The environment would be in much worse shape if industrialization had been fueled with wood rather than coal.
Poisoning a few watersheds in Asia for lithium and cobalt is far preferable to continued oil and coal extraction which would poison orders of magnitude more
There's no good, just less bad and we don't know if undefined impact sea mining is less bad or more bad than the status quo.
I'm inclined to think it's probably worse per amount of material moved than conventional mining but I suspect there may be a few niches where productivity per amount of material moved is sufficiently greater to have a lesser overall impact.
No, there would have been no industrialization without fossil fuels. The carbon density of wood is insufficient.
There are plenty of ways to rationalize anything into making it seem fine or even great, at least by comparison. Just because it's framed in a binary manner where one option is clearly the worst doesn't make the other option good. It's still a fallacy. Your cynicism might block you from realizing that mining for coal instead of cutting down trees doesn't make it "a net positive" for the environment, just a lower net negative.
So I'm glad that we can agree on one thing though. Mining never had any kind of net positive impact on the environment.
Wouldn't a wood-powered industrialization period have incentivized the growing of trees?
A wood-powered industrialization would have led to mass deforestation and then fallen over hard. (Or, more likely, switched fuels.)
That, in fact, occurred. Steel was produced using wood charcoal for millennia, denuding huge swaths of forest, which often became desert rather than growing back. Such deserts can sometimes be reclaimed by careful stewardship.
Seems very cynical and reductive..."a few watersheds"... if one was to replace the ravenous need of workers for privacy in new electric cars...seems like a lot of lithium... here's hoping for fast development of solid state batteries...
but also, isn't it often a case of cost as in how cheap corporations can bilk poorer countries and their political class of important resources...? higher prices/legislation could be a way to force innovation to develop alternative extraction methods...geothermal extraction https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/geothermal-lithium-its-extrac...
It's not written in stone. Check out the story of the Loess plateu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loess_Plateau#Agriculture_and_...
We destroyed it (it looked like a Lunar landscape) and then we regenerated it.
> Until we can determine the impact, I don't see why it should be banned outright.
You're inverting the logic: you don't set fire to the house and then "determine the impact" afterward.
Keep in mind that the cure for cancer isn't down there, cheap fusion isn't down there, the fountain of youth isn't down there. We don't really need those minerals, we just want to make money. But the time when profit was more important than living healthy oceans has passed, surely?
They're battery materials. Batteries are important to ensuring the success of intermittent renewable energy sources.
E.g. an electric car should use alcohol fuel and a small generator rather than fancy batteries.
You can grow sugar crops, convert them to fuel (reclaiming the non-fuel parts), and then use that to power your infrastructure. It's carbon-neutral, environmentally sound (waaaaaaay more than batteries), and you can do it today. No sea mines required.
The only downside is that you have to live within your solar power budget, but we have to do that anyway to counter global warming (until cheap fusion becomes a thing.)
Here's a video of Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019 giving a talk called "Investing in a changing climate – what we can learn from historic energy transitions". https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk The presentation is IMO very interesting, and the conclusion is sobering: "Only absolute cuts in energy use would work." ( https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk?t=2283 )
We are going to have to use less energy. We don't have to endure lower QoL but we do have to achieve our Quality of Life more efficiently.
Global catastrophe blocks out the sun? Fine, charge off nuclear. Nuclear generators destroyed by war or terrorism? Just use wind. The flexibility is what makes electric cars superior, and being able to store energy is what makes intermittent renewables like solar and wind viable when it's not sunny or windy outside.
Most importantly, in a perfect world you'd only have to make the battery once. Some means of recycling dendrite-ridden lithium back into usable material would go an exceptionally long way as well.
We gotta store excess power somewhere, though.
Which is why I said "as a whole". You pointed out a single example of when humans did a good thing for the environment, but as a whole (meaning all humans for all of history) we have had a net negative impact on the planet.
Regarding determining the impact, you can't just outright ban something without knowing the impact. Which is why they're doing these trials. It's not wholesale strip-mining the sea floor, it's a test of technology to see if it can be done sustainably and with minimal negative impact to the environment.
edit: formatting
Fair enough. (I'm usually the one pointing that out in these sorts of discussions. I just want to be clear that we can go the other way and foster life instead of just destroying it.)
> you can't just outright ban something without knowing the impact.
Why not?
I mean, setting aside the argument that we already know that the impact will be bad, let's pretend that the last few centuries of examples haven't given us enough information to make informed predictions about how bad the "impact" will be.
What are the consequences if we just banned marine mining?
- - - -
From my POV, you have to make the case that any mining on Earth at all makes economic sense, given that there is only one living planet in the solar system, and there are lots of things to mine in space (where there are no living things, yet), and we have already heavily "impacted" the existing global ecosystem with our mining and agriculture.
Look, if we're going to get through all this and become a successful space-faring species we have got to start taking the long view, and value things properly.
So if the company behind the deep-sea mining robot didn't think it was economically feasible, they wouldn't have built it. Obviously it does make economic sense and the best way to determine the ecologic impact is to do trials. And I did mention earlier that government regulation should also be in place. I don't see why this is such a hard thing for people to grasp.
Absolutely. I'm a long-term thinker.
From the long-term perspective the living Earth is incredibly valuable: the only source of biomass in the known Universe. In contrast, whatever minerals are down there on the sea floor are as common as dirt in our local neighborhood (Sol and its planets and asteroids, etc.)
It just doesn't make any sense to burn up our planet for short-term gains.
What's the rush?
> I do want to get there, but even with all the Elon fanboi-ing in the world, we're not gonna get there in our lifetimes. At least 75-100 years out before it starts to make economic sense given current technology and risk/reward.
Okay, but doesn't that make it even more imperative that we take good care of the Earth, since we can't yet leave?
> Obviously it does make economic sense...
Only in the short-term, and only if the consequences can be ignored by the folks making money from it.
> the best way to determine the ecologic impact is to do trials.
Strong disagree. Both on principle, and on practical grounds. IANAOceanologist, but it seems to me that we know there will be impacts. This is not a scientific expedition, it's a prelude to destruction.
Oklahoma has earthquakes now. Is it due to fracking? We don't actually know in any official or scientific sense. How could we determine that they are a result of fracking or not? The folks doing the fracking insist that it's not them.
We know there are going to be impacts that affect the entire planet. The question is "How bad would the destruction be?" And the answer is "Don't destroy life for money."
We don't allow random chemicals as food additives and drugs and recall them if they turn out to not be safe. We show that they're save before we allow them on the market.
Much like the question: "is eating half a kilo of table salt a viable cancer treatment?"
Do you apply this philosophy in your life? If the risk was for you to take on yourself would you think the same way? Or only when the risk is to some far off people, in a far off land, or some future generation?
When they say "we don't know the impact" it's on a range from "pretty bad" to "disastrous". Mining never had any kind of net positive impact on the environment so it's not a matter of "hey, maybe we actually help the fish and wildlife by mining here".