[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out Temperate zones and tropic climbs and run through currents and thriving seas Winds blowing through breathing trees and strong ozone and safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Hello Case Squid listeners. It's every other Sunday again and you're listening to Sustainability Now, a bi weekly Case Good radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. The United States has indicated that it will begin to explore commercial mining of mineral nodules on the international seabed in violation of the UN Conference on the Law of the Sea and the International Seabed Authority. These nodules contain a variety of minerals used in cell phones, electric cars and other high tech devices and could reduce US reliance on questionable sources of rare earth and other metals. Opponents counter that the ecological damage imposed by such mining would far outweigh any benefits. But there is another argument for letting sleeping nodules lie. Deep sea mining is a multi billion dollar solution to problems that do not exist. My guests today are Professors D.G. webster of Dartmouth College and Susan park from the University of Sydney. They, along with several colleagues, recently published the False Promise of Deep Sea Mining, a critique of the proposal focused on terrestrial mineral availability, limited social benefits and supply chain economics.
Professor Webster and Professor park, welcome to Sustainability Now.
[00:01:58] Speaker C: Thanks for having us.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Well, we're going to talk about DC seabed mining and strategic minerals, I guess. And I did my thesis 40 plus years ago on that very topic. And it's sort of depressing to see that some things don't change. And already that had been a sort of a theme for 50 or 60 years before.
I guess we'll always, always have it. But let's begin with some basic background on the topic. What are seabed nodules? What do they contain? And why do some people argue that they should be mined?
[00:02:31] Speaker D: The nodules that sit on the deep seabed floor are just part of a natural process and they, they form through minerals, are formed around lumps of rock or what have you. And, and these are, these metallic nodules are considered to be of strategic importance because the metals that they contain, like manganese, is vital to the fourth industrial revolution. The types of materials that we need for the shift into AI, military, industrial systems, the renewable energy transition, solar and wind, they need these critical raw materials.
[00:03:09] Speaker C: I'll also just say, just to give people a bit more of a sense of them, they're formed kind of like pearls and a way where there's like a core of some kind of detritus that's made its way to the area. And then over literally millions of years, millions, like multiple millions of years, they have. Essentially the metals have deposited from the seawater and from the seabed into these round nodules. They're mostly manganese and iron, but you do have other kinds of things like cobalt and copper as well as rare earths in them.
[00:03:44] Speaker B: Well, I've heard a lot about rare earth metals recently. You know that Donald Trump wants Greenland for his rare earth metals. In your article, there's a, there's a table that shows terrestrial supplies. I was a little bit surprised to see how much there there is in various places. I mean, these exclude the, the deep seabed. Now, one distinction before we go on we should probably make is between the deep seabed and, and the exclusive economic zones of countries. Right. Which extends out to 200 miles. Are there seabed nodules within those EEZs as well?
[00:04:20] Speaker C: No, not really. So most of the seabed nodules are found in the Clarion Clipperton zone, which is out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, far from just about everyone.
There are some Pacific island states that are north of the Clarion Clipperton. They're the closest ones to those you can get supermassive sulfide deposits within eez and that's where a lot of the deep sea mining that has occurred. But the nodules themselves are primarily in what's called the abyssal plane, which is very, very deep.
[00:04:54] Speaker B: How far down is that?
[00:04:55] Speaker C: Oh, that's a good question.
[00:04:57] Speaker B: Is it, Miles?
Yeah.
So, okay, well, you're, you are two members of what I'm calling a group of six, who authored this article, the False Promise of Deep Sea Mining. And I'm curious, you know, what's your background and your research and what motivated the group to write the article? And you might want to mention who else is. Belongs to this, to this group of six. I don't know that you've been called that before, but I thought it was a convenient shorthand.
[00:05:25] Speaker D: No, it's great. I love being part of a gang. It's a. It's comprised of scholars from Canada, the United States and Australia.
And it's really developed over quite a few years now. Professor Jessica Green, Dr. Justin Alger, Professor Stacey Vandiver, Dr. Kate Neville, and obviously the two of us. And really what happened is we, we realized that we were all focusing on the energy transition in terms of extraction of natural resources for renewable energy. And this really came out from sharing these concerns about how the energy transition was taking place and the intersection between as you said, terrestrial mining for critical minerals and the concern that states are going to move into mining the deep seabed. And so this intersection really was where we focused our attention for, became a discussion between the group of us and there's more people that are involved in broader analyses of this really coming from a global environmental politics perspective and how we govern this transition. And so this is developed over a few years now and some of the members of the team have, have some, some funding to, to explore how and why this is occurring.
[00:06:48] Speaker B: The funding comes from reliable sources.
[00:06:50] Speaker C: Yeah, dg, Susan has done a great job reviewing sort of recent history, but a few of us on the team also have long term interest in marine policy. So I've been working on oceans for over two decades now and have written a lot about Anklos, the UN Law of the sea, how it, how and why it was negotiated up to and including negotiations around deep seabed mining. So it was really, I think this team is really interesting because we have a few people like myself and Justin who come more from the oceans. We have people who are more terrestrial mining experts and then we have people like Susan who are really focused very much on the energy transition. So we're bringing together different views even though we're all primarily social scientists who focus on political economy or, or global environmental politics.
[00:07:38] Speaker B: Well, there's a history of politics behind all of this too, which I think we'll get back to a little bit later. Well, you're art. In your article you make, you basically say that arguments in support of deep sea mining in, in the international seabed are based on false claims and false hopes. And that advocates argue on three propositions. First, rare earth elements and critical minerals are in short supply. Second, seabed mining will avoid the negative social effects of terrestrial mining. And third, seabed mining will financially benefit the economies of the global South. Could you go through each of those and basically tell us your refutation of those arguments?
[00:08:18] Speaker D: Thanks for that, Ronnie. I mean, I think one of the key issues for us is, is really engaging right from the very start with this assumption that we just don't have enough minerals. And, and we know for a fact that even though the projections for a number of critical minerals are, you know, we need fourfold increase of, of lithium, we need exfold of copper. We just, we have enough of these minerals and that's without even taking into account recycling and the circular economy which a number of countries in the European Union is now pushing for. And so if we look at the political economy argument, we need more this is urgent, we better start mining the deep sea. This, this just doesn't stack up for us. And we look at the terrestrial mining and recognize that even if you did start mining the deep seabed, this is not going to change the trajectory of mining on land because these are long term, proper propositions mines can take. Once, once you have engaged in a mining contract and you start building that mine and you start extracting from that mine, you're not going to stop because there's another operation taking place somewhere else. And so if we look at mining for something like lithium, which we need for, for batteries and is part of components for wind turbines and for solar panels, this is not going to stop because there's another operation somewhere else. And even though some of these markets are very volatile and relatively immature, this is really not going to prevent people from engaging in mining. Or even if there's a dramatic drop in demand because of a slowdown of EV sales, for example, you're not going to abandon the mine. You might mothball it, but then when, when the price goes up again, you're just going to restart practices. So the idea that somehow we're going to stop mining on land or it's going to be cheaper or better is not. But I'll hand it over to DG to give us some more information.
[00:10:30] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, if you look at the history of mining, this is an argument that has been made many, many times to rationalize expanding mining, terrestrial mining, but you can also look, for instance, at existing marine mining. So a lot of our oil comes from the seabed. Now it's not deep sea mining, but we move from the land into the sea. And was, you know, there were these arguments that it was going to really be so much better. And yes, oil companies make a ridiculous amount of money and gas prices haven't gone as high as they possibly could have gone. But all of that is partly because of government subsidies and the fact that we are also subsidizing these companies through environmental externalities like climate change. Right. So we keep hearing these arguments justifying essentially getting more money from the public sphere, being able to engage in speculation around these mining interests, which you can make profits from, and then also just ignoring the fact that there are real environmental consequences that have costs, even though they're not monetary costs. And developing countries have borne the brunt of those environmental costs for decades and they have not reaped the rewards in any way, shape or form.
So I think the record is very clear on that. We can also, when we get to the international CVET authority. We can talk about how that's actually not set up to be as good for developing countries as a lot of people thought it should have been.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: Part of the attraction for investors and speculators and companies is this idea that at some point in the future, the market prices will make what is very expensive profitable.
And we heard this argument back in the 1980s, as I recall, and nothing came of it. And once again, I mean, is this a bubble? Is this basically like a bubble? You know, that there's all of this talk because people have these ideas that, that things are going to go their way, but in the event, most of these companies and efforts will come to naught. I mean, is this what we're looking at?
[00:12:42] Speaker D: I think you're right. In that sense, it is highly, highly speculative.
