Deep Sea Mining: Promise or Peril?

Beneath the waves, in the darkness of the deep ocean, lies one of Earth's last pristine wilderness areas – a place we've barely begun to understand. Now, a high-stakes race is underway to mine valuable minerals from the seafloor, with profound implications for marine ecosystems and our planet's future.

Richard Charter from The Ocean Foundation takes us on an eye-opening journey into the complex world of deep sea mining. He expertly breaks down the three distinct types of extraction threatening different ocean ecosystems: hydrothermal vents with their unique energy-transforming life forms, mineral crusts that form along seamounts, and polymetallic nodules scattered across vast stretches of seafloor. These aren't just minerals – they're living habitats that took millions of years to evolve.

What's particularly alarming is the permanence of any damage we inflict. Charter reveals that test mining tracks created 26 years ago remain perfectly visible today, as if freshly made. "If it took millions of years to evolve these life forms in the sea," he warns, "then we know that for them to come back, first of all they may come back in a different form, and it may take millions of years. This is beyond human scale."

While mining companies frame their work as essential for the green energy transition, providing minerals for electric vehicle batteries and renewable infrastructure, Charter challenges this narrative. He points out that automotive technology is already evolving beyond these specific metals, and effective recycling programs could meet many of our needs without risking irreparable harm to ocean ecosystems. Meanwhile, the deep sea may harbor undiscovered solutions to humanity's greatest challenges, including potential cancer t

Planet Centric Media (non-profit)
Media for a Healthier Planet: Elevating The Interconnectedness of Life & Value of Natural Resources.

Mendonoma Whale & Seal Study
Founded by Scott & Tree Mercer to document the occurrence, diversity, & behavior of marine mammals.

Sea Storm Studios, Inc.
An audio/visual production company in the Sea Ranch, CA (US)

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Chapters

• 0:10 Introduction to Resilient Earth Podcast
• 1:38 Understanding Deep Sea Mining Basics
• 4:13 Three Types of Subsea Mining Explained
• 8:39 Life Cycles Within Ocean Nodules
• 17:35 International Governance Challenges
• 23:33 The Green Solution Paradox
• 30:29 Bypassing Global Laws and Ethics
• 38:46 Machines and Monitoring Concerns
• 49:18 Threats to American Samoa
• 54:27 Final Thoughts on Coastal Protection

Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:10

Welcome to the Resilient Earth Podcast, where we talk with speakers from the United States and around the world about the critical issues facing our planet and the positive actions people are taking, from the tiniest of actions to the grandest of gestures, so that we can continue to thrive and survive for generations to come. I'm Leanne Lindsay, producer and host, along with co-hosts and co-producers Scott and Tree Mercer of Mindenoma, whale and Seal Study, located on the South Mendocino and North Sonoma coasts. The music for this podcast is by Eric Alleman, an international composer, pianist and writer living in the Sea Ranch. Discover more of his music, animations, ballet, stage and film work at ericalamancom. You can find Resilient Earth on Spotify, apple and Amazon Podcasts, iheart Radio, youtube, soundcloud and wherever you find your podcasts.

Speaker 3: 1:38

The ocean floor is full of deposits of critical minerals. Some are in the crust of underwater mountains or around hydrothermal vents, and some the ones we'll be focusing on tonight take the form of potato-shaped nodules, little lumpy spheres formed over millions of years. Those nodules now line some parts of the deep ocean floor and contain valuable metals like nickel and cobalt, which can be used for things like batteries for electric cars. So obviously people are very interested in getting their hands on them, and the head of one company leading the charge, the Metals Company, has gone on outlets like 60 Minutes to argue that those nodules could end up saving the planet.

Speaker 4: 2:14

I love the fact that they're the way we're gonna get away from fossil fuels.

Speaker 2: 2:18

I love the fact that in these are all the metals we need to go and build those batteries.

Speaker 3: 2:24

That man is named Gerard Barron and he's an actual person and not, as you may have thought, chatgpt's answer to make Sean Penn the most Sean Penn. He's positioned himself at the forefront of this industry and reportedly once hired a marketing firm to portray him as an Australian, elon Musk. Barron stresses that he's the real deal. His company says it's secured access to enough metal to power 280 million electric vehicles equivalent to the entire fleet of cars in the US and he's projecting they could start commercially exploiting the deep sea as early as 2026. But the place he's planning to do that is the CCZ, even though it's one of the few remaining environments on Earth that is close to pristine, and extracting those nodules could do irreparable damage. So before we stand back and watch this guy's company throw open the door to commercial-scale plunder, it might be worth looking at what exactly he's proposing to do and whether it's actually worth doing at all. So tonight let's talk about deep-sea mining, and to hear Barron tell it, mining these nodules is really just a simple matter of scooping them off the floor.

Speaker 2: 3:26

Last week tonight with John Oliver, leads us into our show today. We are here to talk about deep sea mining and the issues surrounding it from both sides of the fence and how there are those who feel that this is a solution for the climate crisis we're in and on the other side, it's those who feel that this is an irreversible damage that could happen. And you are one of the top people to speak with, especially because of that wonderful film you at the Ocean Foundation created last year with Dr Sylvia Earle and others of the Ocean Foundation to talk about the deep sea, defend the deep. So thank you, richard, for coming on today.

Speaker 4: 4:13

Well, let's begin with the three kinds of subsea mining. It's not all one thing. There are hydrothermal vents or subsea, basically hot springs under the ocean, and those have around them generally a copper, lead and zinc coating around where the hot water came out of the seafloor in the past or is still coming out of the seafloor today. And around those vents grow very unique biological communities that do not depend on sunlight for energy. Think about that for a minute. They're not a chlorophyll-based life form. They are living off of sulfides and heat and they are very unusual. Some of them are so unusual we don't quite understand how they work yet. So unusual, we don't quite understand how they work yet, but they are the key to a new type of transformation of energy from the core of the earth, basically geothermal energy, heat from the magma at the center of the earth into life, and we've never seen that anywhere else. And we've never seen that anywhere else. We don't know quite what it means, but it could have a key to energy transformation that could someday be used by humans. It's a very unique system. Well, that's one kind, you know. Let's just start with hydroothermal vent communities.

Speaker 4: 5:42

There is a second type of subsea mining that has to do with what are called crusts, in other words along the seafloor or on spires, any vertical feature in the ocean. The ocean has a unique capability of almost plating metals onto those surfaces. So anywhere you have a vertical spire for example Davidson Seamount, off of Monterey Bay, big Sur or down around the Channel Islands there's any kind of vertical surface. You want to look at that because those will also become targets for subsea mining and they have again their own unique life forms. But you have to basically destroy the substrate. You have to take away this piece of the ocean, seabed or the geologic structure to grind it up to get the metals.

Speaker 4: 6:37

And the third type of subsea mining which I think we're going to focus on today, if I understood your interest correctly, are polymetallic sulfide nodules, these potato-sized rocks, stones that are spread across the seafloor for sometimes hundreds of miles. Basically, in the Clarion-Clipperton zone they extend from off of Hawaii almost all the way to Mexico. And although they are vastly spread across the seafloor, each of these stones is a life form in itself. In other words, somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of the life in the deep ocean depends on these nodules, and the nodules themselves have in them a biological system, a microbial system, and so they are not just rocks or, as some of the proponents of subsea mining are fond of holding them up in a hearing and saying it's a battery in a rock in a hearing, and say it's a battery in a rock, actually it's not, it's a life cycle in a rock. And so those are the three types of mining, and all of them are being pursued, some of them more than others, depending on the type of metals that the industry expects to extract, expects to extract, but the extraction of them poses threats to biological systems that are millions of years old.

Speaker 4: 8:13

I mean literally, it took millions of years for the life cycle in the ocean to evolve, and we only have a little tiny bit of history with this. We've gone back where plowing the seafloor for minerals happened 26 years ago, and it looks exactly like it did the day we left. So if it took millions of years to evolve these life forms in the sea, some of which we haven't discovered yet, about half of which we haven't named yet, then we know that for them to come back, first of all they may come back in a different form, and it may take millions of years. This is beyond human scale. In other words, this is not a matter of something that we can fix or mitigate or repair. After we do it, we destroy it and it's one and gone. And we're talking about very, very large areas, particularly for the nodules extraction. Now nobody's commercially mining these yet.

Speaker 4: 9:22

There have been exploration permits granted under what is called the International Seabed Authority, which was created under the rubric of the Law of the Sea. There's about 170 members of the International Seabed Authority and their basic principle believing that you have to have sound science that can show you, that prove basically conclusively that this extraction can be done without harming the larger ocean ecosystem. And international seabed authority has not reached that conclusion yet and there are about two dozen nations that are out prominently in favor of a moratorium on seabed mining. For that reason, because of the amount of danger we pose as extractive entities humans as a top predator, you might say, or everything in the deep ocean. We can't function there ourselves because incredible pressure by the weight of the water above us. So everything would be done by remote extractive machines which we would be controlling from the sea surface on a ship. So nobody can really monitor what we're doing. We're just working miles under our feet with machines that are, you know, are the size of a small Safeway.

Speaker 4: 10:50

And that is why I think we're seeing the debate, because this is key to the whole ocean ecosystem, and the ocean currently absorbs about 25% of the carbon emissions on the planet. Humans create carbon emissions with their industrial activities. The ocean is a little too successful at absorbing that carbon, to the degree that it absorbs it 25% of what we generate, and so we can say, well, we're way over here, on the coast of California or the coast of Hawaii or the coast of whatever country. But the bottom line is, this affects the entire ocean ecosystem and the atmosphere, the oxygen we breathe, and so it's not surprising that there's a lot of interest in this. It's not surprising that the companies themselves that want to do it see ready profits.

Speaker 4: 11:46

They make money taking things from nature, not putting anything back, and extractive industries like this, customarily, whether they're tobacco industry or whoever it is, they always say oh, this is green, we call it greenwashing today.

Speaker 4: 12:02

We call it greenwashing today.

Speaker 4: 12:02

Now they say, well, we have to have these minerals in order to convert, particularly our transportation sector, from being hydrocarbon dependent instead convert it to becoming electricity dependent, and we need to get the electricity from floating offshore wind is the claim, and build the turbines and the substations and everything associated with floating offshore wind requires minerals, and particularly the batteries in the cars, in the electric cars.

Speaker 4: 12:34

However, actually the automotive industry that builds electric cars has been moving away from the types of minerals that would be gathered by subsea mining into more readily available terrestrial, much cheaper, from terrestrial sources, much less damage from terrestrial sources. So even the rationale of, oh, we need it for converting to an electricity-based society. And then, of course, we're seeing the current administration killing incentives for that conversion to electrically-based transportation. Anyway, you know anything to do with energy conservation, anything to do with non-fossil fuel energy? The money is being taken away by this administration, either by the White House or in the House of Representatives. We're kind of right now perched, if you will, on the razor's edge of a decision that ultimately is going to determine the fate of our oceans and life itself on Earth.

Speaker 2: 13:39

Life itself on Earth. That is the one thing that I keep coming back to myself and I can see conservationists, environmentalists, who are thinking of this in the terms of this will help our climate, help us reverse some of those things. But it's a double-edged sword and there's such a high risk because we don't really understand what the possibly everlasting impacts, dangerous and destructive impacts, that kind of activity would have. And once they open that door to a lot of companies that have lined up out there, like Impossible Metals out of San Jose, the metals company out of Vancouver with the Australian CEO, and the potential for destruction is high and it's hard to not see that. But people are having a hard time grappling with what they're hearing. Like this is a green solution and yet not considering the impacts that could be forever destructive. And these rocks, these polymetallic nodules, they take what a million or more years to develop. Richard.

Speaker 4: 14:59

The interesting thing that I've always believed about working on environmental issues is an old saying that says we will only protect what we understand, and in this case because the public. Generally I trust the public, because people are not as ignorant as the current administration thinks. They can reason things out and obviously there's a great connectivity between human beings and the ocean. This is not new. This goes back culturally tens of thousands of years. People have been connected to the ocean and here on the West Coast this is not our first rodeo here on the West Coast. This is not our first rodeo.

Speaker 4: 15:50

We have had in the past a proposal by an interior secretary named James Watt who wanted to mine along the coast of Northern California, basically off of Humboldt, del Norte County and the coast of Oregon on up to about Goose Bay where the hydrothermal vent minerals. James Watt had actually a hard minerals leasing plan. He was planning to hold a lease sale on what's called the Gorda Ridge and the minerals would have then been brought into probably Humboldt Bay or Coos Bay as a slurry and ground up and take it away. It was copper, lead and zinc, which in this was about 1982. Obviously the economics of copper, lead and zinc in 1982 were not attractive to doing the mining here off the California coast. But we've seen this before. We've had pressure here.

Speaker 4: 16:46

Hilo, hawaii. There's a seam out off of Hilo called Loihi, a new Hawaiian island in the forming, and that has a cobalt-rich manganese crust on it, different than the hydrothermal vents, but that also has a lot of interesting life. Hydrothermal vents, but that also has a lot of interesting life. And that lease sale was something that James Watt, when he was Secretary of Interior, also proposed and it was stopped by local concerns, just like Gorda Ridge was stopped here. This process even though you know the Trump administration is trying to circumvent global laws and ethics, if you will this process is responsive to public concern and I think we're seeing that again.

Speaker 2: 17:35

And you just mentioned ethics too, and there was that paper that I sent you and I wanted to get your thoughts on it, entitled Ethical Opportunities in deep sea collection of polymetallic nodules from the clarion clipperton zone, and it's written by steven katona, whom scott and tree know, or scott you know, and dana palikas and gregory stone.

Speaker 4: 17:59

so I want to get your thoughts on that article as you study nature, whatever, whatever side you're on it's hard not to be on the side of nature, if you like surviving as a living, breathing human being and studying nature, you learn that there are intrinsic rights. In other words, ecosystems are subject to what I call the rights of nature. Ecosystems are subject to what I call the rights of nature. Natural systems, particularly everything, including us, has evolved over millions of years, but some particular kinds of what we would call extractive minerals if we were miners, are much more than that. They're actually a substrate for life, and some of these unique life forms have utility to human beings.

Speaker 4: 18:48

One of the COVID tests, for example, that we have used to get through the pandemic unless you're among those who don't believe there was a pandemic or is still a pandemic one of the substances actually came from the deep sea. That doesn't mean we go there and extract a whole bunch of that. We go there and we learn the genetic template of it and then we make it in the laboratory. There are indications still preliminary studies that indicate that. I mean if I were president of the United States, the first thing I would work on, just because so many of my friends have succumbed to cancer, is a cure for cancer. If we do come up with a cure for cancer, the odds are pretty good it's going to come from the deep sea Again, not because we go and harvest a whole bunch of something, but because we learn how this other type of life form survives under these incredible hostile to us but friendly to it conditions, and in the process we might learn something that saves humanity from some of the worst things that happen to humanity, including and especially cancer.

Speaker 2: 20:03

Something they can replicate in the lab.

