Weird progressive rants about energy, vaccines and food aside, Americans know science is often right, and the science shows that American regulations keep the environment safe by a very conservative margin.
Compare our pro-science mentality to Europe, which once funded a group of scientists who began dumping iron sulphate into the ocean in hopes it would mitigate global warming. They import wood pellets and think those don't cause emissions because the third-world country they buy them from gets 'charged' the emissions. They banned sale of ugly fruit and declared that water does not cure thirst. They still ban GMOs while slapping an organic label on Mutagenesis, which just happens to be made by a European company.
They can crash an entire LHC collider when a French union worker leaves a bagel in there.
Given that, environmentalists are right to not want them mining in the ocean at all. America can do it just fine, though. Regardless of the data, environmentalists are up in arms that the Deep Seabed Hard Minerals Resources Act, passed in 1980, means companies can once again buy licenses to drill. They have to obey the same regulations as any U.S. company must or face doom the way the English company BP did with Deepwater Horizon.
Credit: G.Mannaerts, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=120579532
Yet despite that, activists are already lined up to oppose it, using the same argument they invoke about nuclear power. It is not cost-effective. While it has been fun during the new administration to see socialists who wanted to 'eat the rich' and set electric cars their allies bought on fire now complaining about the stock market and promoting capitalism, these new statements show they still don't know any economics.
Nuclear energy is only not cost-effective today because President Clinton, the worst of the Boomer Environmentalists to undermine science last century, banned it to the thunderous applause of fellow Democrats. Had scientists and engineers been able to continue to improve it, we would have affordable 4th generation nuclear energy everywhere in the world, with no emissions. Instead, they are doing the equivalent of holding up a Motorola StarTac, had they been able to ban those (2) and claiming building an iPhone now would be too costly.(3)
Environmentalists once endorsed natural gas. Because it was too expensive to replace coal. Yet when a wildcatter showed how fracking could make natural gas affordable they turned on it.
It's easy to sense a pattern. They don't really care about the price of cobalt and nickel any more than they care about capitalism, their lawyers make money telling their political tribe only more money can "hold companies accountable" - by buying themselves new yachts. They only invoke "international law" when it can make them money, their political allies sure did not remember international law when they are endorsing terrorists against Israel.
They understand law as poorly as they understand economics. There is no international law that bans mining. There never has been. It is instead the same logic the Biden EPA used to terrify family farmers who owned a pond with armed federal marshalls on their land - if anything is being discussed, they it's the same as a future ban.
It isn't banned, it has been legal for 45 years. Anyone claiming otherwise is selling you a political pipe dream.
NOTES:
(1) The Obama administration overruled her and government scientists with 'needs more study' delays. Then he told unions they were going to get more employees because he was going to build an extension to the Keystone XL pipeline he intended to ban. Few journalists questioned how his 'extension from nowhere' was going to work, or how he intended to get permission from the native tribes who owned the land to build there. Obviously if a Republican had claimed something so crazy they'd have called it out.
(2) They tried. Led by former NRDC lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. they claimed every cellphone right up to 5G caused brain cancer. They have no idea what non-ionizing radiation means, or they lie for profit. It's difficult to know which.
(3) The first fax machine was too costly, it cost a fortune and had no one else to fax. To use a more recent example, in the early 1990s, the company a friend of mine worked for bought a 1X CD burner for $5,000 and we wanted to sell a software program on CDs, so we rented time from them. CD burners are now so cheap they are thrown into PCs but I don't regret a penny we spent.
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