The New York Times roped me in with a special subscription deal a couple of years ago, and I never dropped it when the price went back up. I don’t read it a lot – as I don’t read a lot of other news (as in, I try to stay informed, but not to get too caught up in it) – but the real reason for my subscribing still stands: it’s some of the best journalism on the planet. Even when I don’t agree with some of their biases (which they generally keep under control).
I’ve said here before on more than one occasion that their podcast, The Daily, is an excellent example (ironically, The Daily is free — but I like to think my subscription helps support it). The usual format is to take an in-depth (most times around 30 minute) look at some interesting and thought-provoking stories, as in their recent episode “Promise and Peril at the Bottom of the Sea.”
Put simply: there are billions of dollars-worth of potato-sized nodules loaded with the minerals needed to make electric-car batteries sitting at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean between Mexico and Hawaii. If we want our electric cars, we need to find a way to get those nodules to the surface. This, of course, comes with the obvious: the damage that large-scale mining of the ocean floor will do will be a complete ecological disaster – to the obvious: when billions of dollars are involved, someone will find a way to exploit someone else to get it. And we’ll all end up the short end in the long-run while a few get super-rich.
And it’s happening, with the exploiters being rather disingenuous, playing on the environmentalists’ very mantras to point out a perceived hypocrisy among them – “If you want your Teslas, we’re going to need to mine the ocean floor.”
This may be so, but, as a person who doesn’t necessarily want a Tesla (but rather, wants to explore all options to come up with that which balances environmental concerns without rushing headlong into something that will have unintended and possible harmful consequences (e.g. California and its electric-car goals)), I’m not so easy to bully. I’ve got an incredibly bad feeling about this ocean-mining deal. They admit themselves that we know less about the ocean floor than we do about the surface of the moon. One thing is for sure – the oceans are more important to the regulation of the planet’s environment and climate than we have thought in the past, and if we start messing with hundreds-of-thousands of square miles of its floor, we could very well find ourselves paying a huge price in the future.
I’m not against electric cars. I’m just being realistic – they’re not the saviors of the planet that people think they are. At least, not yet. Their production, from start to finish, as well as the means to generate the power to keep them going, is a huge energy-consumer and polluter. It’s just that we’ve moved that consumption out of sight. We think differently about plugging something in than we do about sticking a nozzle into a tank and pumping in a liquid that smells like…well, like gas. We don’t (unless we’re a bit strange) watch the electric meter ticking over like we do the gas pump. Pile on top of that that we have yet to face the large-scale problem of what to do with millions of spent batteries (to include the environmental dangers of even recycling them), and maybe there really is cause for concern.
These are all things on which I know we have brilliant minds working. I’m just writing this off the top of my head, so I’m sure someone can do the hard work of solving these and whatever other problems are out there. But, knowing human nature as I do, I’m not encouraged by things like that which The Daily is telling me here (and they did touch on some first-rate, lawyer-level shenanigans for sure). If there’s a buck to be made, it’ll win out just about every time. It’ll only be after the corporations have gotten their cut and moved on that we’ll find out the real consequences of their actions. I hope, for everyone’s sake, they don’t screw us all irreparably in the meantime.
Obviously we all need to ride bikes more.