We have just two years to stop deep-sea mining from going ahead

[Judi Lynn]

Deep-sea mining would be an environmental disaster, so we need a global moratorium to halt it in its tracks. Here’s how we go about getting one, says Helen Scales

ENVIRONMENT | COMMENT 21 July 2021
By Helen Scales

FIFTY years ago, people started dreaming of mining the deep seabed. Since then, those dreams have turned into a dystopian nightmare as scientists have found diverse, interconnected ecosystems at the bottom of the ocean and realised that mining them risks upsetting the health and functioning of our planet.

We have yet to start deep-sea mining, so this dystopia is just one version of the future, but it is one that may soon get the green light. Countries such as the UK, France, Belgium, Jamaica, Russia, China and Japan all have their sights set on the metals inside coal-sized nodules scattered across a vast abyssal plain, called the Clarion Clipperton Zone, 5000 metres underwater in the Pacific Ocean.

But turbocharging things is the Pacific island state of Nauru, which has used a controversial provision in international law to declare that its seabed-mining contractor, a subsidiary of Canadian-owned The Metals Company, intends to apply for a mining permit. The vague provision means that in two years’ time the International Seabed Authority shall “provisionally approve” Nauru’s nodule mine, which would operate according to the environmental regulations in place by then – which could be none. These are currently being discussed and are nowhere near ready.

If seabed mining were to go ahead, it could unleash an environmental disaster. Nodule mines could wipe out unique species and populations. Sediment plumes could choke animals, including those living far from the mines. Mining wastewater could pollute deep open waters. From tardigrades to tuna, octopuses, corals and whale sharks, nodule mining could harm a huge array of ocean life.

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25133442-800-we-have-just-two-years-to-stop-deep-sea-mining-from-going-ahead/#ixzz77Y8h1WWj

[DFW]

1. That the ocean floor is full of metals has been long known

But the technology to make mining them commercially viable is recent. The ecosystems that deep are by nature extremely fragile, and huge numbers of larger species are dependent on the uninterrupted intact status of the lower depths (plankton production, e.g.).

As has been shown with technical mishaps on the ocean floor already (oil in the Gulf of Mexico, for one), no precaution is foolproof, and the deeper the mishap, the harder it is to rectify. At 5000 meters, it is a risk we cannot afford to take. No amount of cheap nickel or manganese is worth risking wiping out half the tuna population.

[NNadir]

2. The anti-nuke "renewables will save us" author, Benjamin Sovacool, thinks deep sea mining is OK.

Finally recognizing the material impacts of his "renewables will save us" rhetoric on material flows, he says, "Don't worry, be happy, we can find metals for wind turbines on the ocean floor!"

This guy, who has an undergraduate degree in philosophy and a Ph.D. in something called "Public Policy," and whose Ph.D. thesis involved in part, interviewing an unnamed power company executive, is somehow allowed to comment on the work of real engineers and real scientists in prestigious scientific journals, even though he was recently forced to retract one of his antinuke papers on the value of putative European approaches to climate change after being called out for non-existent or sloppy data.

His realization about the metal impacts of so called "renewable energy" popped into his dangerous little brain back in 2020 where he wrote this precious policy piece: Sustainable minerals and metals for a low-carbon future. (Sovacool, Science, 3 JANUARY 2020 • VOL 367 ISSUE 6473, pp 30-33)

Apparently having worked to kill off the atmosphere, and destroy the land masses, he wants to finish off the oceans. After pretending to give a shit about cobalt miners for his "green" vision - like most anti-nukes his pretense of giving a shit is nothing more than lip service - he waxes romantic on seabed mining. To wit, this "policy piece" contains this dangerous rhetoric:

Although mining in terrestrial areas is likely to continue to meet the demands of low-carbon technologies in the nearer term, we need to carefully consider mineral sources beneath the oceans in the longer term. The International Seabed Authority, set up under the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Law of the Sea, is in the process of issuing regulations related to oceanic mineral extraction. This process is a rare opportunity to be proactive in setting forth science-based environmental safeguards for mineral extraction. For metals such as cobalt and nickel, ocean minerals hold important prospects on the continental shelf within states' exclusive economic zones as well as the outer continental shelf regions. Within international waters, metallic nodules found in the vast Clarion-Clipperton Zone of the Pacific as well as in cobalt and tellurium crusts, which are found in seamounts worldwide, provide some of the richest deposits of metals for green technologies. Difficult extraction and declining reserves of some terrestrial minerals, as well as social resistance against terrestrial mining, may lead to oceanic mineral reserves becoming more plausible sources. Minerals near hydrothermal vents are in more pristine and distinctive ecosystems and should likely remain off-limits for mineral extraction for the foreseeable future.

Because he has almost no knowledge of the carbon implications of mining on land or on sea, or of the carbon implications of metal refining, his "policy" is to make ever more convoluted arguments to pretend that Fukushima outweighs climate change and the massive number of daily deaths from air pollution.

He is, like many in these times, a stupid but very dangerous man.