Smelter Closures In America Hurt Our Industrial Output

The United States is losing its industrial capacity quite rapidly. Some environmentalists call these "old industries" and say we do not need them anymore; that we want clean industries. Yet the environmental mitigation equipment has kept up with the needs and our heavy and older industrial industries. Such industries are extremely important to the health of our nation because they represent the raw material production needed to make things. The closer these industries are to the final assembly points of parts means cost savings are rendered which make it easier to compete on the finished products with foreign competitors. For instance if we have a low dollar compared to the rest of the world we have an advantage in cost. But if we eat up that advantage in transporting the processed raw materials from foreign lands then the advantage is lost in transportation and distribution.

When a smelter closes in the US which processes aluminum then the supply is taken out of the market and the price increases. If no more smelters exist then we have to import the material from foreign soils. These costs increase those things we manufacture here, then it is harder for The Boeing Company to compete with Airbus when it wants to sell 50 billion dollars worth of airliners to them. Likewise the new light aircraft manufacturing sector moving into India can blows the doors off of Cessna and Beechcraft-Ratheon. It is serious business as such closures ripple thru the economy and cause damage to our already weakened, but rebounding manufacturing sector. As a teenager learning to fly, I would on long cross country flights often circle around such industrial processing plants and look at the power lines, rail lines, highways that went to them to have the resources needed to produce whatever it was they made. Then not far down the road, sometimes 50, 100, 150 miles you would see a mine which is where the material came from, then the other way you would see a big city with huge manufacturing plants which would use those materials to make stuff. It was much like looking over a giant model railroad, everything worked in unison. But when you take away a component you remove the efficiency of the system. This hurts us in America. If we over regulate and kill one industry, because we call it "old" we destroy the flows of efficiency in manufacturing. Thus one linear thought and bad policy tends to wipe out entire possible opportunities for the future.

Smelters in US in trouble as Alcoa decides to shut down the Portland Smelter.

http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2002/07/29/daily23.html?f=et75

This is bad at a time when we need more aluminum and recycling for aircraft and aerospace reasons. Other Smelters shut down were in Great Falls MT and other places in this great Nation of ours. The environmentalists claim it needs to be done due to Global Warming and even have statistics to back them up. Yes there is some pollution but we have new modern anti-pollution equipment for upgrades in these industries, yet every time a plant or industrial facility tries to upgrade some one sues them. And this study in particularly is frightening to our Nations state of economic world-wide power,

http://www.bpa.gov/power/pl/aluminumstudy/aluminumstudy.shtml

http://www.bpa.gov/Power/PL/AluminumStudy/11-17-2000_mtg.pdf

and many of our environmental scientists talk about how when we close a plant here we send the work to other impoverished nations to destroy their environment.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0225-01.htm

Yet no one is holding a gun to their head telling them to build a plant, or telling us we cannot, when they want the jobs and the money there. This is a complex issue and I think one, which should be talked about with regards to the Fluoride that is produced and how we feed it to our kidneys to get rid of it in our drinking water. We have other needs for fluoride anyway. After we kill the jobs instead of finding technological ways to refine the processes, while we wait in court for environmental suits to come to a close, we go without the very thing that made our country great, and helped us beat the Germans in WWII.

http://www.epa.gov.tw/english/EPM/issue0108.pdf .

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/29559_bpa30.shtml .

We need to be able to process aluminum better and we are going to need more of it and other exotic metals and formulations in the future, which will probably not be able to be made in third world countries, without massive infrastructures, additional costs and years in the making. We have every thing we need right here, we ought get smart and look at the flows of our civilization to put it all together. We study flows in all industries; airliners as they travel the country, trucks and cars, money flows too. We need a cohesive plan to put it all together using the new technologies to upgrade the old industries. Think about it.

"Lance Winslow" - If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs