Right chilly today innit?
Fair enough, git clean does exist. However, if the button saying "discard all changes" is really a button that runs git clean
, that's just a plain terrible design choice. git clean
is "delete all untracked files", which is specifically not discarding changes, because there can be no changes to discard on an untracked file. Even talking about "changes" to an untracked file in VC context makes little sense, because the VC system doesn't know anything about any changes to the file, only whether it exists or not.
That's not even mentioning the fact that the option to "git clean" shows up as one of the easily accessible options in relation to a staging process. Especially if you're coming from the git CLI, you're likely to associate "discard changes" with "git restore".
Yeah, I guess I've got to leave it like that now..
Got will not delete untracked files though, which is what happened here. If you want to discard changes to a file with git, you first have to commit the file to the index at some point, which means there's only ever so much damage an erroneous "git restore" or "git reset" can do. Specifically, neither of them will delete all the files in an existing project where VC has just been added.
If you have set up your staging area for a commit you may want to discard (unstage) changes from the staging area, as opposed to discarding changes in the working directory.
Of course, the difference between the two is obvious if you're using git CLI, but I can easily see someone using a GUI (and that maybe isn't too familiar with git) misunderstanding "discard" as "unstage".
Either way, what happened here indicates that all the files were somehow added to the VC, without having been committed first, or something like that, because git will not let you discard a file that is untracked, because that wouldn't make any sense. The fact that the GUI let this person delete a bunch of files without first committing them to the index is what makes this a terrible design choice, and also what makes the use of the word "discard" misleading.
I use gitkraken for two primary purposes:
-
Having a visual representation of my project history.
-
resolving merge conflicts
Of these, the first is really the only thing I really want a GUI for. I'll just have it open on my side-screen if I'm managing some more or less messy branch structure or quickly want an overview of what has been done on which branches, where common ancestors are, etc. All the actual doing of things is done from the CLI, because it's just better for that.
Keeping the kids safe!
Absolutely! I remember going from "holy shit this guy is terrifying and we have video evidence of him being able to kick ass" to "what the fuck? These not-as-terrifying looking people are messing him up bad!"
There's a lot of good advice here already, especially that wool is the gold standard - nothing synthetic cuts it. I want to add that the absolute key is about layering, and not over-stuffing.
What keeps you warm is primarily the air trapped between your layers, which means that three thin layers can be a lot better than one thick layer. This also means that you will be freezing if your layers are too tight. If you have two thin layers, and put on a sweater, and that sweater feels tight, that likely means you're pushing out the air trapped in your inner layers, and they won't be as effective. The same applies when putting on a jacket.
So: You want a thin base layer (think light, thin wool shirt + long johns), then an optional medium layer or two (slightly thicker wool shirt, I have some in the range of 200 grams), and finally a thicker sweater for when you're not moving. These should increase in size so that they can fit the thinner layers underneath, and you want your jacket big enough to fit all the underlying layers.
Finally: When you're moving around, you will get stupidly warm and sweaty unless you take off clothes. It's better to take off some stuff and be a bit cold for the first 10 minutes of moving than to get sweaty and be cold for the rest of the day. If (when) you do get cold, running in a circle for 10 min will fix it (run at a calm, steady pace, if you're really cold it might take longer to get warm than you think, but you will get warm if you move).
In short: Being in a cold climate is just as much about how you use your equipment, and how you activate yourself to stay warm, as it is about what equipment you have.
Watch me: My void*
doesn't give a shit about your const
!
I have to be honest in that, while I think duck typing should be embraced, I have a hard time seeing how people are actually able to deal with large-scale pure Python projects, just because of the dynamic typing. To me, it makes reading code so much more difficult when I can't just look at a function and immediately see the types involved.
Because of this, I also have a small hangup with examples in some C++ libraries that use auto
. Like sure, I'm happy to use auto
when writing code, but when reading an example I would very much like to immediately be able to know what the return type of a function is. In general, I think the use of auto
should be restricted to cases where it increases readability, and not used as a lazy way out of writing out the types, which I think is one of the benefits of C++ vs. Python in large projects.
Nah, but the Russians took massive losses at some point last year (I seem to remember) because the Ukrainians launched a bunch of mines behind an attacking column, so that when the column was beaten back, they ran straight into a newly placed mine field.
