There is an iron rule of resource exploitation: Go after the easy stuff first. If you don’t, your competitors will and run you out of business with lower prices. But where do you go when the easy stuff runs out? (And the easy stuff always runs out.) The United States’ recent expanded claims to ocean seabeds signals that the easy stuff has run out or will soon. More on those claims later.
The obvious answer to getting more resources is to start digging up the harder stuff. Sometimes it’s new technology that makes the harder stuff economical to extract. Heap leach mining was developed to take low concentration ores and leach out the desired metals using chemical-laced sprays that result in a liquid “leachate.” From this leachate valuable minerals such as gold, silver, copper and uranium are then extracted through further processing. (There are myriad environmental problems associated with the leachate and the tailings left behind if they spill due to leaks and floods. That would deserve a piece all by itself.)
But what happens when there isn’t enough of the harder stuff on land with sufficient concentration of metals to supply the world with minerals it needs for, say, the highly touted renewable energy transition? One possible answer is the seabed which contains nodules of copper, cobalt, and manganese—all of them essential for the energy transition—that might be harvested with emerging undersea mining technology.
Of course, there is the thorny problem of who owns the ocean floor. The United Nations runs the Commission of the Limits of the Continental Shelf to help adjudicate who owns or rather who has “exclusive rights” to the ocean bottoms around the world. That’s why the United States has couched its most recent assertions about U.S. rights to the ocean bed in the language of claims. Since these claims overlap with those of Russia, Canada, Japan (because of U.S. possessions in the Pacific) and the Bahamas, the commission will be asked to work out a proposed allocation.
It’s not difficult to see that in the race for minerals essential to the future of our complex, technology-driven society, force rather than law may govern who gets the minerals at the bottom of the sea. What probably won’t be a major concern will be the environmental effects of such mining on sea life and the knock-on effects on climate change in which the oceans play such an important and helpful role by sequestering so much of the carbon we humans produce.
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Hi Pokiwi,
again with the infinite growth mischaracterisation of the Energy Transition? Maybe you need to watch Tony Seba’s history of disruptive change. It’s not exponential forever, but only at the beginning. A boring old S curve like we’ve seen many times since the Industrial Revolution. Say it with me: “S Curve”. There you go! For the third time, you’re welcome.
Also, your belief in the doomer financial debt = economy FORCED to grow on a finite planet schtick underscores an ignorance of Modern Monetary Theory and how fiat currencies actually work. Just because one business is paying back with interest means nothing about the overall size or demands on the economy. The power to loan money into existence is also the power to not loan it in other instances – balancing out the money supply.
Also, fiat currencies are not just loaned into existence – they can also be written for government programs. Try this podcast – it will set some of your presuppositions straight about money. https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/ For instance – the government can NEVER “run out” of money. Hey – if you believe we pay taxes so governments can budget their books and run their programs – I suggest listening to the podcast above. It’s a great introduction to MMT and by people who are quite environmentally aware, and will help explain that tax does NOT pay for government services! MMT does.
Again – you’re completely misrepresenting me and spreading lies about my position. I’ve asked you to stop this before? From my “Infinite Growth” page.
“Infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible!”
Well, of course. You feel that needs to be said? Out loud? If I rave about the exponential growth of solar panels – I’m not saying that’s forever. It’s until the market is saturated with clean energy. Near the end it will drop off like other disruptive technology adoption S-curve.
I’m a “Bright Green” environmentalist that sees hope in renewable energy adoption rates – but still acknowledges that is only the energy front of the sustainability challenge. I’m not into the infinite growth on a finite planet schtick of the ridiculous Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Instead I’m saying – like the other S curves in history – the climate and broader sustainability challenge requires SMART growth. Yes – that old business acronym that is almost cliché these days. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound? As a Transitionista – I of course support the exponential growth of clean energy and other circular technologies. It’s about meeting the specific goal of solving climate change by 2050. As we know from exponential maths (see the Speed of Growth page), nothing seems to be happening for the longest time – then it all happens at once.
Not infinite growth but Demographic Decoupling
If infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible, what’s the alternative? I do not think going the whole other direction into Degrowth is attractive or defensible either. The industrialised world is not going to just pack up and call it quits and let billions of us starve. The human race is not going to agree – from the goodness of our hearts – to suddenly die back to just 2 billion of us “for the environment”. (William Rees – 2023). It is not necessary and is completely untenable as a political position.
(It is obviously very doomer and may cause more suicides.) Instead, I prefer a middle ground. I think I’ll call it Demographic Decoupling. That is:-
We must Decouple our industrial civilisation from its impact on nature while meeting all human needs, living the majority world out of poverty as fast as possible. As we meet the needs of “People and Planet” – the goal is to meet all human needs with vastly less impact per person. When the world moves into a modern Industrial Ecosystem, powered by clean energy and advanced recycling systems, known Demographic factors will reverse population growth. With the right welfare and taxation policies we can even accelerate the population decline back to 6 billion by 2100. That would mean nature and humanity both thriving in a vastly cleaner civilisation. The challenge is to take as many species and as much of the biosphere with us as we fit through the bottleneck of the coming few decades. Fortunately there are many Regenerative systems that can help bring biodiversity through the bottleneck with us.
