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> can never allow anything new, since we don't know what impact it will have When they say "we don't know the impact" it's on a range from "pretty bad" to "dis

> can never allow anything new, since we don't know what impact it will have 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".

stuff4ben 6y ago
Humans as a whole have never had net positive impact on the environment either. Responsible deep-sea mining, with oversight and regulations in place should be allowed. Until we can determine the impact, I don't see why it should be banned outright.
- j-pb 6y ago
  That's not how safety regulation works, where the burden of proof is on the potential offenders side. 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.
  - stuff4ben 6y ago
    Exactly! How else do you prove deep sea mining is safe without trials like this?
    - j-pb 6y ago
      Ecological surveys. Disturbing a delicate ecosystem by driving a roomba the size of a bulldozer through it is one of those, "that's obviously gonna fuck things up", things where you just need to look at prexisting scientific data. Much like the question: "is eating half a kilo of table salt a viable cancer treatment?"
- carapace 6y ago
  > Humans as a whole have never had net positive impact on the environment either. It's not written in stone. Check out the story of the Loess plateu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loess_Plateau#Agriculture_and_environment 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?
  - moistbar 6y ago
    >We don't really need those minerals, we just want to make money. They're battery materials. Batteries are important to ensuring the success of intermittent renewable energy sources.
    - carapace 6y ago
      Batteries are not a great idea. 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 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 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.
- buran77 6y ago
  > Until we can determine the impact, I don't see why it should be banned outright. 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?
  - stuff4ben 6y ago
    This makes no sense. We perform trials to gather data, just like any scientist. That's what this is, not strip-mining the sea-floor outright. If the trials proved that this can be done in a responsible way, why not do it? But instead you just want to ban it without gathering any data at all.
    - buran77 6y ago
      We've been mining for quite some time now. Have we ever been able to do it without major negative impact on the environment, at least in the easiest, most practiced of conditions? Mining "in a responsible way" is like "clean coal". It's a euphemism for something that still does a lot of damage but fills some pockets enough to call it whatever they want. The scientists are there just to minimize that damage.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>Mining never had any kind of net positive impact on the environment. 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.
- logifail 6y ago
  > The environment would be in much worse shape if industrialization had been fueled with wood rather than coal Wouldn't a wood-powered industrialization period have incentivized the growing of trees?
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > 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.)
    - ncmncm 6y ago
      > (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.
- jgwil2 6y ago
  > The environment would be in much worse shape if industrialization had been fueled with wood rather than coal. No, there would have been no industrialization without fossil fuels. The carbon density of wood is insufficient.

stuff4ben 6y ago

Humans as a whole have never had net positive impact on the environment either. Responsible deep-sea mining, with oversight and regulations in place should be allowed. Until we can determine the impact, I don't see why it should be banned outright.

j-pb 6y ago
That's not how safety regulation works, where the burden of proof is on the potential offenders side. 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.
- stuff4ben 6y ago
  Exactly! How else do you prove deep sea mining is safe without trials like this?
  - j-pb 6y ago
    Ecological surveys. Disturbing a delicate ecosystem by driving a roomba the size of a bulldozer through it is one of those, "that's obviously gonna fuck things up", things where you just need to look at prexisting scientific data. Much like the question: "is eating half a kilo of table salt a viable cancer treatment?"
carapace 6y ago
> Humans as a whole have never had net positive impact on the environment either. It's not written in stone. Check out the story of the Loess plateu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loess_Plateau#Agriculture_and_environment 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?
- moistbar 6y ago
  >We don't really need those minerals, we just want to make money. They're battery materials. Batteries are important to ensuring the success of intermittent renewable energy sources.
  - carapace 6y ago
    Batteries are not a great idea. 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 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 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.
buran77 6y ago
> Until we can determine the impact, I don't see why it should be banned outright. 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?
- stuff4ben 6y ago
  This makes no sense. We perform trials to gather data, just like any scientist. That's what this is, not strip-mining the sea-floor outright. If the trials proved that this can be done in a responsible way, why not do it? But instead you just want to ban it without gathering any data at all.
  - buran77 6y ago
    We've been mining for quite some time now. Have we ever been able to do it without major negative impact on the environment, at least in the easiest, most practiced of conditions? Mining "in a responsible way" is like "clean coal". It's a euphemism for something that still does a lot of damage but fills some pockets enough to call it whatever they want. The scientists are there just to minimize that damage.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

>Mining never had any kind of net positive impact on the environment. 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.

logifail 6y ago
> The environment would be in much worse shape if industrialization had been fueled with wood rather than coal Wouldn't a wood-powered industrialization period have incentivized the growing of trees?
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > 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.)
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    > (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.
jgwil2 6y ago
> The environment would be in much worse shape if industrialization had been fueled with wood rather than coal. No, there would have been no industrialization without fossil fuels. The carbon density of wood is insufficient.