My impression is that remote mining is used for two purposes: Defensively, you can break up or slow down an advance by suddenly laying mines either in front of, in the middle of, or behind, an advancing column (the latter preventing reinforcements from arriving, or the attacking force from an orderly retreat). Offensively, you can use remote mine laying to cover the flanks of an advancing force, or prevent reinforcements from reaching a position you're attacking.
Man... You're really working hard to get mad about nothing here. You just come along and decide that what someone said was directed at you, and that they meant something else than what they did in order to start a fight. You'll honestly have a much better time if you just start trying to see others in a positive light instead of seeking conflict and offence.
And then you go making yourself "more of a victim" on top of things... It looks like you think life is about finding fights, losing them, and complaining as loudly as possible afterwards. Maybe you need help?
(...) what you said can be construed as offensive.
So what? You have a personal responsibility for being offended. It's not everybody else's job to walk on eggshells to avoid offending you. If you go looking for things people have said that can offend you, you're gonna have a shitty time.
Try making an effort to interpret people in the best possible way, and you'll have a much better time, with much fewer people being perceived as "going after you".
Using the wrong filament isn't Darwin Award worthy. Test firing a newly manufactured weapon with your hand is. And that would be true even if this wasn't an experimental home-made design...
I definitely think the ramping up is going far too slowly, and as such it isn't strange that there are shortages.
This is a huge war- the largest land war since WWII. All of NATO is still operating on a peace-time economy, so ramping up production to the levels required to support a 500 k - 1 mill. strong army like the Ukrainians is taking far too long.
However, as far as I can tell, production in Europe is only heading one way: Up. Not only that, Russia is operating in a war economy, which is, more or less by definition, unsustainable in the long run. Europe has the economic capacity to double its production, and maintain it indefinitely. I just think we should prioritise more heavily, and scale up more quickly.
The amount of people I've been helping out that have copied some code from somewhere and say "it doesn't work", and who are dumbfounded when I ask them to read the surrounding text aloud for me...
Along the same line: When something crashes, and all I have to do is tell people to read the error message aloud, and ask them what that means. It's like so many people expect to be spoon-fed solutions, to the point where they don't even stop to think about the problem if something doesn't immediately work.
Once again proving that mobile armour most definitely has a place on the modern battlefield, and the importance of good armour!
Here's to hoping these guys are still in shape to keep it up and train others. And let's get moving on sending more of these and everything else that can protect them while they throw out the Russians!
It seems to me like most European countries see supplying equipment to destroy the Russian army in Ukraine as preferable to destroying the Russian army on their own soil. Although I do hope Germany picks up the pace rather than reduces it.
However, even without Germany, there are plenty of other European countries that will be capable of buying truckloads of equipment from German manufacturers.
I can't even begin to imagine what this must have been like.. I'm wondering about several things:
-
What kind of reaction was there to your dissapearance? Have you ever looked up any archives to find out what happened in the days after you dissapeared?
-
What is your life like now?
It appears that my email has gotten in the hands of some scammers with a botnet or something. What do I do?
Suddenly I started receiving a bunch of scam mails (phishing). I suspect some bot or bot-net is involved, because I've received maybe a couple hundred e-mails at the time of writing, all from different (likely auto-generated) senders. With anything from 2-10 emails per day.
The scam is essentially just some phishing, all related to the same topic. I've mostly been able to mitigate it by filtering out mails containing certain keywords or phrases that show up in the scam mails. However, the mails change relatively often (about once a day) so every now and then something gets through, and I'll update my filter.
My question is really if there's any way I can figure out
- Where this is coming from,
- How they got hold of my email
So that I can try to go after the root cause / prevent other scammers from getting hold of it.
WSL vs. Dual Booting vs. virtualbox
I have a friend thats setting up linux (ubuntu) on his machine. He has a windows installation. I personally use mac as my primary OS, but I've had a linux partition on my machine as well, and I'm having a slightly hard time giving him good advice as to what solution he should choose when setting up linux (I don't even know how I would partition a disk on a windows machine to prep it for dual booting).
My question is quite simple: What are the pros/cons of WSL vs. Dual Booting vs. Virtualbox, both with regards to setup and with regards to usage?
Strikes on the Seim river crossings (speculation/discussion)
I don't really know if this fits in this community, if not just take it down. The map is from the BlackBird group.
Regarding the recent strikes on the Seim river crossings, I've been speculating what Ukraines plans are. Not too long ago, the Ukranian advance around Korenevo slowed a bit. Then they started systematically hitting the Seim river crossings, of which ISW assesses there is only one left.