Speaker 4: 20:05

Yes, something that can be replicated in the lab. So there are pathways of research that are now being pursued. Hopefully, some of them will survive the budget assaults that have gone on on science, and the indications of those pathways of research are that they would take us to a cure for cancer. There are indications that the conversion of energy from one form to another, in other words, heat and sulfides into a life form instead of solar energy from the sun, may be a key to how we power our city someday.

Speaker 4: 20:43

Science doesn't stop and we can't stop it, even if the guy in the White House thinks we can. You can't just outlaw education, attack universities, cut off the funding for the top NOAA scientists and other marine scientists and just take away their money and expect science to stop. Science doesn't stop and just take away their money and expect science to stop. Science doesn't stop. Climate impacts don't stop just because you outlaw the mention of the word climate in government websites. Climate change will happen Years, if not decades, further behind than we would have been had we not gone through these attacks on science. But you can't stop the evolutionary knowledge of how we learn about the world around us. It can't be done.

Speaker 2: 21:28

And something you said earlier too, echoes what Ralph Chami, formerly with the International Monetary Fund, one of the top financial economists in the world, who now founded a company a few years back called Blue Green Future, who's helping island nations and tribes in the Amazon. Native American tribes here in the US value living nature as opposed to extractive nature. And the value of living nature how much more valuable that can be to us humans to continue living on this earth.

Speaker 4: 22:05

I tend to side on the side of life when I see something thriving, probably because I grew up in an agricultural setting and you take very good care of whatever you're in charge of plants or animals or trees, or in my case it was mostly walnut trees but because you know that that's how you survive. Your connectivity to nature is your survival. So healthy nature means healthy humans.

Speaker 2: 22:33

Nurturing nature.

Speaker 4: 22:35

Nurturing nature is nurturing humans.

Speaker 4: 22:37

And I would point out that because 1,000 marine scientists and policy experts from 70 nations wrote a letter to the United Nations saying we need to hold off on licensing of mining operations in the seabed, they might know something.

Speaker 4: 22:56

In other words, that's detached, objective, peer-reviewed science, but it fits together with some of the indigenous beliefs, particularly in Pacific Island nation cultures that go back forever, that believe that all life originated in the deep sea.

Speaker 4: 23:16

That's the cultural norm in certain places and that's why the International Seabed Authority calls this ecosystem on the seabed, particularly not just the nodules themselves but the whole issue of what's on the seabed they call it the common heritage of mankind, or I would call it the common heritage of humankind. And because that is written into the actually the Law of the Sea Treaty, which the US never signed for all the wrong reasons, but because that's written into the Law of the Sea, that is the guiding principle of the International Seabed Authority is protecting and sharing the common heritage of humankind. And that's why they have not been willing to greenlight destructive activities, because we can see that everywhere we've touched on the deep sea, I mean, like I say, there's still plow tracks from 26 years ago in an area of the Chlorian-Clipperton zone that looked like they were created yesterday. We can't go back and put together ecosystems that have evolved over millennia. We're not that good.

Speaker 2: 24:28

Humans make mistakes.

Speaker 4: 24:30

As a species. I would suggest that we are coping with a kind of cumulative pile of mistakes that were made by humans, in some cases with all of the best intentions.

Speaker 2: 24:46

That's right. Some of the best intentions.

Speaker 4: 24:49

I am the person who gets the phone call at 3 am from somebody in a state of abject panic in the Gulf of Mexico saying that the Deepwater Horizon rig is on fire, people are dead and which way is the spill going to go? I hope I never get a call like that on the Sonoma coast, but it's possible. In other words, we are capable as a species of creating planetary scale messes and we deal with them in the most rudimentary, primitive way. In other words, we could create messes that are so big we can never clean them up. They cause damage that is literally beyond any scale of our ability to respond. We clean up oil spills with effectively using or trying to use what are essentially diapers. I've been to many or up oil spills with effectively using or trying to use what are essentially diapers. I've been to many or more oil spills than I care to remember In the deep sea.

Speaker 4: 25:46

We have no mitigation technology at all. We're building machines to go get stuff and rip it out of the seabed or suck it up from the seabed. We don't have any mitigation devices that nobody's even thought about them. You know the scale of the destruction is such that you couldn't go back and let's sort of plaster things back together. Some of these companies' names like Impossible Metals you know that's a really appropriate name. It's literally an impossible place to get metals, both economically and ethically. But you need to be able to think about how things are going to be when we get done doing whatever we're going to do, because you go back to the seventh generation principle of native people. We're talking about far beyond seven generations of damage. We're talking about millennia of damage in the deep ocean and that's why people like Sylvia Earle and some of the top NOAA scientists, who now are jobless, were raising red flags and the whole dismantling of NOAA.

Speaker 4: 26:55

If you look at it carefully, it didn't take the lower echelon of interns and you know bad enough the loss of institutional memory and years of monitoring and science. It took the top people. It took the top scientists first. This was the problem with Elon Musk and Doge. Was it targeted? The base of knowledge that allows us to successfully, or relatively successfully, manage the ocean?