It is based on the exuberance of the market, that the market spirits that John Maynard Keynes used to talk about, where the financialization of venture capital means that they're very, very excited about talking up a new industry, a new enterprise that is going to solve all of our problems. This is a very techno fix, if you like. And so being able to get that exuberance means that you get speculative investment in this new enterprise. And it really does feed into this, these discussions that states are having around national security and energy security about what they need for the energy transition. And so you do get companies that are willing to do this. But mining itself is highly speculative in general and does lead to a number of different investments. And these may not come off, but it's the nature of mining itself.
And so you do get a number of, a number of ideas. I mean, this can change hands quite significantly a number of times before any dirt, or in this case, any nodules have been, have even been touched. And so this creates some of this big excitement and interest in trying to change government policy.
And it does lead to these sort of big discussions in governance circles like the International Seabed Authority, to make these decisions about what we're going to do and how we're going to do it. And so some rational, clear thinking like hopefully we're providing in this article is refuting some of that excitement around what we need to do and how we need to do it urgently.
[00:14:30] Speaker C: I think the security argument is the big difference. Now. There have been multiple cycles of, oh, you know, the seabed is the next big thing in terms of mining wealth and generating minerals. But I think the security issue is a lot more real now. And, you know, in the paper we talk a lot about the relationship to the clean energy transition. But really a lot of the talk is much more around the recent revolution in warfare that we see, for instance, in Ukraine in terms of the use of drones and other automated vehicles, automated weapons essentially, that require batteries, that require all of these electronic devices. And so it's, into my mind it's a lot like nuclear. Nuclear would never have happened if it was just on the basis of economics, even with all of the, oh, it's free energy arguments. Right. It wouldn't have happened. We wouldn't have done that if it hadn't been for the government investing huge amounts of money and figuring out how to refine uranium for weapons first. And so to my mind, what's different now is they've got that security argument and that is much more likely to encourage governments to invest a whole bunch of money. And then once you have the infrastructure, as Susan said, prices can go up or down. When the price is up, you mine. When the price is down, you don't.
[00:15:56] Speaker B: I have to say before we take a short break, that national security arguments were being made in the 1980s. This is nothing new.
You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm Ronnie Lipschitz, your host. And my guests today are Professor D.G. webster of Dartmouth College and Professor Susan park from the University of Sydney, who recently co published an analysis called the False Promise of Deep Sea Mining, which is the topic of our show today.
And I just mentioned that my recollection is, you know, although we didn't have all of these electronic wonders that back in the 1980s, it had to do with jet engines and, and missiles, of course, tell us about the potential ecological impacts of deep seabed mining, because I know that's always been a great concern in terms of what might happen if these things were actually mined.
[00:16:51] Speaker D: I think DG's probably got a lot more experience and knowledge about this than, than I do coming from a more terrestrial mining perspective.
But, but I think again, with a lot of decisions that we make around, around nature is that we don't know enough about the impacts that this is going to have on, on the ecology.
And there's a number of scientists and concerned groups that are saying that we need to know more about what the impacts are going to be because this has a profound impact, could have a profound impact on the way in which our natural systems operate. And this has impacts for the fact that the deep seas do store carbon and it could ultimately change or help.
As with everything, every bit counts in terms of the impacts that we have for climate change. But DG's got a much better understanding of the, the more specific impacts.
[00:17:57] Speaker C: So the abyssal plain, for a long time people thought it was just empty and there wasn't a lot of life down there. Basically, though, every time we send a sub down or every time we do some kind of research, we're finding new species.
And these are species that have evolved, unlike around supermassive sulfides or the sort of underwater volcanic, volcanic deposition of minerals. These are species that have evolved in an ecosystem that is very stable. And so there's a lot of questions around. Well, if we send a vacuum cleaner down there to essentially what is a massive vacuum cleaner to suck up all of these nodules, we're going to be disturbing these, these ecosystems that have not been disturbed. Another big component of this is the potential for sediment plumes.
So there, there's going to be massive plumes of sediment that are going to be released as they try to pull the nodules from the seabed. And they're massive ocean currents that actually go along the bottom of the ocean through these areas and then come back up to the surface. And so there's reason to care about sediment plumes for the deep ocean that they could be covering up things that basically are designed to balance on these very silty soils, but also that these sediment plumes could release metals and other kinds of things that we don't even necessarily know what they are and bring them to the surface or they interact with surface ecosystems and coastal ecosystems. So there's all sorts of potential harm, not just in the deep ocean, but also closer to home.
[00:19:37] Speaker B: Has anybody done any kind of pilot mining on the deep seabed that has sort of generated data about these effects and impacts?
[00:19:48] Speaker C: Yeah, so pilot mining has been happening primarily, though they collect data on what's there, and in fact, they're required to report on the results so we know what they're pulling up in terms of what nodules are coming up. They are supposed to report species, for instance, and things like this. But in terms of the difference between the relatively small scale exploratory mining and the larger commercial scale mining, there's an order of magnitude difference there in the kinds of effects that could occur.
Yes, we have some knowledge, but that knowledge, what we do know, has basically told biologists and oceanographers who've written extensively about this. I mean, every other year you've got a paper coming out in Nature or Science against deep sea mining because of its negative ecological impacts.
But those people who have reviewed these kinds of data, as well as the data that's collected by scientists themselves are all very concerned about these potential impacts.
[00:20:57] Speaker B: Well, let's change the topic a little bit. In March, the Trump administration announced that the United States would be partnering with something called the Metals Company to explore commercial mining on the deep seabed. I looked up the metals company. I noticed it was headquartered in, it's headquartered in Canada, which seems sort of contrary. But has, has this company ever actually mined anything?
It was kind of difficult to interpret from the website whether this is a kind of a, a shell startup or there is actually something here.
And, and where does that stand? I mean, it's only three months for four months later. But has anything happened with it?
[00:21:39] Speaker D: Not. Not to my knowledge. My understanding is you're absolutely right. It is a company that is based on selling the idea of mining.
And this really comes down to, again, the financialization of this speculative idea that we can mine and we should be mining in the deep sea and really creating that hype and buzz to be able to generate a significant amount of money again before anything actually happens.
And so it is based on former incarnations of to do the same thing in different places. And this, this creates in some ways, just having a new name and trying new. Trying to do the same thing.
You know, you really have to start to wonder, you know, for a number of political economists, we do try and track where these companies come from and who, who the main investors are. But it can be quite difficult with a significant lack of transparency, to be able to identify who has any runs on the board anywhere in terms of trying to undertake these types of activities and gain, as Didi said earlier, significant government subsidies and approval to do so.
[00:23:00] Speaker C: Yeah. So the metals company is the new name for the. Was it Deep Green minerals, I believe, which has been around for a while.
And they did have a contract with Norway to mine other types of deep sea minerals off the Norwegian coasts. But that was actually, and they were literally weeks from starting that, when the Norwegian government was forced to change its decision there by public protest because people were just like, not having it. Of course, Norway has made a lot of money off offshore oil drilling. And so they saw this as another way to extend that. But there was a big public outcry.
I mean, yes, it's all about speculation, but again, the technologies are there to do this kind of mining now.
It's not as speculative as it was back in the 1980s. And they're doing exploration in the Clarion Clipperton Zone. Not necessarily just the metals company, but there are literally 20 or something different contracts that are with the International Seabed Authority to do the kind of exploration. And it's not just going and picking up a few nodules. They are actually collecting tons of material as part of these processes.
[00:24:19] Speaker B: So this issue, this issue of seabed mining, you know, came up, I think first in the late 70s and the early 80s when the UN Conference on the Law of the sea was being negotiated. I mean, you can correct me if I'm wrong about that timing. I think, I think the nodules were known, but the. The whole idea of the common heritage of, I'll call it humankind, that this was in the high, high seas, no country had a sovereign claim over this space. And so it was also the time of the new international economic order, when countries in the global south were agitating over division of revenues from various kinds of extractive resources. And can you give us a little bit of background information about the UN Law of the sea and about this issue?
[00:25:08] Speaker C: Actually, it was the 1960s, there was a book that was published by a geologist that basically said that the seabed was the next source of riches. I mean, and he was, as the geologist, he was predicting millions and millions of dollars at a time when millions and millions of dollars meant more than it does today. Right.
And so that's one of the reasons why deep sea mining became an important issue during the Law of the sea negotiations, the third round that started in the 1970s and didn't wrap up until the 19 1982.
And deep sea minerals and deep sea mining was one of the biggest sticking points, one of the biggest reasons that took so long, because exactly as you said, Ronnie, developing countries wanted their piece of the pie. And they didn't just want benefit sharing in terms of getting some revenues from the companies that were mining the deep ocean. They also wanted technology.
