Otherwise known as “five hundred billion” dollars or $500,000,000,000. Does calling it “half a trillion” make it seem like more?

Regardless, it is a lot of money. For comparison, California’s annual state budget is about three hundred billion dollars ($300,000,000,000).

The folks over at Planet Tracker have this piece about the consequences of seafloor mining. I’ve written about this stuff before. I stumbled here because I read the article Deep Sea Mining could cost $500 billion in lost value study says on mining.com (a good site for those interested in natural resources).

If you can’t grow it then you have to mine it. We’ve all seen what mining does to terrestrial landscapes. Can you imagine what it would do to the seafloor?

Environmental damage and ecological disruption are costly. In actual dollars. If capitalism is to be dissuaded from its lust for short-term profits—which results in the degradation of the quality of life for all—it has to be dissuaded on its own terms. Making a mess has to be bad for business. It has to hurt the bottom line. Only then will our corporate overlords take the time to do things properly.

We don’t have to mine the seafloor. We can get what we need up here. And we can reduce, reuse, and recycle. The innovations we develop to exploit an exotic new landscape like the seafloor could just as well be used topside, too. I say we need to tackle the e-waste problem. Imagine the heaping piles of old TVs, computers, and phones we’ve thrown away in just the last few years. It’s a treasure trove. An unexploited resource. Let’s climb that mountain instead of the ones on bottom of the ocean.