Speaker 4: 27:26

And it came in and took the top tier and for that reason, all that's left will be, yes, men and women who say it's okay to do this. In fact, one of them's saying it right now about DC mining. Why? Because everybody else is gone. The agency wasn't just gutted. The agency was basically given a surgery that made it only say yes to destructive activities and that is so disrespectful to the individuals most of the women, actually who invented the Coastal Zone Management Act itself in Congress, the NOAA scenario for managing our oceans, which is a pretty big thing to manage. To take out the brains, if you will, or the heart of that science, it should be criminal. I mean, literally people should be in prison for what just happened to that agency.

Speaker 2: 28:23

Scott was just talking on public radio about this very issue that NOAA had been gutted, that it has the Coast Guard, it forecasts the weather.

Speaker 4: 28:34

The same thing happened over at the Department of Interior Doge, actually implanted in the Interior Department oil industry well-known oil industry lobbyists to make sure that Interior falls straight and narrow. But what happened at NOAA was not just gutting NOAA, it was more like a prefrontal lobotomy that was taking out the top scientists so that bad things could be brought before noah.

Speaker 2: 29:03

And then, uh, when that happened, noah would say yes, who's left is the yes man yeah, you mentioned too that the scientists and others were told at noah that if they didn't approve of these leases they would be let go, you know. So either they walk now or they will be let go if they did not do these.

Speaker 4: 29:26

Yes, it has been brought to my attention that people who had decades of history at NOAA and the agency were told either you approve offshore drilling within National Marine Sanctuaries or you leave, and they fortunately had the ethical integrity to say goodbye, in spite of the fact they devoted their entire life to this piece of ocean, to these marine sanctuaries. You cannot rebuild that kind of the sea. We can't influence it. We're observers essentially in Jamaica when it meets. But the Trump administration figured out a workaround they think we believe it's illegal in which the seabed around American Samoa, in the exclusive economic zone around American Samoa, can be leased for minerals extraction. Now American Samoa has objected to this. They support a moratorium on seabed mining, but the Trump administration said forget it, get out of the way. So the Trump administration is planning to use something called the Deep Sea Hard Mineral Resources Act, another law that only applies to the US, that they claim allows NOAA to review applications, issue exploration permits and approve commercial recovery permits for US entities operating in international waters. Now, a plain reading of that law doesn't give us that right. We've never been cowboys like this in the global community before, but that lease sale could happen very soon I mean literally within weeks, and it's being promoted by a gentleman named Eric Noble who is the principal deputy assistant secretary of commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere. This is what's left of NOAA. I said would be a yes man, and he is, and so he's ignoring the international seabed authority. He's claiming that he's going to expedite permitting and approvals for mining around american samoa, in spite of just about everybody in the immediate vicinity of the pacific ocean objecting. Again, you've taken away noah's brain and you are left with a button that you push that only says yes. It's like a fortune telling machine that can only say yes, and so we're seeing that happening literally. Uh, I'd say within the next few weeks we will see a lease sale and if that's going to happen, then I would say right behind it will be a revisitation by the same agency of things like the Gorda Ridge right here off of Northern California.

Speaker 4: 32:48

I worry about Humboldt Bay Harbor, which is being improved ostensibly to pave the way for floating offshore wind. So you need harbor improvements for that. Ostensibly to pave the way for floating offshore wind. So you need harbor improvements for that. And unless conditions are put on those harbor improvements at Humboldt Bay, what you could easily see at Humboldt Bay is. It would become the mining harbor or the base for mining on the Gorda Ridge, which is not that far offshore, bringing the minerals into Humboldt Bay as a slurry, which is a very toxic slurry. And don't call me at three in the morning if a barge full of that slurry creates a three-dimensional spill in or around California's.

Speaker 4: 33:40

Some of California's most important fisheries operate out of Humboldt Bay. Don't call me, because there's no technology to clean up a three-dimensional spill. None, not a nothing. It was part of the problem with Deepwater Horizon is it became a three-dimensional plume. So as mining comes to our state's coast soon, we're totally unprepared. We could put conditions on the use of Humboldt Bay and restrict it to renewable technology, but we haven't, we aren't and we may not succeed at that, because a lot of the companies that are pursuing floating offshore wind are in fact oil companies and as the floating offshore wind and other wind energy technologies are being suppressed, the money's drying up to do renewables. So I think we're having a constraining effect on renewables. A constraining effect on renewables. At the same time we're seeing a push for the destructive extractive technologies that ignore the rights of nature, that ignore ethics, ignore indigenous belief systems about the source of life on this planet and ignore the fact that we're going to destroy things that took millions of years to create and evolve, without ever understanding how they work.

Speaker 2: 35:03

Very well said, Richard.

Speaker 4: 35:04

It is insane. Really, the only word that really comes to mind is insane.

Speaker 2: 35:09

You also bring up a few terms I would like for you to expand on a bit so that listeners and viewers who may not understand them that well, might know a little bit more about how they got started, but things like the ISA, the International Seabed Authority, as well as the law of the sea and then how US territories work work.

