Thursday, May 04, 2006
Sustainable mining…. in Antartica
Of all the politically motivated sustainability oxymorons, ‘sustainable mining’ is the most ludicrous. Just how can extracting an ore from the ground be sustainable?

When a ton of ore is extracted, there is a ton less in the ground. Therefore it will run out, ipso facto it is not a sustainable process. I guess any steel buried at landfill will eventually re-oxidise and once again return to a long term inert state, but that takes a while; many millions of years.

Now I am not suggesting that we should or could cease mining. If we did, we wouldn’t be able to manufacture all those wonderful little trinkets, like stainless steel file organisers, or dinner party table decorations. Oh yes, and the global economy would collapse. Please, just don’t preface the word 'mining' with ‘sustainable’.

Queensland National Party Senator, Barnaby Joyce, has just returned from a month long ‘fact-finding’ trip to Antarctica, as a member of the External Territories Committee at federal parliament. And a jolly interesting time he had too, it seems.

While in Antarctica, Joyce discovered that underneath the mile deep ice lies a veritable bonanza of coal, oil, iron-ore, yellow cake and heaven knows what other profitable ores. And Australia lays claim to 42% of it.

Now there has never been anything particularly complicated about National Party policy on natural resources. If it can be mined, farmed, whaled, sold and developed, fished, chopped down, grazed, then we should do so, without delay. Environmental regulations should be rolled back, private property rights maximised.

Government’s role should be limited to facilitating the sale and building the infrastructure to get the stuff to market.

So there is little surprise that Joyce has returned from Antarctica believing Australia should start exploiting it now; in a ‘sustainable’ way, of course.

Joyce believes that if Australia doesn’t do it, someone else will. Claims to ‘sovereignty’ (Treaties notwithstanding) over Antarctica are just that, claims and, as such, they are subject to dispute.
Currently, a 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty prevents such a struggle for resources and in 1998 a compromise agreement was reached to add a 50-year ban on mining until the year 2048.

But growing global demand for energy, materiel and attractive neo-antique candle holders will no doubt soon put Antarctica’s resources on the global agenda, to be sold to the highest bidder.

Furthermore the increasing wealth of unscrupulous business can stretch further and deeper into hitherto inaccessible regions.

If Joyce had his way, Australia will be at the forefront of efforts to break the treaties and open up the last remaining pristine continent to ravages of resource and fishery multi-nationals, the only ones with the financial clout to run operations in such an inhospitable place.

If this happened, regulation and compliance would be pitifully poor, with few people on the ground able to monitor operations and zero local political pressure for change (aka local NIMBYs). Antarctica would be out of sight, out of mind.

Joyce’s pseudo-concern over the inevitability of the exploitation of Antarctica’s natural resources is pathetic. He appears ready to jettison any moral convictions he ever had, simply because the market dictates this.

Politics is driven by values and the economy should serve these values. When the market economy doesn’t serve the community, it should continue to be regulated.

But Joyce isn’t just telling-it-like-it-is. His apparent ‘realism’ is as sad as it is disingenuous.
Like any other National Party (or Coalition) politician he just wants to get his grubby little paws into the next big thing to sell. And no bloody polar bear* is going to stand in his way.

(yeah I know, I was being ironic…. I know polar bears live at the North Pole!)

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