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Antarctica Day 2024: Why Cape Town is a test case for the permanent mining ban that can be lifted

Antarctica Day 2024: Why Cape Town is a test case for the permanent mining ban that can be lifted
Extinction Rebellion stages a performance protest in Kalk Bay, Cape Town, on World Environment Day in June 2023. (Photo: Ethan van Diemen)
Tiara Walters
By Tiara Walters
2 Dec 2024
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Antarctica Day is an opportunity to ask awkward questions about the region’s unsustainable legal regime, and the Mother City’s role in it.

For 65 years the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, whose signing is marked on 1 December, has stood as a dolos between humanity’s fossil fuel addiction and the thing that allows our species to still look itself in the eye. 

That thing is being able to say that, despite all the damage we visit upon this planet, we have not yet despoiled Earth’s greatest — if likely resource-rich — wilderness with crushers and grinders, bucket-wheel excavators and subsea mining dredgers. 

But what has offered the Antarctic and its dedicated peace and science mandate its best protection? The treaty and its environmental laws, captured in the 1991 Madrid Protocol? Or its remoteness? 

This is not necessarily a binary issue. But let’s teleport ourselves back to 1959 and get hypothetical. If Antarctica had been more accessible then, and mining tech sufficiently developed, would this wilderness and its irreplaceable community of life still be safe from exploitation today? 

Campaigners at a January 2023 protest in Cape Town against the arrival of the Karpinsky from St Petersburg, Russia. (Photo: Jamie Venter)



Russian seismic surveys in Earth’s last unmined frontier since Antarctica’s mining ban entered into force in 1998. (Graphic: Righard Kapp)


An infinity of space-time to kickstart change


At the June 2023 Antarctic Treaty talks in Helsinki, the US led the reaffirmation of the Madrid Protocol’s mining ban which is fabulously permanent — but can be changed in the infinite expanse of space-time that unfurls beyond the year 2048. To lift the ban from that point onwards, there are legal hoops to jump through, but infinity is a long time, and it takes just one state to call for a review.

This is a fact that often gets lost in a conversation that struggles to mature beyond the irritation of those who rightly point out that the ban, in force since 1998, has zero expiry date. 

The crucial distinction is that, while the ban does not expire, it is not immune to expiry. The latter is exactly what the US wanted during the Protocol’s 1991 negotiations — but Panglossian polar PR, that all is for the best in this best of possible worlds, does not tend to air this inconvenient truth.

‘We can eat fish. But we can’t eat oil,’ said Themba George, a volunteer with 350.org while protesting against the Karpinsky’s January 2023 arrival in Cape Town. (Photo: Jamie Venter)


What Bush Sr & co thought of a ‘permanent’ ban


Enter Curtis Bohlen, the chief delegate of the US negotiating team, who vehemently opposed a permanent ban at the 1991 Protocol negotiations. 

“We have always been opposed to a permanent prohibition on Antarctic activities,” the US chief delegate told The New York Times. He was also George Bush Sr’s assistant state secretary for oceans, environment and science. “It’s a matter of principles. We should not foreclose the right of future generations to make decisions.” 

In 1992, a now-defunct House of Representatives committee told their subcommittee colleagues they had pushed for an “indefinite” ban instead of a permanent one, to allow for the possibility of mining. 

“The United States was prepared to agree to an indefinite ban on mineral resource activities, but refused to accept a permanent ban in the event minerals would need to be obtained from Antarctica in the future … The US insisted upon the withdrawal clause as a condition of signing the protocol.” 

Caron Hopkins, a homeless resident at Cape Town port since 1997, protested against the Karpinsky’s January 2023 arrival by noting that 'Russia is a mal [crazy] country, but our government is maller [crazier]. We want peace. So, what is this Russian ship doing in our seawater?' (Photo: Shelley Christians)



Campaigners at the V&A Waterfront protest against the Karpinsky’s January 2023 arrival. (Photo: Jamie Venter)


Fast-forward to 2024: a US-led coup for Antarctic protection


Shortly after the US had led the ban’s reaffirmation in Helsinki, June 2023, we asked the embassy to clarify the difference between a ban that wants to protect the environment and how it was originally shaped by the Bush Sr administration. 

“The US maintains our strong commitment to preserving Antarctica for peace and science, and to protect its environment through the Antarctic Treaty System. All consultative parties adopted a resolution at the [meeting] in Helsinki to reaffirm the Article 7 mining prohibition, including that it does not expire in 2048 or any other year …

“It is significant that three-fourths of all consultative parties co-sponsored the working paper on this topic — a record number — and that all consultative parties supported this resolution,” according to the embassy official. “This further demonstrates how strong the global commitment is to preventing commercial mineral extraction, including fossil fuels, in the region.”