Speaker 4: 35:45

The largest wilderness on the planet is in the ocean. About 95% of the habitable space on earth is in the ocean. Because of the three-dimensionality of the ocean, we think we're living in this little thin layer that you you know like we're like microbial critters on the surface of the planet. But actually if you go and look at the ocean, about 95% of habitable space on Earth is in the ocean. So the ability to govern that, govern the parts of the ocean that are more than most nations have, an exclusive economic zone, it's called where you control. In the US it's 200 medical miles out from the coast. Beyond that is international waters To govern that the law of the Sea signatories, as I say, there's 170 members, roughly give or take. They created a process and an entity called the International Seabed Authority, a governance mechanism that everybody respects, and our appointee to that under the last administration was able to observe lobby work with other members. But now we have a seat at the table is all we have, but we can't influence it. So we're going to ignore it, we're going to try to go around it and the problem there is. I think we're going to run into trouble because other nations see us acting as outlaws, other nations will say, well, if the US is going to be the outlaw under the law of the sea, then we will too. This stands, I think, a good chance of basically tearing up the governance mechanism which has already lent leases for exploration. Like I say, the extent of the Claring-Clipperton Fracture Zone is wider than the US continent. There are leases to many nations there that have been restricted to exploration and science, which makes sense to understand how you might mitigate impact and in the course of that, we now have the US being the outlaw all of a sudden.

Speaker 4: 38:10

They used to have a saying in the old West bandits would come into town. Tree the town oh, no, disrespect tree, but the bottom line, tree the town means you need a new sheriff and I would suggest, given that very excellent comments were made by our Congressman, jared Huffman, who is the ranking minority on the House Natural Resources Committee, before a recent hearing on subsea mining, in which it became clear that if he had been the chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, we'd be in a lot better shape, because he raised the issues that need to be raised about the science missing science, about the uniqueness of these ecosystems and our inability to mitigate the damage we're going to do to those ecosystems. And of course, his district includes the Gorda Ridge. In other words, the southern end of the Gorda Ridge is off of his congressional district. So we're watching with great interest the outcome of the next House races.

Speaker 4: 39:17

That could put him in a position of being the chair of the committee. That would have something to say. But meanwhile the Republican majority, as we just saw, with erasing large parts of the renewable incentives and tax breaks out of the previous administration's plan to transition away from hydrocarbon fuels, the Republicans are living in abject fear of President Trump, because when he wants something out of Congress, he just marches over and he says I will primary you. In other words, he will put up a primary opponent and take their seat. And one thing Congress people like more than almost anything is to keep their seat, and so it's like blackmail.

Speaker 2: 40:07

Power play.

Speaker 4: 40:08

Well, it's, a protection record, is what it is, and that's how he got one vote margin in the reconciliation vote. In the middle of the night was he threatened enough people on the Republican side with various bad things that could happen to them, including a well-funded opponent in a primary? And none of it's based on science. It's all based on political pressure.

Speaker 2: 40:37

None of it's really for the people of this planet.

Speaker 4: 40:39

Not for Americans and not for the people of this planet. It's for profits for his cronies and allies. You know that helped him get elected. Money for miners, we could call it. And it may not even make money for miners. I mean, it's very, very expensive, as you can imagine, to mine at these depths. It is not a friendly place, that's a good point.

Speaker 2: 41:07

That's a good point.

Speaker 4: 41:08

The pressure has a very nasty tendency to collapse any kind of machine we send down there.

Speaker 4: 41:17

Every once in a while a lot of news is made as tourists try to go visit the Titanic wreck or something and their submersible vehicle implodes so quickly that they don't even know what happened. I mean, they think it's a pretty humane way to die. But then there's life forms that have evolved to sustain that pressure, find food and live there. It's not impossible to live there, it's just we can't live there. So we send machines which we have to operate with artificial intelligence from a great distance up above, and nobody's going to be able to monitor this activity. I think one of the reasons industry is so attracted to the deep sea bed is you can't keep an eye on them. I mean, it's bad enough that they've done the horrendous house cleaning that they've done at EPA, but not only will there be nobody minding the store, but the store is literally light years away in terms of being able to keep an eye on what's going on down there. And yet some of the most fragile ecological processes on the planet are going on down there.

Speaker 2: 42:31

I'm glad you brought this up. The governance of these companies in such a remote location it's hard enough to manage, say, fishing in our oceans, in our deep seas.

Speaker 4: 42:44

Exactly. We have a very fragile ecosystem with no governance mechanism, the governance mechanism that we are creating and evolving. The International Seabed Authority is saying, whoa, put on the brakes. We're not ready to go there yet because of the damage we could do to this collective common heritage of humankind. And then along comes America. First philosophy no science.

Speaker 4: 43:14

Whatever the president happens to say on any given day is supposed to be the truth, and he just throws things out there and says, oh, we'll go mine it, it'll be fine, you know. And so they promote the myth that it's somehow less harmful than terrestrial mining, that recycling of metals won't work, when I mean, there have been very advanced metals recycling programs going on in the EU for 30, 40 years, where metals are collected and reused. We don't do that here because we couldn't make as much money. Corporate profits don't rely on recycling. They rely on new raw materials being converted into products. We're supposed to ignore the fact that recycling could probably answer a lot of the needs that we have for some of these metals if we had gotten serious about it. And there's profit in recycling. We just don't do it.