Collapse is not the solution
In many ways the doomer is like a religious cult that hides outside society in their Monasteries (sorry – I meant Prepper Compounds). They wash their hands of the whole awful business of activism and engaging with society and just wait for the apocalypse to wipe out the ‘sheeple’ in a sort of “Greenie Judgement Day.” But if they think peak energy collapse is inevitable – they’re deceiving themselves. The peer-reviewed science is in, and renewables can and will do the job!
What I fear is that so many young people become despondent because of doomers that we lose the activists we need to get the biosphere through this ecological bottleneck. They do not have a viable alternative plan for solving climate change and Overshoot. Everyone agreeing to hand over half our money to the poor and then die back to 2 billion is just. Not. A. Policy.
So while the Doomer stamps their foot and insists this is the only way – and then spreads lies about the energy transition – they’re actually working against the only viable method of fixing this mess!
The energy transition itself is not the ONLY answer
What if we’re all still here in 30 years and the energy transition is complete – but we all forgot to be conservationists and many of our beautiful nature reserves and favourite critters went extinct?
Scolding the energy transition for not fixing all other aspects of biosphere decline is like yelling at the fridge because it will not cook your meal! It’s just not the fridge’s job to cook your meal. The fridge and whole cold chain behind it is to keep your food and medicines fresh and offer up a whole variety of menu choices you might not otherwise have in your diet. That’s the same with the energy transition. It’s job is to save us from global warming, peak fossil fuels, fossil fuel particulates that cost the world $5 TRILLION a year in extra health costs (W.H.O.) and to finally free us from Petro-Dictators! I say those 4 HUGE things are enough! If it does all that we should be grateful and move on to solve other issues other ways.
Try the Earth4All material that have 5 major transition pathways – with clean energy only being one of them. Earth4All is a sister organisation to the Club of Rome, Potsdam Institute and others.
https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/infinite-growth/
You’ve got this exactly back to front and upside down and inside out.
FIRST – if a bank loans me a mortgage, it’s because that particular unit of the economy (me? Or a company I represent?) has ALREADY grown. EG: I have moved from being a child into an adult with an income, or the business I represent has grown to the point where it can buy a warehouse to run a bunch of computers in. IF we qualify according to their security criteria (I have a 10% deposit and a stable source of income from accounting career), THEN they’ll loan me the money to buy a place to live. That is, bank loans can just reflect what is happening in the economy – not the other way around.
SECOND – that interest helps the bank fund paying interest to those who have SAVINGS accounts and investments with the bank. One is interest coming into the bank, the other is interest going out. The excess pays the bank’s staff salaries, the rent, electricity, etc. The interest isn’t NEW MONEY! It comes from my salary, then goes through the bank into other people’s savings interest – or the banker’s new car – or the banker’s barber. It’s flowing through the economy. Many banks do not have authority to create ‘new’ money this way – not M0 anyway – that’s the central bank’s role only. https://www.rba.gov.au/education/resources/explainers/banks-funding-costs-and-lending-rates.html
THIRD – Many jobs are ‘virtual’, like accounting and admin and coding and computer game designs. Sure office admin uses enormous energy for heating and cooling and running the computers – especially server farms. But the Energy Transition will take care of that – and the environmental harm from mining will also be minimised by increasing focusses on recycling in the Industrial Ecosystem.
You write like a mortgage for an existing house suddenly means they have to open a new mine in the middle of the Amazon rainforest or something. But many loans are about buying existing houses. In fact, as interest rates nudge higher we might see less airline travel, less tourism, and slightly more conservative lifestyles as people struggle to keep their homes. So surely it’s more the lifestyle of the career person that is more of an issue than their having borrowed money to buy an existing house. Gradually – bit by bit – we are learning how to recycle ever more effectively to offset the material impacts of first-world lifestyles. Sure – my daughter is horrified by the trends in social media “Influencers” around fast fashion and the incredible waste in that industry. But if Precision Fermentation finds a new way to brew up the materials for this – or seaweed farms create a sustainable source of feedstock (they’re working on it!) – surely that offsets some of the harm? Especially as there are businesses that network one industry’s waste as a feedstock for another industry. It’s funded by what would have been normal advertising revenue from stakeholders – now going into a green image for their brand.
FOURTH – money is being created and destroyed in exponential ways, both through the loaning of money into existence and the NOT loaning money into existence! That is, while one person might be borrowing money, another is going bankrupt. The economy is a big messy thing, and the money supply follows the economy – not the other way around.