Fossil fuel use causes many other problems: air pollution, ecological damage during extraction, political risk to assure constant supplies from unstable parts of the world, and the economic costs of rising and/or unstable prices.
Western investors may find that earlier foreign investment strategies that exploited opportunities for excessive resource extraction and ecological degradation, and did not benefit the people through productive employment generation, are less likely to be accepted – not least because now more alternatives are available.
In contrast to weak sustainability [70], strong sustainability acknowledges the critical limits of resource extraction and ecological carrying capacity, which have been pointed out in various studies [71 73].
The ecological effects of deep sand extraction, however, are still largely unknown.
The construction industry has been responsible for plaguing the environment due to ecological imbalance caused during the extraction and production of building materials.
Professor Kevin Anderson, from the Tyndall Centre at the University of Manchester, said the UK government should halt production until more was known about the ecological implications of shale gas extraction.
"The indigenous peoples of Sakhalin, who practice a traditional self-subsistence economy based on fishing, hunting, reindeer herding and wild plant gathering, are bearing the brunt of the negative ecological impacts of the Sakhalin extraction projects.
TRACI and ILCD were applied as impact assessment tools and LCA outcomes were employed to examine and determine ecological burdens of the REEs solvent extraction operation.
These issues are often mentioned in the academic literature and in SR fund prospectuses where they are used as negative screening criteria (e.g., child labor (social), animal experiments (moral), extraction of raw materials (ecological)).
Although such tests provide information to understand the interaction between two wells, the tests still do not enable an understanding of the effect of extractions on aquifers, the ecological impacts of wells or their interaction with surface water resources.
