There are a number of economic issues that are being raised by the global shift toward more sustainable forms of generating energy. Even if we allow that this transition will be gradual, the implications are still rather significant for markets around the world.
We have already begun to see changes related to the emergence of “green technology,” including when it comes to the precious metals. What you may not realize, however, is that gold—in addition to silver, platinum, and palladium—could play a key role in possible renewable energy technologies.
Catalytic Converters
One area of focus for environmentalists has undoubtedly been the effect of automobile emissions on pollution and the climate. The primary mechanism in car exhaust systems for reducing such emissions is a device called a catalytic converter. Its main components are made of platinum and palladium.
However, new research by the World Gold Council (WGC) suggests that “Gold can [also] act as a catalyst (a material that accelerates chemical reactions without being consumed in the process) effective in reducing hazardous vehicular emissions.”
Moreover, the WGC has shown that using “gold alongside . . . platinum and palladium . . . can reduce the cost of the devices.” While this new technology using gold made its debut on the international markets in 2011, the council is continuing to support manufacturers in adoptingcatalytic converters that include gold.
With automobile demand around the world remaining strong, a sharp rise in platinum or palladium prices could make using a small amount of gold in catalytic converters an attractive alternative. This is particularly relevant with tightening supplies of these two Platinum Group Metals.
Solar Panels
Harnessing solar energy is another promising green technology that could mitigate our reliance upon burning fossil fuels. Silver is an important component of solar cells. The steep rise in orders for solar panels over the next five years have therefore forecast greater industrial demand for silver in the future.
Interestingly, scientists and engineers are now finding that gold nanoparticles have the potential to improve the efficiency of solar cells as fuel cell catalysts. More research could reveal other key industrial uses for gold in protecting the environment. For instance, the treatment of contaminated groundwater may soon involve gold. Researchers at Rice University have successfully removed chlorinated compounds from water with the help of gold and palladium as catalysts.
With the goal of maintaining a clean air and water supply in focus, more possibilities for the usefulness of gold in reaching environmental initiatives will likely continue to come to light.
Gold slumped on Wednesday after the durable goods report showed that US business spending continued to rebound last month.
Orders for things built to last such as appliances rose 4.8%, the Census Bureau said, while business capital goods orders increased by 0.4%, more than forecast.
Gold has been hit by expectations that the policies of U.S. president-elect Donald Trump will boost economic growth as well as strong U.S. data that has supported the case for an interest rate rise.
The precious metal was earlier weighed down by a strong dollar, though some analysts said that bullion could receive support from European political risks in the coming months.
Gold futures were down 2%, or $25.13 an ounce, to $1,188 at 11:38 a.m. ET. Spot gold fell below $1,200 for the first time since February.
Goldhas shed about 10 percent from a peak hit in the aftermath of the U.S. election two weeks ago.
"It's been a pretty dreadful time forgold. Everything that's good for growth has been negative forgold," said Robin Bhar, head of metals research at Societe Generale in London.
With traders pricing in a 100 percent chance of a December rate increase, according to the CME Group's FedWatch Tool,gold's decline may be bottoming out, Bhar added.
"I suspect that maybe 70 percent of the rate rise is priced into the market, and when it comes through, you may have 'sell the rumor and buy the fact'," he said.
The U.S. Federal Reserve next meets Dec. 13-14.
Uncertainty surrounding Italy's constitutional referendum on Dec. 4 and French and German elections next year could supportgoldthrough safe-haven buying, Bhar said.
"Seasonally, as we move towards Christmas, New Year and Chinese New Year, that should see some physical support."
Goldis highly sensitive to rising interest rates, which lift the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding assets such as bullion while boosting the dollar, in which it is priced. The dollar was steady on Wednesday near a recent 13-1/2 year peak.
While Trump's victory has spurred safe-haven buying of physicalgoldin Europe, traditional bullion holders in the United States are standing pat.
Another analyst believes thatgoldis vulnerable to more losses in the short term.
"We suspect that the precious metal will be under further pressure, likely taking out $1,200 support in fairly short order," INTL FCStone analyst Edward Meir said in a note.
Silver fell 0.7 percent to $16.52 an ounce and platinum shed 0.2 percent to $934.95.
Palladium gained 0.2 percent to $741.30, having touched its highest since early June at $749.40 in the previous session.
