The iceman goeth

Resources are the name of the game in today’s world – even more explicitly in the barely interrupted Middle East conflict than when providing the subtext for Donald Trump’s Venezuelan stunt – and the amendments to the 2010 Glaciers Law (approved in Congress by a 137-111 vote in the small hours of Thursday) should be seen within that context. Very crudely simplified, these amendments boil down to delegating the definition of the periglacial (moraines etc.) to provincial governments avid for hundreds of billions of dollars in mining investments – all given an added edge by the worldwide havoc caused by the interruption of oil supplies.

This context has injected a false sense of urgency which has crowded out discussion of the important, as occurs so often in Argentina. Advocates of the amended law point to the need to bring a neglected mining industry up to its level of development in countries with less restrictive attitudes like Chile (which has a substantially higher per capita income despite an inferior agriculture and manufacturing industry) or Peru. Yet neither these arguments or critiques centred on environmental purism or deploring the colonialist looting of national resources do justice to the complexity of the issue.

It remains debatable whether the 2010 Glaciers Law was the only factor obstructing previous mining investment or whether its amendment will turn the corner now. In the preceding two decades investment was far more blocked by a generally restrictive macroeconomic climate, including a ban on the repatriation of dividends – this problem is addressed by some of the tweaks to be found in the RIGI incentive scheme for major investments rather than by tampering with environmental legislation. The latter only tends to make the mining giants nervous since they are fully aware of the enormous rise of environmental concerns in this century in the face of climate change. These and other factors make this week’s legislation vulnerable to being challenged in court as unconstitutional and regressive – an obstacle recently experienced by the government’s labour reform.

Oil and water do not mix, it has long been said, but both are fundamental in today’s world and this alone makes the conservationist arguments rather more than hot (or cold) air. Looking beyond the Swiss landscapes of the Bariloche area, much of the Argentine side of the Andes is conspicuously arid with the mountain range interrupting the rain clouds from the Pacific whereas the mining industry is notoriously water-intensive, guzzling billions of gallons (four billion gallons daily in the United States alone, for example). Provincial governors might be desperate for mining royalties to replenish their depleted coffers with revenue shrinking (both by accident and design with a combo of tax cuts and depressed consumer markets) but water is even more vital for the average citizen while much of the regional agriculture such as Mendoza vineyards depends heavily on irrigation. Nor is water the only concern: glaciers and their surrounding environments are natural reservoirs and regulators whose degradation could carry irreversible consequences. On this basis this issue should perhaps not only be resolved by Congress but submitted to referendum at provincial and even local level with mining prosperity by no means the automatic winner. Nor should indigenous rights be absent from the discussion even if they seem to be completely out of fashion under the current government.

Even if the voices numbering six digits demanding the right to express their opinion in the preceding public hearing was excessive and smacked of filibustering, the government went to the other extreme in rushing through this legislation. These voices (which could have been processed virtually) would surely have enriched a debate which reflected the poverty of a Congress whose libertarian chair of the Foreign Relations Committee thinks that there is still such a country as Czechoslovakia – even an ignorant football fan could have informed her that the Czech Republic aka Czechia is one of the Group A teams in the upcoming World Cup.

In a broader global context, the spotlight is falling far more on oil than water with the fragile truce in the Middle East yet to be subscribed by Israel and yet to reopen the Strait of Hormuz for the energy supplies so  vital for the world in general and the dynamic East Asian countries in particular. But environmentalist voices are not to be silenced here either – fossil fuels are supposedly to be phased out in the next few decades as the only way to save the planet from the consequences of global warning whereas water will be needed by every generation to come, short of the Artemis II space mission finding huge pools on the dark side of the Moon.