And so as part of the final enclose agreement from 1982, the whole international Seabed Authority was established with this thing called the enterprise, which was supposed to be part of a public private partnership kind of deal which would collect very high royalties, very high fees from any companies that were mining in the area areas outside of national jurisdiction, and then share that money as common heritage of mankind or humankind, but then also share technology. And there were these very high requirements that anybody who developed any kind of deep sea technology would have to share it with the entire world. And that is why not only did it take a very long time for the law of the sea to be negotiated, but it didn't actually enter into Force until 1994. 4 When there was A secondary agreement that actually completely gutted almost all of the benefit sharing from the original. So it's called the implementing agreement of 1994, which gutted, I believe it was Title 9 or Title 11 of OnClose, and made the fees much smaller, made it so that there was no requirement of technology, technology transfer or capacity improvement. And by this time, of course, the Cold War was over and developing countries were jumping on the capitalist bandwagon. But also, it had been decades and nobody was mining in the deep ocean. So developing countries also were like, why would we fight over this? It's a pipe dream. It's not going to happen. Right. And so that's the 1994 agreement. The EU and a number of other developed countries finally decided to ratify on clos with that agreement in tower. And so that's how we got to where we are today with the International Seabed Authority and all of that.
[00:27:59] Speaker B: Did the United States ever ratify the law of the sea?
[00:28:01] Speaker C: No.
[00:28:02] Speaker B: Although, as I recall, the Reagan administration made severe demands on the negotiations. It then basically walked away from the law of the sea.
[00:28:11] Speaker C: It was not just Reagan. It was also the Senate. There were and still are quite a few members of the Senate who have been able to, to hold up U.S. ratification.
And partly that was based on security issues, and partly it was just ideological opposition to the US Being part of it.
[00:28:29] Speaker B: You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guests today are Professors D.G. webster and Professor Susan park. And we're talking about deep sea mining and the history of, I guess, the idea and the international legislation that was intended to provide distribution of the revenues in particular and maybe the technology to developing countries in the Global south. Back in the 1980s, when the UN law of the Sea was first concluded, you mentioned the enterprise, and I had forgotten about that. And I sit here wondering whether it has to do with boldly going where no one has gone before.
So I looked up the International Seabed Authority and I was surprised to discover it actually exists since I haven't been following this. I had sort of imagined, you know, all of that had kind of vanished into the, the mists of, of global diplomacy. But. But sure enough, there it is. Where's it located? How is it organized? What does it actually do?
[00:29:30] Speaker C: It's located in Jamaica. That's where the headquarters are. It is, I would call it a labyrinth. It was created as a labyrinth to begin with. But then after the 1994 agreement, it really got complicated.
So there's an assembly which is made up of members of the isa, representatives from countries that have are members as well as observers. So the United States is not a member since it hasn't ratified unclose, but it does usually participate as an observer. It has a Council.
The assembly meets once a year. It's the sort of overarching body that makes the final decisions about things. But the Council is a smaller group of representatives that are elected by the assembly that meet multiple times a year. It also has a number of technical committees. In fact, the Legal and Technical Committee is one of the most important bodies that is made up primarily of experts who have been appointed by states.
And then it also has a Finance Committee. And the Finance Committee is another one of those things that was created in 1994 with the implementing agreement. And it is essentially stacked the deck in terms of basically the biggest contributors to the ISA budget get to decide how the budget is used. The Council also, in theory was stacked in 1994 with similar requirements to what is with the UN Security Council. In theory, if the US had ratified, for instance, it would be guaranteed a seat on the Council every single year. Right. It would never be rotated off and it would always have basically a veto power. So anyway, long story short, it's complicated. What it does is it oversees again, there are claims out there and exploratory licenses out there, and there are companies out there exploring all of this area. So it had to develop the law the rules for exploration first, which took forever, and now it is working on the rules for commercial exploitation, which they've been doing since 2014, which is about when they finally finished the rules for exploration.
And it's, you know, these negotiations have been going on for more than a decade in terms of getting these rules for commercial exploitation together.
Again, primarily it's all about what are the fees going to be, how are we going to share benefits.
There's also though, a whole segment of that that's about how do we monitor, enforce and ensure compliance. There's actually a committee also that is already trying to ensure compliance with exploration licenses. And you can, you can read there that even though primarily that means that are they reporting to us the information that they're required to report to the isa. And there's already like four companies that are not reporting that information and not responding to the isa, even though these are companies that have licenses through the isa.
So in theory it's there to figure out who gets to mine where.
And I'll just end with one last thing, that it is also part of their job as the ISA to ensure that they protect the biodiversity of the deep sea. So they're supposed to be there to allow mining to occur, to help figure out how to share the benefits from the mining, but also then to protect the deep sea. And they've done that by setting aside areas where they're not going to allow mining.
