[tiedieconderoga]

It seems like wealthy nations often leave resources in the ground until they really need them.

Mining, refining, logging, chemical processing...these are dirty businesses. Why muddy up your local communities and reduce your future reserves, if one of your trading partners is willing to do it on their turf?

It does mean short-term pain if capacity and expertise need to be built out quickly, but that's the price of admission.

[jollyllama]

Can you offer any examples? When I think of the wealthy nations like the USA or UK, they mined and extracted much of their resources earlier than anyone. They just often did it in the less wealthy parts.

[zdragnar]

Mines in the US are frequently delayed or prevented from opening entirely due to environmental lobbying pushback. We've got plenty of resources we could be tapping into, but cheap overseas competition plus strict pollution controls and environmental lobbying red tape on top of that makes it a very long, expensive investment to see a return on.

For example, the Interior Department instated a 20-year moratorium on renewing any leases for mining operations near the boundary waters in northern Minnesota. Understandably, the consequences of copper sulfide ore polluting the waters is severe, but the 20 year ban is nonsensical. The dangers won't be any less in 20 years. We aren't exactly 20 years away from magical technology that will make it safe. It's a purely arbitrary number meant to appease environmental groups without having to pay out to buy the land and permanently ban resource extraction.

For what it's worth, I'm not really in favor of the mines, per se, just irked that we keep playing games. Either do environmental reviews and let miners mine when they have leases to do so and appropriate safeguards in place, or don't. A 20 year moratorium just sets up political groups (mining and environmental lobbies) to suck up more cash donations and sets up another political fight down the road.

[yodelshady]

> Mines in the US are frequently delayed or prevented from opening entirely due to environmental lobbying pushback.

They are now, yes. I believe the point is, that's a relatively recent development. (And surely, from an environmental perspective, having all the damage in one area is good? Baotau isn't getting any better. By the same token, it's not getting worse.)

Side note but, with politeness, one enormously frustrating part of arguing with Americans is you really don't realise just how many problems are trivial to solve when you have US-level natural resources at your disposal. The social elements are still there, I'm not claiming every US problem is trivial, but the resource access element just isn't. You go to an electronics conference, you're researching some new PV tech, so are your US colleagues, but they've got hundreds of hectares of land that's perfect for the application and worthless to everyone else. And that happens in almost every field. Good for you, but JFC, that's not a universal experience.

[zdragnar]

If you'd seen my comment history, I have actually advocated for more mining in the US in the past. The particular potential mine I mentioned happens to be next to a geographically massive and pristine watershed, which is also connected to lake Superior. So, a massive source of copper and nickel is available to us, if only we want to risk permanently polluting one of the world's largest freshwater lakes and pristine habitats.

This is in the same state with suburban areas that have water poisoned by water gremlin and 3M, so you might understand that people are a little sensitive to the prospect of a foreign-owned mining company (twin metals) wanting to set up a mine.

We do need to stop relying on cheap, unethical foreign resource extraction, and that means the environmental lobby needs to become more realistic about not trying to stop every single project. By the same token, resource extraction isn't going to get investment if doing it right means nobody will buy the results at a massively inflated price point, so we need to be wary of new operations claiming to do something obviously very hard while competing with cheap overseas stuff.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned at the end of my first post, there is a TON of money flowing into lobbying groups on this topic. So long as the fight exists, they keep getting money. Actually solving the problem in a reasonable way means the money stops flowing to these people.

The only actually easy methods of solving this would violate our government's constitution, so we're left with muddling through.

[jollyllama]

Yes, that's in essence what I was saying. Think back 100, 200 years and the most mined nations were probably the wealthiest.

[tiedieconderoga]

Well, uranium could be an example. The US doesn't mine much of it anymore - instead, they buy most of what they need from Russia. There's still plenty of it out there, but if you ever stumble across an old mine out West, there'll (hopefully) be a lot of signs warning you not to drink the water or spend much time in the area.

There has been a lot of coal and oil extraction, clear-cutting, etc. all around the world. Sometimes because the materials weren't commodities yet, sometimes because it's cheaper to produce locally. But as land and labor get more expensive, so does local production.

[stubish]

Australia is wealthy because it is digging up its coal and iron and gas and exporting it.