If the goal was to encircle and trap Russian units, I would assume that Ukraine would make a hard push through Korenevo to the river. As it looks now, it seems like they are leaving a small corridor open. Whether that is due to Russian resistance or Ukrainian planning I have no idea.
This makes me wonder whether they are intentionally leaving a small opening (See: Sun Tzu) to try to make Russian forces low on resources funnel through the opening where they can inflict heavy casualties, or whether they are trying to force the Russians to expend resources trying to prevent being cut off before they close the net.
In any case, I can see Ukraine wanting to secure another major road towards Korenevo that they can use to supply the offensive.
Of course, I don't want anyone to reveal anything that could violate OPSEC, everything I read is based on OSINT. I'm just interested and would like to hear other peoples speculations.
The Lion of Gripsholm Castle
In a sub like this, we cannot exclude the possibly best attempt at taxidermy, made by some poor soul that had likely never seen a lion.
Setting up self-hosted cloud storage
I'm looking to set up a server of some kind that I can use to store more or less arbitrary files on demand.
While I have quite a bit of programming experience, I have little-to-no experience in the server-space, so I don't really know where I should be getting started/what kind of pitfalls I should be looking out for/what kind of design choices I should be making early on.
In short: I want some system that allows me to take more or less arbitrary files, send them from either my laptop or phone, and have them stored on a drive that I can have lying around somewhere hooked up to some setup. I don't need any automatic backing up, sending files manually is sufficient. The individual files I'll be sending probably won't be exceeding the MB range of sizes. Remotely downloading files from the storage is not an immediate requirement, if I need to retrieve them I can plug directly into the disk. What I want to protect myself against is the "freak accident" type of thing where all the devices I currently have copies of a file on are lost in a fire, while travelling, or something like that.
Does anyone here have any tips for where I should be looking to get started?
Kjør debatt: Bør koranbrenning forbys?
I lys av sakene i Sverige og Danmark har dette blitt dagsaktuelt i Norge også. Jeg vil høre hva folk tenker. Stikkord er:
- Ytringsfrihet / misbruk av ytringsfrihet
- Respekt for folks religion / følelser
- Grensesetting mellom beskyttede og ubeskyttede religioner / følelser
- Sikring av Norge og nordmenn mot vold og sanksjoner.
Bare 20 % ønsker vindkraft på land, kun 2 / 79 ordførere sier ja til vindkraft i sin kommune. (artikkel i innlegg)
Kun to av ti nordmenn ønsker vindkraft på land. NHO-sjef Ole Erik Almlid mener resten må tenke seg om.
Her er jeg helt klart i statistisk mindretall, så jeg håper noen kan fortelle meg hva de tenker. Jeg mener vi helt klart må bygge vindkraft på land hvis vi ønsker å nå noen som helst "klimamål" (altså unngå at verden brenner/drukner). Jeg får alt for ofte inntrykk av at "alle" er enige i at vi må bygge mer fornybar energi, mens de samtidig kjemper med nebb og klør mot de tiltakene som er realistiske, gjennomførbare, og kan fungere.
Jeg vil gjerne at noen som er imot vindkraft på land opplyser meg litt: Hva mener du vi bør gjøre i stedet? Hvorfor ikke gjøre det i tillegg? Tror du andre tiltak alene er nok? Er det ikke en realitet at det hjelper lite å beskytte lokalmiljøet mot vindkraftutbygging nå, hvis det uansett blir ødelagt av flom, tørke, forsuring av vannet, fremmedarter pga. temperaturendring, jordskred (mer ekstrem nedbør), osv. om 30-50 år?
Linket artikkel:
Flere ordførere har lukket døren for vindkraft på land. – Ta debatten på nytt, sier NHO-sjefen.
Kun to av ti nordmenn ønsker vindkraft på land. NHO-sjef Ole Erik Almlid mener resten må tenke seg om.
Norge kan ha for lite kraft allerede i 2027.
Skal vi unngå det, bør det bygges 5–10 terawattimer (TWh) med vindkraft på land. Det slo Energikommisjonen fast i februar.
Men selv om åtte av ti er enig i at Norge må bygge ut mer fornybar energi, mener kun to av ti nordmenn at det bør gjøres med vindkraft. Det viser en ny undersøkelse fra Næringslivets Hovedorganisasjon (NHO) (se graf nederst i saken).
