For those who have not found time yet to see Don’t Look Up, you’d best hurry before reality catches up.
This is a kind-of spoiler, but there is plot point regarding mining the sea floor. For those not keeping up with current events, it is only partly satire. The New Yorker‘s Elizabeth Kolbert has an update.
Let’s head to the tiny island nation of Nauru which wields outsized importance considering its eight-square-miles and 10,000 inhabitants.
The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) declares about a hundred million square miles of seabed a “common heritage of mankind.” Administration is by the International Seabed Authority based in Kingston, Jamaica. But that’s just a miner wrinkle (pun intended) for those hoping to tear the shit out of our common heritage for private profit:
Large swaths of the seabed are covered with potentially mineable—and potentially extremely valuable—metals, in the form of blackened lumps called polymetallic nodules. For decades, companies have been trying to figure out how to mine these nodules; so far, though, they’ve been able to do only exploratory work. Permits for actual mining can’t be granted until the I.S.A. comes up with a set of regulations governing the process, a task it’s been working on for more than twenty years.
The complexities continue. To apply for a mining permit, companies need to team up with a country that’s party to UNCLOS. (Most of the nations in the world are, but not, significantly, the United States.) And this is where Nauru comes in. It’s sponsoring a company called Nauru Ocean Resources, which is a subsidiary of the Metals Company, a Canadian firm. The Metals Company wants to mine a nodule-rich region of the Pacific between Hawaii and Mexico known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. In June, not long before the Metals Company went public as a “special purpose acquisition company,” Nauru notified the I.S.A. that it was invoking what’s become known as the “two-year rule.” The rule—which is actually part of an annex to UNCLOS—says that, “if a request is made by a State,” the I.S.A. “shall” finalize the regulations within two years. As it has now been six months since Nauru invoked the rule, this leaves just eighteen months for the work to be completed.
When did we last see special purpose acquisition companies? Oh, right. Friday.
Anyhoo, developers object to the short timetable. Not enough time for lobbyists to buy off the right people, one supposes. But surely, environmentalists want to tear up the seafloor, right? This is all about green energy and sustainability. The same way developers where I live argue that tearing down a block of 100-year-old Victorian homes to build 100 condos is about affordable housing if they make seven affordable. Never mind that 50 people already occupy affordable apartments in those existing homes they plan to bulldoze.
But I digress:
Both Nauru and the Metals Company have portrayed the effort to mine the seabed as essential to cutting carbon emissions. Clean-energy technologies such as electric-car batteries, at least in their current form, require metals, including cobalt, that are found in the nodules in relatively high concentrations. “Nauru is part of a pioneering venture that could soon power the world’s green economy,” a video produced by the country’s government declares. “We’re in a quest for a more sustainable future,” Gerard Barron, the C.E.O. of the Metals Company, says in the same video.
Marine scientists argue, though, that the potential costs of deep-ocean mining outweigh the benefits. They point out that the ocean floor is so difficult to access that most of its inhabitants are probably still unknown, and their significance to the functioning of the oceans is ill-understood. In the meantime, seabed mining, which would take place in complete darkness, thousands of feet under water, will, they say, be almost impossible to monitor. In September, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which compiles the “red list” of endangered species, called for a global moratorium on deep-sea mining. The group issued a statement raising concerns that “biodiversity loss will be inevitable if deep-sea mining is permitted to occur,” and “that the consequences for ocean ecosystem function are unknown.”
Nauru’s business ventures have a dubious record, Kolbert reminds readers, quoting oceanographer Sylvia Earle. Carving up the ocean floor with mining would amount to “biggest land grab in the history of humankind.” Give the non-White inhabitants of Nauru more Bibles. It will all be fine.
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos had best set about mining the asteroid belt ASAP, a la “The Expanse,” if they expect to save mankind from others of their kind.
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