February 15, 2024
Peters backs sea mining prospects
Foreign Minister Winston Peters says opponents of mining ignore the infrastrucutre needs which underpin modern living.
Mr Peters has returned from the Cook Islands, where he was briefed on its expoloratory programme to assess the viabilty of mining mineral-rich nodules from under the ocean.
His predecessor Nanaia Mahuta backed a conditional moratorium on deepsea mining in international waters, but Mr Peters says he’s not going to tell other countries what to do in their own territories,
“Of we’re going to have an economy to handle the changing worrld and environment we are in, the infrastructure will desperately need extraction, and you have got all these people saying ‘I’m green, I want to go ahead, I want the world to change,’ but the very utilities and resource to do that, they don’t want a bar of. You can’t have the new wind power, solo power, all these other powers without extraction. That means mining,” Mr Peters says.