Why Are Investors Dumping Gold? Another Victim Of A Strong U.S. Dollar
Gold rises as a safe haven when investors fear a recession, inflation increases or the U.S. dollar plummets, making the precious metal cheaper for foreign investors.
Well, none of these things are happening right now. Indeed, quite the opposite is happening. Gold prices fell to their lowest level in nine months. What's driving gold's decline?
Gold prices hit a nine-month low. Source: MetalMiner analysis of @stockcharts.com data.
The Case For A Bull Stock Market
To be honest, I've been pretty skeptical of the U.S. stock market. Market indexes have traded sideways for almost two years. Still, they have avoided a severe bear market. The day Donald Trump was elected, markets opened sharply lower as fear consumed traders. But stock markets love to do the unexpected and indexes are now back to trading in record territory.
The S&P 500 surges following the Trump victory. Source: MetalMiner analysis of @stockcharts.com data.
Such action is a hint that equity trading desks and large funds aren't finished buying stocks yet. The question is: will Donald Trump's presidency for the next four years be just what the doctor prescribed to keep this aging bull stock market going, even after seven-plus years of gains behind its back? Could the rise in equities even accelerate?
That's too big of a guess. However, going back in history we noticed that in 1982, the stock market was on what it looked like the cusp of a major bull market. But soon after, the new president - Ronald Reagan - slashed taxes and unleashed a super bull market that lasted until the year 2000.
Not saying that history will precisely repeat itself, but the investing crowd is already making some strong bets even before Trump becomes president in January. So far, that hasn't helped gold as a safe haven.
The US Dollar Hits a 13-year High
Perhaps, the biggest factor driving gold prices south is a surging dollar.
The US dollar Index rises to its highest levels in 13 years. Source: MetalMiner analysis of @stockcharts.com data.
The U.S. Dollar Index, which tracks the performance of the dollar against a basket of currencies, continues to rise following President-Elect Donald Trump's victory.
Investors expect Trump's proposals to boost fiscal spending, cut taxes and loosen regulation. They also believe he will accelerate economic growth and boost inflation, bolstering the case for the Federal Reserve to raise U.S. interest rates. Expectations for an interest-rate hike in December's meeting have risen to more than 90%, up from 30% at the beginning of the month. Higher rates make the currency more attractive for yield-seeking investors.
A rising dollar depresses commodity prices, especially precious metals. It does have less of an effect on more economically-sensitive groups like energy and industrial metals. Indeed, industrial metals are on the rise despite a strong dollar. This is because the dollar is rising on expectations of higher rates down the road but, at the same time, metal prices are getting an additional boost because of Trump's plans to spend big on the nation's infrastructure. However, gold's demand won't be affected by infrastructure spending. As a result, investors are left without reasons to buy gold at this moment.
Leaked map reveals chronic mercury epidemic in Peru
People living upriver from gold-mining are the most contaminated, according to US-based scientists
Fish from the River Madre de Dios in Peru. Fish consumption is considered one of the two main ways mercury contamination has spread among local inhabitants - including those living upriver from gold-mining. Photograph: Cris Bouroncle
Ask about the fish in restaurants in the centre of Puerto Maldonado, the biggest town in Peru’s south-east Amazon, and you’ll hear all kinds of things. Some people will shake their heads and say there isn’t any fish on the menu “because of the contamination” or “out of protocol”. Others might say there is fish available, before sometimes hastily clarifying that it comes from farms along the Inter-Oceanica Highway running to Brazil, or from the Pacific coast, or even, according to one chef, all the way from Vietnam.
Why such problems with the fish in this part of the Amazon? Answer: alluvial gold and the mercury required to extract it. The gold-rush in the 8.5m hectare Madre de Dios region began in the 1980s and, by 2012, miners had destroyed more than 50,000 hectares of forest, effectively dumping 100s of tons of mercury into the rivers while doing so. In May this year Peru’s outgoing government announced a pathetic 60-day “declaration of emergency”.
An image of a unpublished map obtained by the Guardian, based on “preliminary results” from studies of local inhabitants by the Duke Global Health Institute in the US, provides some idea of how widely-spread and severe the mercury contamination is across Madre de Dios. Arguably the map’s most alarming revelation is that the most contaminated area of all is upstream from the mining: the stretch of the River Madre de Dios between towns called Boca Colorado and Boca Manu, a significant part of which is in the buffer zone of the Manu national park, which Unesco calls the most biodiverse place on earth.
