Norway pauses plans for Arctic deep-sea mining

Dec. 2 (UPI) -- Norway's government reached an agreement with a small progressive party to not mine in the Arctic in exchange for it supporting its budget.

The agreement is a big win for the Socialist Left Party, which had demanded the government stop the first round of licenses for deep sea mining exploration planned for next year. The party said it would withhold support for the Norwegian government's budget if they moved forward.

"After hard work from activists, environmentalists, scientists and fishermen, we have secured a historic win for ocean protection, as the opening process for deep sea mining in Norway has been stopped," Haldis Tjeldflaat Helle, a deep-sea mining protester at Greenpeace Nordic,said, according to The Guardian.

Norway's Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store, of the Labor Party said the agreement was just a pause in its mining plans and that environmental impact assessments and regulation settings will continue.

"This will be a postponement," Store said Sunday.

Norway is seeking to be one of the first countries to mine in the Arctic, which would require heavy machinery to remove such items as cobalt, nickel, copper and manganese from the seabed. The minerals can be lucrative, if not controversial, and used in everything from electric car batteries to wind turbines and solar panels.

Scientists and environmentalists have warned about the impact such mining will have on sea life and the Arctic overall. They charged that much more environmental assessments must be done than what is currently required before mining, or if it should be done at all.