Indeed, in May, the White House announced the US’s seminal new national strategy for Antarctica — a major update on a policy that was last written in 1994.

By clinging on to 1.5°C and promoting “an ecosystem-based approach”, which is informed by the “best-available” science, this is an environmentally smart policy. 

It was pushed through by a conservation-minded US Antarctic division just before now US-president elect Donald Trump could load his climate wrecking ball with renewed kinetic force. 

Clearly, the new policy’s drafters are not exactly Bohlen’s sycophants. The 2024 policy is a tacit acknowledgement that disembowelling the fragile Antarctic for oil and gas at some point in the future is not even anti-science or antithetical to an “ecosystem approach”. Attempting to mine and burn a possible 70 billion tons of hydrocarbons — 15 years of global oil consumption — is suicidal. 

The US-sanctioned Karpinsky strikes again


But these shifting undercurrents of US engagement with Antarctica should give us all pause for thought, especially since it is a US-sanctioned Russian oil and gas survey vessel that is scheduled to trundle back to the Southern Ocean  in the 2024/25 summer research season.

Sailing under the Russian Antarctic Expedition, the state programme that executes Moscow’s interests in the Far South, the Akademik Alexander Karpinsky says it has mapped billions of tons of Antarctic hydrocarbons via Cape Town, despite that ban.

The US-sanctioned Karpinsky, owned by Russia’s state mineral explorer Rosgeo, may have been docking in the Mother City for years — but Moscow and Pretoria, both ban signatories, maintain this is legal stuff permitted by the ban’s “scientific research” allowance. 

Of course, the Democratic Alliance — a major coalition party in South Africa’s new national unity government — has repeatedly disagreed, describing the “research” as a “contravention of the Madrid Protocol”. It also “constitutes exploration with a future intention of exploitation”, it argues. 

The great irony of the Moscow-Pretoria defence is that the Karpinsky is designated under energy sanctions. 

That makes the US — the treaty’s original architect and depositary — the first Antarctic state to acknowledge that the vessel’s sorties are hardly textbook research. 

When asked about the Russian activities, Washington told Daily Maverick that the purpose for the sanctions was unequivocal: “… to further constrain development of future energy and mining projects abroad”.

An Extinction Rebellion protest against the Karpinsky’s return from Antarctica in April 2023. (Photo: Nic Bothma)


Antarctic Treaty talks 2025 — a renewed opportunity


And yet, amid the snow and the fury, the sanctions and the denials, the posturing and the gaslighting, a small group of academics have been shouting into the icy void. 

There is an elegant solution for all this, they say. 

In 2022, Professor Alan Hemmings of Gateway Antarctica at New Zealand’s Canterbury University and Patrick Flamm of Frankfurt’s Peace Research Institute co-authored a peer-reviewed proposal. Published in the German journal GIGA Focus, this outlines how to immediately implement oil and gas blocks that can never be demolished.

How would one achieve this? By using the annual Antarctic Treaty talks to “codify” a legal pathway “as a legally binding Measure”. 

A “Measure” is technical treaty speak for a legally enforceable agreement. 

It is an opportunity to revitalise Antarctica’s consensus culture, currently on life support due to ongoing Chinese and Russian vetoes. The next opportunity is at the June 2025 Antarctic Treaty talks in Milan, Italy, and there are 23 more in the run-up to a potential 2048-plus review. 

A Marine Traffic record of the Karpinsky as it sails out of Cape Town to Antarctica on 1 February 2023. (Source: Marinetraffic.com)



Extinction Rebellion stages a performance protest in Kalk Bay, Cape Town, on World Environment Day in June 2023. (Photo: Ethan van Diemen)



The paper’s authors do not advocate the monumental task of forever eliminating all types of mineral extraction right now. “The project here is one of a narrower commitment to not commencing a subset of this — extraction of Antarctic hydrocarbons,” they explain. 

Some prominent commentators habitually claim that, from 2048, the ban can only be lifted by consensus and a mining regulation pact. 

That is a dangerous half-truth that creates a false sense of security. 

It takes a simple reading of the treaty’s environmental constitution to see that the ban can be reviewed and even lifted from 2048 as a result of consensus and majority voting, as well as the Bush Sr administration's controversial walk-out clause.

Even the act of calling for a 2048-plus review may stir up geopolitical tensions as seven states including Argentina and Australia maintain territorial claims that are neither denied nor recognised by the treaty. This would require bandwidth that might be better used to deal with a melting continent pouring into the ocean, raising global sea levels and rewriting coastlines. DM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeWvTRUpMk

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