Administrerende direktør i NHO, Ole Erik Almlid, mener vi må ta vindkraft-debatten på nytt.
– Det store løftet som skal gjøres, klarer vi ikke uten vindkraft på land, sier han.
Vil akseptere vindkraft
I flere år har motstanden mot vindkraft på land vært sterk. En kartlegging gjort av Nettavisen viste at kun to av 79 ordførere ville si ja til vindkraft i sin kommune. Tall fra Cicero viser at motstanden er fallende, men fremdeles er 35 prosent helt imot vindkraft på land.
NHOs undersøkelse viser derimot at langt flere er villig til å akseptere det, hvis politikere og næringsliv sukrer pillen (se graf under).
Vindkraft i industriområder
NHO spurte nordmenn hva som skal til for å akseptere vindkraft på land. 33 prosent vil si ja hvis vindturbinene blir bygget på områder som allerede er regulert til industri.
Det er i tråd med Energikommisjonens forslag om å bygge nærvindmøller.
I tillegg vil nordmenn at vindkraften skal sikre mer inntekter til kommunen og flere arbeidsplasser.
– Jeg er veldig glad for å se at vindkraft på land har så stor støtte, under gitte forutsetninger. Det viser at bildet kanskje er mer sammensatt enn vi har trodd, sier Almlid.
Ifølge ham åpner dette et rom for å diskutere vindkraft på lokalbefolkningens premisser, fremfor å avvise det blankt.
18 prosent vil ikke gå med på det under noen omstendigheter.
I Møre og Romsdal og Vestland er henholdsvis 28 og 24 prosent av befolkningen helt imot vindkraft. Fem av de 13 områdene NVE har pekt ut for vindkraft ligger helt eller delvis i disse fylkene.
Ordfører-duell om vindkraft
Almlid oppfordrer landets mange ordførere og ordførerkandidater til å løfte debatten i årets lokalvalgkamp.
– Ta diskusjonen om det er mulig å ha vindkraft i deres kommune. De som har sagt nei, ta en ny diskusjon. Men gjør det på en ordentlig måte, og gjør det i dialog med befolkningen.
Almlid tror flere kommuner kan ombestemme seg fordi situasjonen er annerledes nå. Med kraftunderskudd vil strømprisene bli høyere, og allerede nå er det bedrifter som ikke blir etablert fordi de ikke har tilgang til kraften de har behov for.
Han mener tror flere vil kunne si ja til vindkraft hvis de får mer igjen for det.
– Jeg har veldig tro på gulrot.
Positive sider
NHO representerer bedrifter innen kraftkrevende industri, kraftprodusenter og offshorenæringer som skal elektrifisere. Likevel mener Almlid det er langt flere enn hans medlemsbedrifter som vil nytte godt av vindkraften.
Han mener politikere og næringslivsledere må bli bedre til å fremheve hvordan vindkraft kan gi noe tilbake til samfunnet. Et eksempel er at utbyggingen kan skape arbeidsplasser og levende lokalsamfunn.
– Den type utbygging som vindkraft på land innebærer, må gjøres i godt samarbeid med lokalbefolkningen. Og det må gjøres på en måte som sikrer inntekter til kommunen og verner sårbare områder.
Skjære gjennom
Men det haster å ta en avgjørelse. Det er fire år til Norge kan gå med kraftunderskudd, og utbygging av vindparker kan ta lang tid.
Debatt er bra, men til slutt må noen skjære gjennom. Såpass er Almlid tydelig på.
Han bruker motstanden mot vannkraftutbygging på 1970- og ’80-tallet som eksempel.
– I dag er alle glade for at vi har vannkraften. Om mange år vil også mange være glade for at vi har både vindkraft, vannkraft og solkraft.
Vindkraftdebatten krever at næringsliv og politikere tar tydelig lederskap, mener Almlid.
– Vi må lære av det vi gjorde på åttitallet, da vi synliggjorde hvorfor vannkraften var viktig. Men det viser også at det å skjære gjennom, er viktig for å få til de langsiktige målene man satt, sikre arbeidsplasser og rimelige strømpriser.
Almlid understreker at det å si nei til vindkraft, også får konsekvenser.
– Sier vi ja, så har det en kostnad, og da må vi bøte på det best mulig. Men hvis vi sier nei, så har det en kostnad også.
Nei til atomkraft
Undersøkelsen viser også stor støtte til utbygging av atomkraft. Almlid har derimot ikke tro på at Norge skal bli en stor atomkraft-nasjon.