[00:33:02] Speaker B: As I recall in the original agreement, any place, any area that was going to be mined was supposed to be divided in half, that the company, the mining company would get proceeds from one half and the Global south or the, the enterprise would get the proceeds from the other half. Right. Does that still exist or is that. That's gone?
[00:33:23] Speaker C: Yeah, the enterprise still exists and, but, but now the benefit sharing is primarily through fees.
There is also a requirement that any company that wants to mine in the deep sea has to have a developing country usually, but, but some country member of the ISA as a co signer, I guess you could say, on their license. So it's all again similar in that they're focused on public private partnership kind of deals, but the split is much, much lower than it was in the.
[00:33:58] Speaker B: Original enclosed if I can, I want to read something from the website which is a sort of a summation of a lot of this. No deep seabed mining operations have started anywhere in the world. Current exploration activities undertaken in the seabed area are aimed at gathering the necessary information on the location and quality of the seabed minerals and collecting all the necessary environmental information.
To date, ISA has approved 30 contracts for exploration involving 22 countries and covering more than 1.3 million square meters kilometers of the seabed. This represents 0.7% of the international deep seabed and 0.3% of the world's oceans.
Twelve of these contracts are sponsored by developing countries.
Thirteen countries and one intergovernmental consortium currently have contracts for the exploration of polymetallic nodules. Seven countries for the explore exploration of polymetallic sulfides and five for the exploration of cobalt rich ferro manganese crusts. Well, I'm not going to ask what's the difference between all of these?
So all of this is basically exploratory and speculative kind of activity. What sort of actual explorations are going on that you know of, for example?
[00:35:20] Speaker C: So exploration essentially means they go down and they mine a small area and.
[00:35:26] Speaker B: What'S the technology look like?
[00:35:28] Speaker C: So it depends on what you're trying to get. For the supermassive sulfides they have and actually for the cobalt crust, both are minerals that are trapped in rock.
So unlike the nodules you can't just vacuum them up. You have to actually have these crushing devices, which again, do exist. You can Google it and find pictures of them where they're just these big, massive gears essentially that are on like a robot. That kind of, it kind of does still look like a vacuum. But, you know, one of the ones with like the thing that spins and so it goes through it breaks up the cross or it. With the supermassive sulfides, it's usually a chimney that has been.
[00:36:09] Speaker B: Again, are those the ocean vents then?
[00:36:12] Speaker C: Yep, those are hydrothermal vents.
[00:36:14] Speaker B: So there's, there's authorization to, to explore the hydrothermal events with the eventual goal of extraction. Right. Of destroying them.
[00:36:23] Speaker C: Yes. And Nautilus was the company that pioneered this, not on the international side, but in Papua New Guinea. And that did not work out very well for Papua New guinea or for Nautilus's investors. But the company that bought out Nautilus, which was mainly backed by Russia and which is now a private company, has recently been accused of starting to mine in PNG waters on the supermassive sulfide deposits without actual permission.
Again, it's a lot of, it's about hype. So the hype is around the metals company, the hype is around the security, and then in the. And. And then the polymetallic nodules. And then on the other side, all sorts of things are happening. And again, this is just. This is more of the same from mining.
Terrestrial.
[00:37:11] Speaker D: Yeah. And I should add that one of the reasons why this is considered to be something so important for, I don't know, we get to the United States eventually is because it is a new frontier.
And this frontier is really where states are focusing their attention. And what we see is, the biggest concern is that in opening up this frontier, you're essentially recreating the geopolitics that we're seeing everywhere else. So you mentioned Greenland earlier. I mean, the United States has mentioned their interest in critical minerals in the Ukraine, in Greenland, in helping to broker a peace agreement between Rwanda and the drc. This is all about critical minerals. And the shift into deep sea mining is also competition with China. And so the United States has 26 of their 50 critical minerals that they, that they get from China. So they're deeply concerned about where they're accessing their critical minerals. And so the idea that they can get them from the deep sea, where they're still going to be competing with China.
[00:38:24] Speaker B: This whole argument about sourcing critical minerals from China, again, this came up in the past, right when we were sourcing critical minerals from the Soviet Union and business I think trumped politics at the time, so to speak. Is there any reason to think that this, this time around will be, will be different? I mean of course China has imposed some embargoes of some sort on some rare earth minerals and I'm not quite sure where things stand at the moment. Is this a serious concern?
