Ocean Mining: A Gamble with Our Planet's Last Frontier? 🔋 

That won't be enough by far if you wan't an energy transition.

'Out of sight, out of mind' can be translated loosely as, 'Invisible, idiot.' I prefer that version when thinking about devastating industries.

You make a very good emotional argument. Sadly, the argument is just counter-productive virtue signaling unless you also want to eliminate all other resource extraction on earth.

The question is whether mining on land will be more harmful than mining underwater

If you really want to trash a place landmining is the way to go

​@@jamespaul2587c'mon

@@jamespaul2587the problem is we can see what happens on land, the sea has be trashed for decades with everything from nuclear waste, plastic and sea trawlers destroying habitats on the sea floor and we have no way to monitor any of it. This is likely to be another pandoras box.

@@jamespaul2587 Exaclty, there's is much more biodiversity in Indonesia and DRC's tropical zones where land mining of Cobalt and Nickel currently take place.

I agree with you on the mining, but I'm not sure that thinking of ourselves as custodians is the most helpful image. We are a part, a small, very, very, very temporarily, destructive part of the great web of life, but the danger we represent, is not to the planet, but to ourselves. I think it really needs to be brought home to people that - the reason we're worried about losing bees, is not primarily because we love bees, but because without them, we lose a lot of our food production. WE are at risk of extinction, or at least, being reduced to, medieval-minus, levels of civilisation and population levels. Sure, we'll take maybe 50 - 60% of the large species with us, but within a million years, assuming we don't survive, the planet will have shrugged us off, as a blip, on the order of a nasty period of vulcanism, or a medium-large asteroid impact. What is really sad, apart from the slow dying of billions of human beings, and the fascists we will elect in response to the climate crisis, is that, in less than two centuries from now, if we could get our sh*t together and halt global warming, we really could become custodians, deflecting asteroids, increasing, or decreasing the temperature by manipulating the atmosphere and amount of solar radiation, no more awful ice-ages (I know, we are in an 'ice-age'), like during the last glacial maximum, or slush-ball Earths. Taming vulcanism is possible, but might take us a while yet.* We will have no food-production need for 75% of the land currently being farmed within 35-50years. Imagine all that rainforest being restored, every Scottish and Irish, now bare, hillside, covered in native woodlands, patrolled by native apex predators. We can have a paradisical Earth, if enough of us want it. * Read a great article about taming Yellowstone's super-volcano; it involved extracting the heat from the surface rock, through some form of heat exchange mechanism, similar to geo-thermal energy set-ups, until that rock was cold and solid, then go a bit deeper, and deeper and so on, cooling and hardening, metres, then kilometres deep, of rock over centuries and millennia, effectively 'capping' or sealing the magma safely below. I'm sure you would have to keep at it, that magma isn't going to take this lying down.

Yes, the oil and fishing industries have caused untold damage, not to mention climate change.

This process doesn't really generate any pollution. Just physical disturbance.

There's very little marine life down that deep. Sunlight doesn't penetrate more than 200 meters or so.

@@howard6433 But the video explained that there is quite a lot of biodiversity. with thousands of species. I'm not convined that counts as 'very little life'.

@@howard6433 how many times do we have to 'wait and see' on our guesses before we realize that we don't understand the effects of ecology until they're disrupted. We say now 'There's not much down there' then in 20 years they'll be like 'it destroyed this rare system of algae growth beneath the first layer of sediment that fed the bottom feeders which feed the X and X and Z and so on.

Greed is always a danger but is immaterial to the discussion. The question is should we mine the resources given the historical environmental destruction of mining.

@@michaelsmithers4900 Greed is literally the entire discussion, it's the reason we're in this mess to begin with and it's not profitable enough to make changes so we're still in this mess with no real light at the end of the tunnel.

@@kristoffer3000That’s reductionist and shifts the blame from the many that profit from technology (you and I included) to the few the get rich. There are many motivations greed is only one.

@@michaelsmithers4900 It's not reductionist at all, it's just the uncomfortable truth. You think we'd be standing still if capitalism didn't exist? The socialists in China are currently the most innovative people on the planet in just about every sector whilst being far more ecologically friendly than the West. The rich are the problem, we didn't have to be in this mess to begin with, we knew about the dangers of climate change before it was a problem but nobody listened because there was money to be made. That you think greed is only a part of the discussion just means you're ignorant.

I think you sugested it was all about greed.

Ummm... we NEED middle of the road vehicles to meet the demand of the vast majority... middle of the road people.

@@patreekotime4578 You and Climate Change deserve better.

@@miketrebert7788 The mass market folks arnt going to go for anything hyper efficient or space age. Beyond any logic they love their terrifyingly dumb SUVs. The EV Range Rover may just do more for the electrification push than any high concept vehicle ever will.

@@patreekotime4578 The French govt. recently started a scheme granting leases to applicants with "low income" for smallish EVs for EU100 per month. I think the allotted number (25,000) was fully subscribed in a few weeks. The whole thing was paused and a second round will (maybe) go ahead when heads stop spinning. Creative thinking, locally made EVs, more EVs on the road and visible. Everybody wins. BUT, they don't have a Tory govt.

What "tests"? I refer to stuff we have in UK. Battery EVs are falling out of favour in UK and even US. Elon has started shedding staff what with lack of interest in battery EVs. I might have mentioned this a while ago.

Quite so. How many communities across the planet were considered a nuisance and therefore expendable by us Euros. In fact Britain was world leader at fffkin over people "not like us". You can make your own list.

Capitalism goes brrrr

I dare you to look into the recycling industry. Sometimes religion doesn't meet reality...

It seems we never thoroughly consider the complexity of natural systems, and the interconnectedness to everything else.. and the fact we don't even fully know or understand those complexities.

Vision becomes problematic when you start dealing with the sediment getting disturbed. There's also a matter of efficiency; a dredge that just sorta scrapes the sea floor with a basket and scoops up the lumps is going to produce a lot of resources very quickly, and be very reliable. A robotic arm that picks up each individual lump will take much, much longer to get the same output.

I had exactly the same thought. Machine learning should be able to identify the nodules efficiently, pick it up, pop it in the hopper behind. Certainly vacuuming up the entire bed is going to cause enormous damage to those creatures and their environment

And reduce profit???? Are you mad???

I was thinking the same. There's been a revolution in underwater drone technology - I wonder if there's now the technology to gently pick up selected rocks & pop them in a basket for collection, with a tiny fraction of the environmental damage.

@@bimblinghill You're describing how an environmentally responsible research expedition might be conducted. Not how a greedy corporation would operate.

Capitalism goes BRRRRR

Good point. It looks as if we have helped to modify the climate so that the ocean has decided to inundate our dry bit. Hmm, we didn't see that coming did we ... or rather we decided to ignore the climatologists with the usual, "Scaremongers! WTF do they know?" Quite a bit it appears.

We got in this mess w climate change by this same attitude..we justify these reckless actions by claiming it's necessary. We really need to learn from our many mistakes. Tampering w natural systems always has consequences. There's still so much we don't know about the ocean. Yes, climate change is a problem but it's only a piece of a much bigger issue..the imbalance of natural systems causing a domino effect. We've assaulted these systems on so many levels, our energy production being just one of many. Biodiversity loss will be equally or more devastating than climate change. We've started a destabilization process..we must attempt to stabilize the whole system, not solely focus on climate. Most importantly, we need to be very, very cautious. We may tip things in a way that might not be recoverable.

My thoughts. Surely actually more efficient

😂