|
|
|
|
|
|
by ChuckMcM
3613 days ago
|
|
|
It does, but not insanely so. WW I explosives were much less energetic than modern munitions. A modern MRAP[1] could drive around all day and be fine. The gas cannisters are an issue but manageable as well. The economic choice in re-mediating battlefields has been to minimize economic harm (tearing up the landscape). But the question of 300 years of non-useful land? Taken all at once does it make more sense to pay the price now. You can think of it like a mortgage with interest, if you pay it off slowly over time it takes less money per month, but the total money over time is large. If you pay off the mortgage it takes a lot of money but the overall cost is lower. What if you do the modern calculus of costing the land use, versus the cost of complete remediation more quickly. Let me put it into a modern context. If you took 65 square miles and turned it into a city with the density somewhere between Manhattan and Aleppo, you could settle the entire middle eastern diaspora on land that is currently unused. This is fertile land which once had 9 villages. The diaspora is filled with working age people you could recruit as labor for the effort. How much would that cost? Would that be more or less than the cost of refugee programs and border management and social programs for the unemployed immigrants? I only ask the question if anyone thinks about it this way, I don't think they do. [1] http://www.navistardefense.com/navistardefense/vehicles/maxx... |
|
|
The land may not be usable for another few hundred years, but what is the opportunity cost of all that upfront remediation? It's big. That's capital that can be invested in other things.
Some land in the middle of nowhere is not really that valuable. The productivity of such rural land is low. This is why no one has bought up that land and remediated it in the first place.
> How much would that cost? Would that be more or less than the cost of refugee programs and border management and social programs for the unemployed immigrants?
That 65sqm could be anywhere; there's tons of un-mined land in Europe. It's a whole continent. There is no necessary connection to remediation. If you can't make such a 'diaspora city' work economically on unmined land, you can't make it work on mined land either.