Speaker 2: 44:12

They're making a lot of advances in sodium batteries, especially China right now.

Speaker 4: 44:18

One of the myths that's being promulgated by the industry is lithium. Well, we need lithium batteries, actually lithium as a source material from the sea. That's not where, where lithium comes from. It comes from layers of uh minerals out in nevada or in certain southern california lake beds. It's not an ocean derived material, but, uh, you know, the battery technology is moving away from ocean source materials as we speak, and so the problem that I see is that, because we've taken the scientists and made them walk the plank, if you will, we don't have the scientists who help us look over the horizon at the future of technology. In other words, the frontiers of science are no longer in view because the people who had the training, the degrees, the technology for example, the National Marine Sanctuary System has been quietly monitoring shoreline segments all along the California coast within sanctuaries.

Speaker 4: 45:36

We've got four grand national marine sanctuaries. Shoreline segments have been monitored, and to track the migration or evolution of the things that live there. Is it moving north? Like a lot of things, terrestrial North America are moving north because of climate, and so all that data just stops when you fire the people or retire the people who were doing it, so we don't have a look at what's coming anymore by the scientists who were trained to tell us what's coming, whether it's a hurricane, a tsunami or an ecological change. We haven't got that tool and we might be able to recreate it in my grandchildren's lifetime. We aren't going to recreate it quickly because they selectively got rid of Doge and the White House selectively got rid of Doge and the White House selectively got rid of the people that could have helped us understand how human beings might survive in a changing world, because we won't see the change coming, but the change will come without us seeing it coming, and that's a lot more dangerous.

Speaker 2: 46:49

In some of these last few minutes I wanted to bring Scott on and address your questions.

Speaker 1: 46:55

Yeah, I was just asking, Richard. I was saying this will all be Biden's fault when it comes apart. About five slides back you had a photograph of one of the large robotic bulldozers. Looks like a robotic bulldozer.

Speaker 4: 47:09

Yes, would you like one on the Mendocino Coast? We can have it delivered Monday.

Speaker 1: 47:13

Yeah, it'd be good for climbing. There were the tank treads that it's obviously going to use to go across the bottom. Isn't that probably a number of the nodule, the precious nodules that they want to collect? The reason I'm bringing that up is because when I first heard about this five or six years ago, it was presented to me as like an Easter egg hunt. Robots were just going to saunter across the deep ocean bottom picking up nodules without any disruption. And when you look at the teeth on that thing between the treads, how deep do those go? Do you have any idea? Well, most of the conventional.

Speaker 4: 47:48

I would call it conventional because all of this is experimental. Most of the conventional proven, if you will ability to collect nodules takes with the nodules about six inches at least of the seafloor. Sediment pumps it into the ship up on the surface, and that ship on the surface then has a big circular centrifugal force to separate the nodules out from the silt and then the silt is dumped over the side of the ship and creates a plume that we don't know how long it travels, how far, because we've not measured how far it travels. There is one company that now claims that they have an artificial intelligence plucker now claims that they have an artificial intelligence plucker.

Speaker 4: 48:38

I grew up harvesting walnuts from my earliest childhood, so there are different ways, but the pluckers grabs, using artificial intelligence, individual nodules, still getting some silt, keeping in mind that each nodule has life in it anyway, and then those go to the surface and are cleaned up and there's a smaller silt plume. That's the theory. Now, artificial intelligence working on the seabed thousands of feet down, if it encounters geographic anomalies in the sea, if the seabed is not perfectly flat, it comes to a hill or a canyon, it's not going to work. In other words, that is an unproven technology that is being used to sort of cover up one of the many concerns about subsea mining by claiming we'll just pick them one at a time, in fact those are in the promotional videos, if you go, they have animations on it at Impossible Metals, I think it's also the metals company and other companies that are lining up to do this extraction.

Speaker 2: 49:45

They try to show how, oh, it's minimally invasive.

Speaker 4: 49:49

Minimally invasive of the deep seabed is a joke. In other words, they hold a focus group, they develop a messaging oh, this is what people are worried about tilt plumes and so they try to come up with a reassuring answer. That may be impossible Maybe that's why they got the name. It may be impossible to do, but it sounds good. And even if that works, the sheer volume of material you have to excavate from the seabed is huge, and so that explains why. I mean, there's a whole constellation of corporations and manufacturers that won't touch seabed metals, of corporations and manufacturers that won't touch seabed metals. You know, not just US companies, but companies all over the world. They're not going to do it. It's like this is the new tobacco they're not going to touch it because of the impacts, and I think that's smart.

Speaker 2: 50:47

It is smart.

Speaker 1: 50:48

Yeah, since this is brand new, there can't be any baseline data on where the plumes are going to settle.

Speaker 4: 50:55

They can settle a very long ways away, and the scale at which the extraction would be taking place, you know, is just phenomenally huge.