“It is noteworthy that some areas with high averages of mercury are upriver from the mining zones,” states the map, which was shown to Health Ministry officials earlier this year.
The map suggests the second worse-hit area is insidethe Manu park itself, immediately upriver from Boca Manu, along the River Manu’s left bank. The right bank is affected too. William Pan, the study’s lead researcher, told the Guardian “we didn’t sample people in Manu national park”, but explains the map on the basis that his teams have sampled several communities “along that bend of the river (Rio Manu/Rio Madre de Dios)” and “the map smoothing method creates a 10km buffer around the study sites and the exposure is extrapolated”.
According to US-based scientists, the people living upriver from gold-mining in Peru’s Madre de Dios region are the most contaminated by mercury. The worst-affected areas are shaded in red, the second-worst in orange, the third worst yellow. “µg/kg” should read “mg/kg.” Photograph: Anon.
How come people upstream are the most contaminated? Or maybe the mercury there has little or nothing to do with gold? As acknowledged by a 2011 report by the Environment Ministry, titled Gold-mining and Mercury Contamination in Madre de Dios: a Time-Bomb, mercury stored naturally in Amazon soil and vegetation is released when the forest is cut down or burnt and then leaches into the water.
as “very high” and says Madre de Dios is experiencing a “chronic mercury epidemic.” The contamination upstream was, he says, “the most surprising finding of our human Hg [mercury] assessment.”
“The communities near the confluence of Rio Manu and Rio Madre de Dios have the highest exposures in the region,” Pan told the Guardian. “When we tested fish, water and sediment, none of the values were high. So we were surprised when people were detected with high levels. We have several hypotheses that we are evaluating.”
According to Pan, those hypotheses are the people in that region migrate downriver to work in the mining, and that they are more dependent than the rest of Madre de Dios on local agriculture, fish and meat because there are no roads. Another is that “due to reliance on fish consumption, they are likely eat larger fish, which will have more Hg just naturally”.
Pan says the map was “supposed to be confidential with the Ministry of Health” because it is “unpublished data and we have not fully analysed all the samples,” calling it “very crude” and far from final. He told the Guardian it is based on three distinct studies conducted between May 2014 and June 2016, and the final results will include samples from almost 72 sites. He says the Health Ministry has “real monetary constraints right now due to expenditures of the prior ministry”.
Previous research by Pan and colleagues argued that mercury contamination is generating “significant health risks” for communities in Madre de Dios “hundreds of kilometres” downstream from the mining, particularly among children and indigenous people.
“Children living within the central portion of the [Madre de Dios] watershed cannot safely consume carnivorous fish without exceeding recommended international [mercury] body burdens,” stated an article by Pan et al in Environmental Science in January 2015. “Deforestation and mercury release are an immediate threat to both local and distant downstream communities, many of which do not benefit economically from [the mining].”
The law announcing Peru’s declaration of emergency in May stated that many people in Madre de Dios have “higher than the maximum recommended limits” of mercury, which causes “serious, chronic and complex health problems, particularly in children and pregnant women.”
“[M]ercury contamination of the air, water, sediment and fish is the result of inadequate practices by illegal and informal gold-miners during the extraction and working of alluvial gold,” the law stated. “In addition, there are people located beyond the mining extraction zones that are at high risk of being contaminated with mercury because of the high levels of it detected in the environment and in certain fish species, especiallyMota Punteada, which is part of the daily diet of Madre de Dios’s population.”
The social and environmental tragedy unfolding in Madre de Dios has been known about for many years: the Ministry of Environment dubbed it a “time-bomb” five years ago, but the bomb was ticking long before that. Will Peru’s new government, led by president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, now take sincere, sustainable, non-violent steps to address the problem - not just in the Boca Manu region, obviously, but across Madre de Dios and Peru’s Amazon as a whole? What steps can the government take to initiate a massive public health campaign and inform those who are contaminated, or are at risk, and provide access to treatment – and if it doesn’t have the funds do so, who can provide them? What forms of alternative employment can be created, so those who find themselves forced to mine and handle mercury have other options? What steps can those buying, selling, hoarding, working and wearing Peruvian gold take to ensure they stop contributing to the devastation of huge swathes of the Amazon and the contamination of 1,000s of people living there?
The World Health Organization calls mercury “one of the top ten chemicals or groups of chemicals of major public health concern”, and states that human activity, including gold-mining and coal-fired power stations, is the “main cause of mercury releases.”