– For å nå 2030-målene, så er ikke atomkraft svaret på kort sikt. Det er for langt frem og kommer til å være kostbart.
Han vil heller ha mer av alt annet.
– Svaret på utfordringen som Energikommisjonen har løftet frem, er både og – ikke enten eller. Det er vind på land, vind til havs, mer vannkraft, mer solkraft og mer energieffektivisering.
What happened to NSFL?
Back in the day, on other forums than this one, there were tags to differentiate between porn (nsfw) and gore (nsfl). This was nice for people browsing new that had no problem seeing tits, but wanted to avoid degloved hands.
Throughout the years, the NSFL tag went out of use. What happened?
Jailbreaking iPhones: what exactly does it entail?
I remember back in the day when people would "Jailbreak" iPhones, but never really picked up on what they were doing other than that it let them do stuff that those of us with "non-jailbroken" iPhones couldn't do.
Are they just booting another OS, e.g. android? Also: why haven't I heard of it in a while? Is it not possible on newer iPhones?
Ola Borten Moe kan ikke gå av etter aksjehandelsak (Aftenpostentekst inkludert)
Det har kommet frem noe jeg ikke var klar over i forbindelse med aksjehandelsaken til Ola Borten Moe: En stortingsrepresentant har (per grunnloven) ikke lov til å trekke seg, men er nødt til å bli sittende ut perioden. Det er (slik jeg forstår det) heller ikke lov å skrive ut nyvalg/oppløse stortinget i løpet av en stortingsperiode, slik som man kan i mange andre land.
Jeg ser at det er gode argumenter både for og mot dette, og er interessert i å høre hva folk synes om det. Bør en politiker kunne trekke seg / utvises fra stortinget hvis de misbruker folkets tillit? Bør det kunne skrives ut nyvalg hvis stortinget går i vranglås og ingen klarer å samle flertall for noe?
Nedenfor er det Aftenpostens leder har å si om saken:
Å sitte på Stortinget er ingen straff
Ola Borten Moe må nok jobbe med motivasjonen. Men han ba om tillit fra velgerne. Da må han stå løpet ut.
Det kom et lite hjertesukk fra Ola Borten Moe fredag. Han varslet at han går av som statsråd, trekker seg som nestleder i Senterpartiet og ikke stiller ved stortingsvalget i 2025. Men han slipper ikke ut av Stortinget før denne perioden er over.
Moe virket ikke spesielt motivert for en slags åpen soning på Løvebakken. Det er mulig å forstå. Men hverken hans eget parti eller andre bør lytte til oppfordringen han kom med om å se på dette regelverket på nytt.
Moe peker på at andre land gir folk mulighet til å trekke seg fra nasjonalforsamlingen.
Ulike demokratier har forskjellige løsninger både når det gjelder dette og andre ting. Norge skiller seg fra mange andre, også ved at det ikke er mulig å oppløse parlamentet og skrive ut nyvalg. Det er en styrke for det norske demokratiet. Partiene tvinges til å finne løsninger sammen når velgerne har sagt sitt. Det har bidratt til en kultur med brede forlik om viktige saker som blant annet pensjon.
Plikten til å stå løpet ut for den som velges til Stortinget, er grunnlovsfestet. Unntak er blitt gitt for representanter som får internasjonale toppverv, som da Jens Stoltenberg (Ap) ble generalsekretær i Nato i 2014.
En generell mulighet til å trekke seg ville ha flere uheldige sider. For velgerne ville det blir mindre forutsigbart hvem de egentlig stemmer på hvis en toppkandidat plutselig kan trekke seg etter valget og noen andre rykker opp. Partier kan fristes til å toppe listen med kjendiser som etterpå finner ut at de har morsommere ting å gjøre enn å sitte i komitémøter og votere til langt på natt, mens andre nyter lyse sommerkvelder i juni.
En risiko er også at velgernes avgjørelse undergraves. Det kan oppstå press i offentligheten for å få en representant til å trekke seg. Hvis det lages en nødutgang fra Stortinget, kan også partiene få enda mer makt ved at brysomme representanter kan skvises ut.
Moe sa på pressekonferansen at han er innstilt på å gjøre en jobb de neste to årene for velgerne i Sør-Trøndelag som ga ham tillit i 2021. Det er fullt forståelig om motivasjonen hans akkurat nå ikke er på topp. Men han vil trolig – og forhåpentlig – klare å mobilisere sine sterke sider som politiker igjen.
