the message is ..
If you have a project in a forest location and you happen to use cyanide and acids in your processing route - i.e. chemicals which can seep into sensitive forest waterways and ecosystems or that people rely on for drinking and agriculture/irrigation - then there is reason for concern.
So a few gold miners wrongly located may be rightly concerned.
But do we (or a number of other coal projects) have this going on in the remote coal regions located in the desert expanses - remembering that Gobi is the name of a vast desert - not a forest and that Mongolia is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world.
We are talking about South Gobi... not South Forestania.
What I find interesting is ..
On the one hand we consider that the coal regions and projects as being remote - and we are (rightly) concerned about the infrastructure that needs to be built to support the coal projects and we factor those costs in - but on the other hand we also worry that they may not be in remote desert regions but in some sensitive areas... even though we are talking about South Gobi ?
The point is - we can't have it both ways.
We can't have our cake and eat it ..likewise we can't have our remote coal cake and access it (via ecosensitive waterways at the same time).
Actually if we had waterways we may have been able to barge the coal all the way to China !
The point to me is ..
Is Gobi a vast desert or not ? I think it is.
Are we near forests or waterways near inhabited towns or irrigable farmland ? .. I think not.
Will we need infrastructure .. I think we do and I've factored that in.
I'm trying to be consistent in my thought process in order to assess this.
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