Speaker 4: 51:11

And so my opinion is that we need to be precautionary about anything this big affecting any place this sensitive, and this is almost a bigger issue than the fate of the rainforest, in a way, in terms of oxygen, the ability of the ocean to absorb carbon from the atmosphere and that's why we began work about a year ago on a film which explains all of this, has filmed footage of most of the things we've talked about, and in the course of doing that film, I thought well, this is, at the time, kind of a little ironic in a way, because people had never heard of Seabed Mining and it wasn't something people cared about.

Speaker 4: 52:03

And now, every time the President of the United States walks in front of a microphone, he's indirectly promoting our film, which may explain why we won the uh science award in the international ocean film festival. Uh, I mean, the film is made, it's free, you can watch it online at the url, the deep movieorg. But you know, the bottom line is suddenly everybody wants to know about something that we just made a film about, which is kind of I don't know what do you call it. It's timely. My philosophy includes serendipity yeah, that's true as something that can happen, and so, in this case, it is serendipitous that we made a film that people now want to see us that we made a film that people now want to see.

Speaker 2: 52:54

There were a couple of other things that we've heard too, trying to show that this is less invasive, less harmful, and what you said earlier about how the oceans cover most of the planet and the life within them is three-dimensional. The comparisons aren't quite the same. They're trying to say this is just a small percentage of this vast ocean and yet it's like bulldozing down the entire Amazon forest on land oxygen that comes from the ocean to breathe, and so the two scales.

Speaker 4: 53:36

this is kind of like rock climbing in Yosemite. It's the difference between the boulders in Camp 4 and climbing El Cap. You know, is this a 2,000-foot wall or is this a 30-foot boulder? And this issue, in terms of the global environment and the context, is the 2,000-foot wall and the people who are fighting it on various Pacific islands as we speak. They don't have the money to go to Washington and lobby Congress or any respect whatsoever from a White House that thinks this is going to be wonderful. He doesn't care. And so America Samoa right now is in the crosshairs. I suggest that other island nations will soon be in the crosshairs.

Speaker 2: 54:24

Richard, do you have any final comments?

Speaker 4: 54:27

Thank you for paying attention to this.

Speaker 4: 54:31

I know that here on the Sonoma-Mendocino-Humboldt coast, we had something happened here almost 50 years ago now, where a lot of people who lived here got concerned enough to take care of this coast and, in the course of taking care of this coast, created a place that is so well protected with national marine sanctuaries, with the UNESCO International Biosphere Reserve, more recently with state marine protected areas, that all over the world people interested in coastal planning come here to study what we've done.

Speaker 4: 55:08

You know our national marine sanctuaries are, you know various layers of protection, so that they can go home to Indonesia or wherever and emulate what we've done here. I don't think we're going to just stop. I see a next generation coming and I just think that this coast what I call the Mennonoma Coast will not only continue to be a global tourism destination because of the natural beauty, but will continue to be a model for coastal planning, intelligent coastal planning on into the future, well beyond when. I'm not here to worry about it, and I just want to thank the literally millions of people who created these sanctuaries and are going to, I think, stand against things like order ridge mining and encourage you to look further offshore you can't see the deep ocean, but it is incredibly connected to where we live right now.

Speaker 2: 56:16

One of the things we talked about as we were preparing for the show too, was showing in our own communities and maybe some up and down the coast, but defend the deep the movie you were just talking about, as well as a couple of clips from our episodes covering both deep sea mining and offshore drilling. I think that that's something that we should talk about, Scott and Treat, and maybe even have you up here, richard, to participate. But it could be held here in the Sea Ranch at Del Mar Hall or atala Arts Center or up at Point Arena Theater. But I think it's important to raise more awareness here locally too.

Speaker 4: 56:59

Happy to do that. I'm not that far away, the trip is beautiful and never let it be said that a small, dedicated group of people cannot change the course of global events. I think Margaret Mead said that first. I'm paraphrasing, but a movement that started here to take care of this coast is still alive and I'm always happy to show up. We can provide a full-screen broadcast quality print of the film. You can show it in a park on an island in the Pacific. It's a world we live in, as digital media, of course, is ubiquitous. It can be anywhere in the world instantly.

Speaker 2: 57:38

Thank you, richard Charter, and thank you Scott and Tring Mercer for helping us all discuss these issues and topics out of many issues that are facing us, and what is being done and what we can do about them.

Speaker 4: 57:53

Thank you, richard, thank you all.

Speaker 2: 58:07

Thanks for listening to the Resilient Earth podcast, where we talk about critical issues and positive actions for our planet. Resilient Earth is produced by Planet Centric Media, a 501c3 non-profit, and Seastorm Studios Inc, located on the rugged North Sonoma Coast of Northern California. I'm Leanne Lindsay Coast of Northern California. I'm Leanne Lindsay producer and host, along with co-hosts and co-producers Scott and Tree Mercer of Mendenoma, whale and Seal Study, located on the South Mendocino and North Sonoma Coasts. The music for this podcast is by Eric Alleman, an international composer, pianist and writer living in the Sea Ranch. Discover more of his music, animations, ballet, stage and film work at ericalemancom. You can find Resilient Earth on Spotify, apple and Amazon Podcasts, iheartradio, youtube, soundcloud and wherever you find your podcasts. Please support us by subscribing or donating to our cause.