Den som har sagt ja til å stille til Stortinget, og som får velgernes tillit, må stå løpet ut. I gode og vonde dager.
Getting into trad climbing - any tips?
I'm getting into trad climbing, after quite a few years of indoor and outdoor sport and bouldering. I'm very aware that trad climbing involves more risk, especially if you climb above your ability and/or are bad/inexperienced at placing runners. Does anyone here have tips on how best to practice protecting a route to the point where you feel safe enough to climb a difficult crux with only trad protection below you?
Opinions: What is a movie you genuinely like, that is rated below 60% on rotten tomatoes?
Inspired by the linked XKCD. Using 60% instead of 50% because that's an easy filter to apply on rottentomatoes.
I'll go first: I think "Sherlock Holmes: A game of Shadows" was awesome, from the plot to the characters ,and especially how they used screen-play to highlight how Sherlocks head works in these absurd ways.
Deep sea mining - a better alternative? (article in body)
Taking nickel from rainforests destroys 30 times more life than getting it from the depths
I'm immediately sceptical to the idea of ruining even more areas of nature than we already are, but at the same time I recognise that if we want to build feasible green energy and storage, we need rare-earth metals and heavy metals. This might be a good alternative to massive deforestation.
Since the article is paywalled:
Pushed by the threat of climate change, rich countries are embarking on a grand electrification project. Britain, France and Norway, among others, plan to ban the sale of new internal-combustion cars. Even where bans are not on the statute books, electric-car sales are growing rapidly. Power grids are changing too, as wind turbines and solar panels displace fossil-fuelled power plants. The International Energy Agency (iea) reckons the world will add as much renewable power in the coming five years as it did in the past 20.
All that means batteries, and lots of them—both to propel the cars and to store energy from intermittent renewable power stations. Demand for the minerals from which those batteries are made is soaring. Nickel in particular is in short supply. The element is used in the cathodes of high-quality electric-car batteries to boost capacity and cut weight. The iea calculates that, if it is to meet its decarbonisation goals, the world will need to be producing 6.3m tonnes of nickel a year by 2040, roughly double what it managed in 2022. That adds up to some 80m tonnes of nickel in total between now and then.
Over the past five years most of the growth in demand has been met by Indonesia, which has been bulldozing rainforests to get at the ore beneath. In 2017 the country produced just 17% of the world’s nickel, according to cru, a metals research firm. Today it is responsible for around half, or 1.6m tonnes a year, and that number is rising. cru thinks Indonesia will account for 85% of production growth between now and 2027. Even so, that is unlikely to be enough to meet rising demand. And as Indonesian nickel production increases, it is expected to replace palm-oil production as the primary cause of deforestation in the country.
But there is an alternative. A patch of Pacific Ocean seabed called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (ccz) is dotted with trillions of potato-sized lumps of nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper, all of which are of interest to battery-makers (see map). Collectively the nodules hold an estimated 340m tonnes of nickel alone—more than three times the United States Geological Survey’s estimate of the world’s land-based reserves. Companies have been keen to mine them for several years. With the coming expiry, on July 9th, of an international bureaucratic deadline, that prospect looks more likely than ever.
It’s better down where it’s wetter That date marks two years since the island nation of Nauru, on behalf of a mining company it sponsors called The Metals Company (tmc), told the International Seabed Authority (isa), an appendage of the United Nations, that it wanted to mine a part of the ccz to which it has been granted access. That triggered a requirement for the isa to complete rules on commercial use of the deposits. If those regulations are not ready by July 9th—and it seems they will not be—then the isa is required to “consider and provisionally approve” tmc’s application. (The firm itself says it hopes to wait until rules can be agreed.)
tmc’s plan is about as straightforward as underwater mining can be. Its first target is a patch of the ccz called nori-d, which covers about 2.5m hectares of ocean floor (an area about 20% bigger than Wales). Gerard Barron, tmc’s boss, estimates there are about 3.8m tonnes of nickel in the area. Since the nodules are simply sitting on the bottom of the ocean, the firm plans to send a large robot to the seabed to hoover them up. The gathered nodules will then be sucked up to a support ship on the surface through a high-tech pipe, similar to ones used in the oil-and-gas industry. Mr Barron says that his firm can break even on nodule collection at nickel prices as low as $6,000 per tonne; nickel currently sells for about $22,000 per tonne.