Peru is one of the world’s biggest gold producers, with the main importers being Canada, India, Switzerland, the UK and the US. A report published in April by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime argued that 28% of all gold in Peru is illegal, with illegal gold-mining across Latin America increasingly controlled by drugs traffickers and “organized crime” groups.
In January Peru ratified the Minamata Convention on Mercury, a legally-binding global treaty which commits parties to regulate artisanal and small-scale mining, among other things, and states that “parties may cooperate with each other” to stop altogether the use of mercury or mercury compounds in such mining. Switzerland has ratified the Convention too, but not Canada, India or the UK.
Peru’s Health Ministry did not respond to questions
3 Steps You Must Take Before Recycling Your Old Cell Phone
There's no question that recycling or donating your old cell phone is the responsible, earth-friendly thing to do, but there are a few key precautions to take before handingoff a trove of personal informationto a total stranger
ISTOCK/MIKKELWILLIAM
When you’re ready for a shiny new high-tech phone, it’s a great idea to donate or recycle your old one, because it saves energy and protects natural resources through waste reduction. But first, besides making sure to disconnect your cell service, take these important steps to protect and preserve your personal data.
1. Back it up. If you want to keep files such as music, photos, or documents—basically anything that’s stored on the handset, you’ll need to transfer them. You can back up files to a memory card, or store them online by backing them up to the cloud. The method of backing up files to the cloud can vary by handset, as different manufacturers offer different cloud solutions, so it is always a good idea to either call customer service or do a little research regarding your particular cell phone model.
2.Remove the SIM card and memory card.Once you’ve backed everything up, remove the SIM card and any internal storage such as an SD card. Sometimes contacts and other data can end up being stored on the SIM card, so even if you have disconnected your cell service and don’t need the SIM anymore, it’s always best to remove it before donating or recycling your phone.
3. Perform a factory reset. Once you’re confident that you have everything backed up and saved, it’s time to wipe your phone by performing a factory reset. Consumer Reports recommends that you encrypt your device first, then perform a factory reset—how you do that exactly will vary according to your cell phone’s operating system.
If you have enough smartphones, you could 'mine' a gold ring
Smartphones contain gold, but how much? Our infographic explains below, inspired by the e-waste recycling research of Veena Sahajwalla at the University of New South Wales, who presented at our World-Changing Ideas Summit on 15 November.
NThe London market opened lower, with a fall in the gold price weighing on the shares of mining companies.
The benchmark FTSE 100 share index dropped 41.49 points to 6,753.22.
Shares in Randgold Resources fell nearly 7% while gold and silver miner Fresnillo dropped 5.3%.
The price of gold dropped 1% to $1,203.86 an ounce on Friday, the lowest since May. The gold price has been hit by rising expectations that US interest rates will rise next month.
el Londres mercado abierto más baja, con una caída en el precio del oro de peso en las acciones de empresas mineras. el índice de referencia FTSE 100 compartir índice se redujo 41.49 puntos a 6,753.22. acciones en randgold recursos cayó casi 7%, mientras que el oro y Plata minero Fresnillo cayó 5.3%. el precio del oro se redujo 1% a $ 1,203.86 una onza el viernes, el más bajo desde mayo. el precio del oro ha sido golpeado por el aumento de las expectativas de que nos las tasas de interés subirá mes que viene. el jueves, el presidente de la reserva Federal, Janet yellen, indicó que los Estados Unidos del Banco central podría aumentar las tasas de interés "relativamente pronto". en el FTSE 250, las acciones en electrocomponents saltó 10% después de que el distribuidor de componentes electrónicos informó un 76% de salto en la mitad de año beneficios £ 55.1m, y levantó su objetivo de ahorro de costes. en los mercados de divisas, la libra fue sin cambios en contra del dólar en $ 1.2419, pero se levantó 0.2% en contra del euro a € 1.1709.
On Thursday, the chair of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, indicated that the US central bank could raise interest rates "relatively soon".
In the FTSE 250, shares in Electrocomponents jumped 10% after the electronic component distributor reported a 76% jump in half-year profits to £55.1m, and raised its target for cost savings.
On the currency markets, the pound was unchanged against the dollar at $1.2419, but rose 0.2% against the euro to €1.1709.
ISTOCK/MIKKELWILLIAM
