The Fanatic's Veto
The latest iteration of BANANA (“Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything,” which has supplanted NIMBY) comes to us courtesy of environmental fanatic (but I repeat myself). Norway has discovered that there are large swathes of "polymetallic nodules" off its coast, and has been making plans to recover these sources of a variety of metals needed to make the solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries that comprise the "renewable" energy sources we are told must* replace oil, gas, and coal power.
Given that most of those metals are currently sourced from China and Africa, where the environment is of no interest but where child labor is, this discovery and initiative by a first-world Western nation, which will certainly be far more environmentally conscious, should be a cause for celebration.
Alas, no.
"Do-gooders" (note the scare quotes) from Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, and others are voicing their opposition to Norway's venture:
Minerals and metals for the green shift should be obtained from consumption reduction and better reuse on land, not from the depths of the sea where brutal mining can do irreparable damage to nature.
Somehow, the vast quantities of metals needed to "green" the world will come into existence through conservation and recycling.
Utter nonsense. I'm presuming that no one in those organizations has done any of the math... or if they have, the inescapable conclusions are simply of no interest to them.
Why should they be, when they can grab headlines with such folderol as "brutal mining" (have they seen how China mines rare earths?), and scare their mailing list recipients into pumping more money into their coffers.
What we see here is the expectation of a green miracle, where the wildly ambitious (to be generous) goal of decarbonizing the world's energy production in a few short years is accomplished via rainbow-hued unicorn farts. The hard realities of resource extraction for all those solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries (oh, lots and lots of batteries) - and that's not even considering that our technology isn't remotely "there" yet - are ignored or waved off. Indeed, the entirety of greening amounts to politicians legislating "make it so" mandates and expecting someone else to magic those mandates into reality.
On top of all that, societies have fallen in thrall to their fringe loons - single-issue harpies who have the time, energy, and fanaticism to argue against the nuts-and-bolts necessities associated with their lofty goals.
The greens, whom I've noted time and again hate humanity and would be pleased to see 90% of the world's population go poof, believe that the world can and should be saved by forcing us to drastically dial back our living standards. That's what the "consumption reduction" phrase means. Not efficiency improvements such as LED light bulbs, but sweat in the summer, shiver in the winter, live in shoeboxes in massive apartment complexes rather than private homes, and cram like sardines into buses and trains rather than own cars.
As for recycling as a source of metals... there must be something to recycle. We aren't dumping mass quantities of lithium, cobalt, nickel, neodymium, terbium, dysprosium, praesodymium into landfills, so asserting that such can be recovered by recycling is, again, utter nonsense.
Such caterwaulers, no matter how loud or insistent, should be ignored unless they have good alternative ideas. With the exception of Greenpeace's recent embrace of nuclear power, they don't. Their "ideas" are fantasy, their goals require supernatural intercession to come true, and their desires are more focused on stopping progress and harming humanity than on anything else. They probably have autographed posters of Agent Smith on their walls.
All around us, there are fanatics who wrap themselves in righteousness, inform us that they are on the correct side of an issue, and demand we bend the knee to their ever-wilder and ever-more-detached demands. We see it in "green." We see it in gender ideology. We see it in identity politics. We see it in countless iterations of Other People's Money LINK.
None of them recognize a hard reality of politics and human social organization:
They don't want to, and they can't be reasoned into doing so. This is the fanatic's way, and when we grant the fanatic veto power over our lives, we doom those lives to stagnation and regression.
Let's be clear as to who is calling the shots on this: the Chinese want to protect their monopoly status and writing huge checks to WWF, et. al., is just the cost of doing business. It's funny how EVERYBODY looks the hypocrite who takes money from the CCP, doesn't it?
Activists are what I call "Armchair Engineers" after the term "Armchair Coaches" who from watching TV know everything about football better than the best coach on field. Having never done anything or made anything in their lives they still somehow know better than those who actually make things, or play football.