The counter view is that it's better to save your natural resources for when you really need them and pay others to exhaust their own, rather than to exhaust yours before you have to.

And a counter to that is that if you don't flex an economic muscle, it withers away. The ability to extract a natural resource depends on extracting it.

But then when you really need them you have no infrastructure with which to extract them nor experience doing so. You have also lost out on tremendous economic opportunity from money you needed to spend on resources while the people you've paid, assuming they manage their income responsibly, have invested that money in further productive assets.

the mobile bay already has a lot of oil mining: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=oil+rig...

we don't need it happening upstream.

and watch as the nations destroy themselves (ecosystems)

we are already extracting a lot of resources around the mobile bay. i recommend that you do some research before you post knee jerk contrarianism comments