I’ve been thinking a lot about Norway. I want to go there. It looks amazing. Here’s a photo from a travel site offering aurora cruises:

And then there’s fjords and glaciers and arctic fishing villages and all that. Sounds great—sign me up!

Norway has a lot of money in the bank. Their sovereign wealth fund is over 1.4 trillion dollars. That money comes from oil revenues. Norway is a global player in fossil fuels, exporting both oil and natural gas from their North Sea fields. Most of the country is run on hydro-power so local demand isn’t a problem. They have the most electric vehicles (per capita) of any nation. Also it’s a small country population-wise, only 5.5 million folks. The city of Saint Petersburg in Russia has about the same number of inhabitants.

Norway is now interested in another kind of resource and it’s found on the sea floor. Lumps of accreted minerals, rocks ranging in size from golf balls to bowling balls, are found on the continental shelf and deep ocean surrounding the country. A potentially vast new source of manganese, copper, cobalt, nickel, and other critical minerals, these polymetallic nodules are the mining industry’s hot new commodity. And that makes the ocean bottom the new frontier. Here’s the scope of Norway’s ambition:

This is a completely new thing. It’s true that terrestrial mining is increasingly unpopular, but it is at least a well-understood thing. People know how to do it properly. Any failure by miners to contain their messes and clean up their act is a choice by them. They have the means and skill. Only the desire to cut corners, a consequence of profit-chasing, prevents them (or any business) from being a responsible corporate citizen.

We know nothing about the ocean. We know more about Mars, fer chrissakes. And we know enough about Mars to know it will never be home, that Elon’s grandiose adolescent fantasy is just that.

The ocean really is our home. It’s the source of life. It’s our planet’s heart and lungs. And our planet’s heater and air conditioner, too!

I think this decision to mine the ocean floor is a momentous one. We really need to learn a hell of a lot more about the ocean before we start sullying it with robots and mining waste. At least this stuff will be done remotely. People can’t go down that far and work. Machines (as we’ve learned with the Mars journeys) are much better in harsh environments than people.

There are no solutions, only trade-offs. (I first read that on John D. Cook’s blog but it’s attributed to Thomas Sowell.)

We want a green future but it will cost us. And I don’t mean just dollars. How much are we willing to pay? I don’t know the answer to that question. And I still want to go to Norway. Apparently a lot of other folks want to go there as well, it’s a very popular travel destination.

What I really want to do is travel by boat across the Atlantic. Halifax seems a good place to start. Or someplace on the St. Lawrence, like Montreal. A stop or two in Greenland or Iceland would be nice, as would the Shetlands, Orkneys, and Faroes, but the main goal would be the Norwegian coast, and northwards to the Arctic Circle.

I might just wind up staying home, of course. It would be better for the planet. I’m not going to bicycle to Halifax, for instance. There’s plenty of travel to do here, close by. Your mind can certainly take you on plenty of journeys. For most of human history people never ventured more than a few miles from where they were born. We live in an amazing time where we can actually contemplate round-the-world travel. Sailors, sea captains, and the merchant-princes who funded their vessels and journeys always had that option, but most of the world were land-lubbers. Now a remarkable portion of our population has flown in transcontinental airliners and on vessels that traverse vast seas safely and even luxuriously.

Check out this deal from Hurtigruten: only $1648 per person! Looks like a fabulous journey: