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36 comments on Queensland Shale Oil Billions in The Balance ?
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No, this is the perfect solution, really! Think about. processing the shale in Australia is good for the environment.
The alkaline salts could be dumped on the Great Barrier Reef and would serve to reduce CO2 induced acidity. The left over tailings could be used to as a substrate to grow more reef. Or you could just go out and start dynamiting the whole reef and get the process of destruction over with once and for all and then you wouldn't have to worry about it at all. It might be good to revisit Dr. Bartlett's lecture about Arithmetic, Population and Energy http://globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/461
to get a little perspective about these pie in the sky schemes.
The alkaline salts are made by liberating the CO2 that was present before.
It was Na2CO3 and CH2 as a rock. You liberate the CO2 and the CH2 and are left with Na2O as a remainder or byproduct. So you don't get net basic, but net acid when the CH2 is burned in your car.
Ehem, I was making an obviously poor attempt at being somewhat sarcastic ;-)
It's hard to convey tone of voice in text, but you can do it with capitalization and punctuation if you try. E.g.:
Nobody's going to take that seriously.
Whether it be sarcasm, irony or joke (humour), surely we need only the application of intelligence, not CAPITALS, or emoticons, to work out what is going on? I am reluctant to use stereotypes, but it does seem that that the non-US (I exclude Canadians)respondents on TOD seem to be much more alert to the linguistic nuances in postings on this site.
Imagine how the text of Shakespeare would look if it were deemed necessary to signal irony with capitals or italics!
Other observers have noticed a tendency towards literalism (not to mention its kin, fundamentalism) in American readers, so if this is a congenital defect that contemporay American individuals cannot be held responsible for I apologise.