[00:38:57] Speaker D: Yes, absolutely. These are the minerals that the United States relies on for many military applications as well as computer advancement. So for the United States this is a technological and strategic advantage to be able to have these minerals and they do not have enough domestic capacity and are seeking to reroute global supply chains for critical minerals to try and cut China out.
You're absolutely right. China has over the past few years, specifically the last three years, put resource, sorry, constraints on their exports of a number of critical minerals in order to engage in that strategic tit for tat tariff restrictions and protection of a number of goods.
And so they absolutely see this as something that they want to protect. So trying to engage in a number of minerals partnerships with like minded allies as a way of securing access to critical minerals has become a key policy not only of this administration but also the previous administration.
It's a kind of, they've woken up pretty late to the fact that we need a number of these minerals in such demand.
And I know you can have those discussions about the fact that we can talk about the energy transition or the shift to renewable energy. This is more of an energy addition because of course we're not seeing a decrease in the use of fossil fuels.
So again we come back to this security issue as something that's really driving this concern.
And the, the idea that it's, the energy transition is part of it, but it's very much seen through the lens of, of strategic military and high computing that is needed not just for the types of dominance in high computing and supercomputers and semiconductors, but also for medicine and agri farming like the types of technology that we need for all aspects of contemporary society.
[00:41:16] Speaker B: You're listening to Sustainability Now.
I'm your host Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest Today are Professors D.G. webster from Dartmouth College and Professor Susan park from the University of Sydney. And we've been talking about strategic critical minerals and their role in various industries and national needs and particularly the United States.
I mean of course it seems ironic in a way, in retrospect anyway that nobody was paying attention to this while we were busy trying to, to transform China into a thriving democracy.
And, and, and I Mean, it goes hand in hand with what I see as the China hysteria in Washington in particular. Right. The coming war with China and all of that.
Where, where does the United States stand in all of this in terms of seabed governance? Since it's not a party to the conference, just an observer, is it in blatant violation of international law? And so what?
[00:42:23] Speaker C: Yeah, so I think one of the big differences between the discourse now and in the 80s was even though, you know, Reagan was very strong arming, you know, he strong armed the folks negotiating unclos, there was still not this willingness to walk away from international negotiations and from the United States role as an international leader.
Now we have a president who is, that's what he runs on is America first. And he has made it very clear that he is very interested in the metals company's proposals to allow and to essentially get the US to subsidize the first commercial exploitation of the manganese nodules or the polymetallic nodules in the Clarion Clipperton Zone.
So Trump has made it very clear that he's absolutely willing to allow US interests to go ahead in line in contravention of international law because the United States is A, not a member, but also B, they are skeptical of the entire post World War II order.
Right. There was a new economic order in 1980s. Now there's a new political order.
[00:43:38] Speaker B: So without these subsidies, it's not economically practical to do the mining. Right. Were any subsidies included in the recent, you know, big beautiful bill that Congress passed? I, you know, I'm sort of sitting here thinking that was one of the things I haven't seen anything about. Right. So. But nothing's going to happen unless the money is there.
And is there any money there or is this all just, again, you know, smoke and mirrors kind of stuff?
[00:44:09] Speaker C: Yeah, it's a good question. I would have to look at the, the details of the bill. I hadn't heard anything about it myself.
One thing I did hear about just this morning is that Trump has put in motion US government funds to buy a controlling share in the US's only terrestrial mine for rare earths, which is in California.
[00:44:31] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Which has been shut down for some number of years. Right. Again. Because even on, on land, it's not worth.
China undercuts the price. Right, Right.
[00:44:42] Speaker D: That's right.
[00:44:43] Speaker B: Of course, there's always that question, why wouldn't China continue to undercut the cost of production elsewhere? But go on. Sorry, dg.
[00:44:53] Speaker C: So there's again, there have been a lot of signs that he's going to be willing to make this, make the subsidies happen.
The other side of it, though, is that the stock prices for the metals company go up every time Trump says something like this, and every time the guy who runs it gets to go to the White House and things like that. And every time Trump basically says the ISA doesn't matter.
In fact, just since I think it was just in the last few months, the price of metals company stock has almost quadrupled since they had that really great meeting with Trump. I think it was back in April, and it stayed pretty high, which is actually relatively rare.
So there's a lot of potential. Even if the mining never happens, there's a ton of potential for profit taking through the stocks.
And that's what this is. That's why we keep saying it's speculative. Not that the technology doesn't exist, but that there are a lot of people who are already making money off of this.
Well, maybe not a lot, but at least some people are already making money off of this because they're manipulating or at least benefiting from changes in the.