The support ship will wash off any sediment, then offload the nodules to a second ship which will ferry them back to shore for processing. The surplus sediment, meanwhile, will be released back into the sea at a depth of around 1,500 metres, far below most ocean life. And tmc is not the only firm interested. A Belgian firm called Global Sea Mineral Resources—a subsidiary of Deme, a dredging giant—is also keen, and has tested a sea-floor robot and riser system similar to tmc’s. Three Chinese firms—Beijing Pioneer, China Merchants and China Minmetals—are circling too, though they are reckoned to be further behind technologically.
As with mining on land, taking nickel from the sea will damage the surrounding ecosystem. Although the ccz is deep, dark and cold, it is not lifeless. tmc’s robot will destroy many organisms it drives across, as well as any that live on the nodules it collects. It will also kick up plumes of sediment, some of which will drift onto nearby organisms and kill them (though research suggests the plumes tend not to rise more than two metres above the seabed).
Adrian Glover, a marine biologist at the Natural History Museum in London, points out that, because life evolved first in the oceans and only later moved to the land, the majority of the genetic diversity on the planet is still found underwater. Although the deep-ocean floor is dark and nutrient-poor, it nevertheless supports thousands of unique species. Most are microbes, but there are also worms, sponges and other invertebrates. The diversity of life is “very high”, says Dr Glover.
Yet in several respects, mining the seabed has a smaller environmental footprint than mining in Indonesia. The harsh deep-sea environment means that, although its inhabitants may be highly diverse, they are not very abundant. A paper published in Nature in 2016 found that a given square metre of ccz supports between one and two living organisms, weighing a couple of grams at most. A square metre of Indonesian rainforest, by contrast, contains about 30,000 grams of plant biomass alone, and plenty more if you weigh up primates, birds, reptiles and insects too.
But it is not enough to simply weigh the biomass in each ecosystem. The amount of nickel that can be produced per hectare is also relevant. The 2.5m hectares of seabed that tmc hopes to exploit is expected to yield about 3.8m tonnes of nickel, or about 1.5 tonnes per hectare.
Getting hard numbers for land-based mining is tricky, for the firms that do it are less transparent than those hoping to mine the seabed. But investigative reporting from the Pulitzer Centre, a non-profit media outlet, suggests each hectare of rainforest on Sulawesi, the Indonesian island at the centre of the country’s nickel industry, will produce around 675 tonnes of nickel. (One reason land deposits produce so much more nickel, despite the lower quality of the ore, is because the ore extends far beneath the surface, whereas nodules exist only on the seabed.)
All that makes a very rough comparison possible. Around 13 kilograms of biomass would be lost for every tonne of ccz nickel mined. Each tonne mined on Sulawesi would destroy around 450kg of plants alone—plus an unknown amount of animal biomass, too.
Pick your poison There are other environmental arguments in favour of mining the seabed. The nodules contain much higher concentrations of metal than deposits on land, which means less energy is required to process them. Peter Tom Jones, the director of the ku Leuven Institute for Sustainable Metals and Materials, in Belgium, reckons that processing the nodules will produce about 40% less greenhouse-gas emissions than those from terrestrial ore.
And because the nodules must be taken away for processing anyway, companies like tmc can be encouraged to choose places where energy comes with low emissions. Indonesian nickel ore, in contrast, is uneconomic unless it is processed near where it was mined. That almost always means using electricity from coal plants or diesel generators. Alex Laugharne, an analyst at cru, reckons Indonesian nickel production emits about 60 tonnes of carbon dioxide for each tonne of nickel. An audit of tmc’s plans carried out by Benchmark Minerals Intelligence, a firm based in London, found that each tonne of nickel harvested from the seabed would produce about six tonnes of co2.
In any case, metal collected from the seabed is unlikely to entirely replace that mined from the rainforest. Battery production is growing so fast that nickel will probably be dug up from wherever it can be found. But if the ocean nodules can be brought to market affordably, the sheer volume of metal available may start to ease the pressure on Indonesian forests. The arguments are unlikely to stay theoretical for long. Mr Barron of tmc aims to start producing nickel and other metals from the seabed by the end of next year.
Correction (July 6th 2023): An earlier version of this piece said global nickel production would need to reach 48m tonnes per year by 2040, and would total 320m tonnes by 2040. The correct figures are 6.3m tonnes and 80m tonnes. Apologies for the error.
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