[00:46:08] Speaker B: Stock prices, presumably friends of the president.
Every time a company like this is sold, somebody gets rich and someone else, you know, tries to test the last fool theory, which is that they can find somebody else to buy their shares when the going gets rough. I mean, it's. It's kind of hard to fathom that, not being a, an investor myself.
Well, have you gotten any responses to your article?
[00:46:38] Speaker C: People have thanked us for writing it. We did get. There is a person who will not be named, who is very much a promoter for deep sea mining, who emailed us and basically wrote his own opinion piece, basically saying that we were.
And I think it's something real to think about his concern, one of his concerns at least, is this idea that we might have been treating developing countries as, as basically, you know, unwitting shills. You know, people who are just being taken advantage of and not giving them the sort of autonomy and respect that they deserve.
I think that's definitely an important thing to keep in mind. And my main response is that these companies have been doing the same thing to develop countries as well.
It's not just the developing countries.
We all have really been subsidizing industries and moving our money into the pockets of speculators and people who run these companies.
[00:47:44] Speaker B: Yeah, there's no reason to think that will change. Right. And that's the definition of insanity, I suppose. Right.
Well, we're just about out of time, so maybe, you know, you have Any. Is there anything else our listeners should know about this topic? I mean, Susan, why don't you start?
[00:48:04] Speaker D: Yeah, that's a really good opportunity to identify that when we talk about the demand for critical minerals and what we need going forward. And that states really see this as a security issue, not just for their energy security, but for their national security.
A lot of companies, terrestrial as well as for the deep sea, really do expect subsidies. They consistently say that these are immature markets, they're not well developed, that they need the assistance from government to actually make this happen. And that's not just for some of the more obscure, like rare earths, but also some of the more developed critical minerals like lithium.
And so we are now looking at what many are calling resource nationalism, with states using a number of what used to be called industrial policy to try and kick start critical minerals mining. And this is seen to be, like in Australia, seemed to be part of a shift to protect our sort of national interests. And so this turn towards resource nationalism is part of this bigger picture around protectionism, a shift away from liberalization, an undercutting of, as DG said, the liberal international order that we've had since 1945. So for me, critical minerals are a real flash point that are not just contributing to broader geopolitical tensions, but also challenging the way things have been done for many decades. So the deep seabed is deeply concerning, as I said, for opening up this new frontier to this very geopolitical competition.
So, a few big thoughts.
[00:50:00] Speaker B: Dg, anything to add?
[00:50:03] Speaker C: What gets me is Susan's absolutely right. It's challenging sort of the foundations of peace.
But on the other hand, it's not challenging the things that really need to be challenged, like the fact that we have a entire economy of electronics that's based on planned obsolescence and the amount of waste we're talking about mining. The deep ocean, which has not been touched by humans, which has evolved in these amazing ways, when really we could mine our waste and we could reduce our waste.
I don't know about you, but I get sick of having to replace my phone every few years. I know some people are always about getting that new iPhone, getting that new phone. I hate having to replace my computer. And there's reasons why we need to upgrade the components and things to go use the new OS to avoid the viruses, etc. There's also ways that we could get around it if we really had the kinds of competition and the kinds of markets that actually fostered entrepreneurship and redesign in the ways that the guys in Silicon Valley. They think they're doing it, but really they're just doing the same old, same old.
And we're not questioning that. Instead, we're saying, oh, hey, let's go to the great deep ocean and get some minerals.
You know, it sounds fabulous. It's part of that whole ethos that comes with the pioneers and the colonists and all of those folks. So to me, it's challenging change on the political side, but the economy is just staying the same.
[00:51:49] Speaker B: Well, thank you, DG and Susan, for being my guests on Sustainability Now.
[00:51:54] Speaker C: Thank you. Thanks for having us. Thanks.
[00:51:57] Speaker B: You've been listening to a Sustainability now interview with Professors D.G. webster of Dartmouth College and Susan park from the University of Sydney. They, along with several colleagues, recently published the False Promise of Deep Sea Mining, a critique of the proposal focused on terrestrial minerals, mineral availability, limited social benefits, and supply chain economics. You can find their
[email protected] 5u5e w e b j. If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find them@k squid.org Sustainability now and Spotify, YouTube and Pocket Casts, among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make K Squid your community radio station and keep it going. And so until next every other Sunday, sustainability Now.
[00:52:57] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out.
Temperate zones and tropical climbs and currents and thriving seas, Winds blowing through breathing trees and strong ozone, safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
