June 13, 2025 • 59 mins
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
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Welcome to the Resilient Earth Podcast, where
we talk with speakers from theUnited States and around the
world about the critical issuesfacing our planet and the
positive actions people aretaking, from the tiniest of
actions to the grandest ofgestures, so that we can
continue to thrive and survivefor generations to come.
(00:32):
I'm Leanne Lindsay, producerand host, along with co-hosts
and co-producers Scott and TreeMercer of Mindenoma, whale and
Seal Study, located on the SouthMendocino and North Sonoma
coasts.
The music for this podcast isby Eric Alleman, an
(00:55):
international composer, pianistand writer living in the Sea
Ranch.
Discover more of his music,animations, ballet, stage and
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You can find Resilient Earth onSpotify, apple and Amazon
(01:18):
Podcasts, iheart Radio, youtube,soundcloud and wherever you
find your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
The ocean floor is full of deposits of critical
minerals.
Some are in the crust ofunderwater mountains or around
hydrothermal vents, and some theones we'll be focusing on
tonight take the form ofpotato-shaped nodules, little
lumpy spheres formed overmillions of years.
Those nodules now line someparts of the deep ocean floor
and contain valuable metals likenickel and cobalt, which can be
(01:58):
used for things like batteriesfor electric cars.
So obviously people are veryinterested in getting their
hands on them, and the head ofone company leading the charge,
the Metals Company, has gone onoutlets like 60 Minutes to argue
that those nodules could end upsaving the planet.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
I love the fact that they're the way we're gonna get
away from fossil fuels.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
I love the fact that in these are all the metals we
need to go and build thosebatteries.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
That man is named Gerard Barron and he's an actual
person and not, as you may havethought, chatgpt's answer to
make Sean Penn the most SeanPenn.
He's positioned himself at theforefront of this industry and
reportedly once hired amarketing firm to portray him as
an Australian, elon Musk.
Barron stresses that he's thereal deal.
His company says it's securedaccess to enough metal to power
(02:45):
280 million electric vehiclesequivalent to the entire fleet
of cars in the US and he'sprojecting they could start
commercially exploiting the deepsea as early as 2026.
But the place he's planning todo that is the CCZ, even though
it's one of the few remainingenvironments on Earth that is
close to pristine, andextracting those nodules could
(03:06):
do irreparable damage.
So before we stand back andwatch this guy's company throw
open the door tocommercial-scale plunder, it
might be worth looking at whatexactly he's proposing to do and
whether it's actually worthdoing at all.
So tonight let's talk aboutdeep-sea mining, and to hear
Barron tell it, mining thesenodules is really just a simple
matter of scooping them off thefloor.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Last week tonight with John Oliver, leads us into
our show today.
We are here to talk about deepsea mining and the issues
surrounding it from both sidesof the fence and how there are
those who feel that this is asolution for the climate crisis
we're in and on the other side,it's those who feel that this is
(03:48):
an irreversible damage thatcould happen.
And you are one of the toppeople to speak with, especially
because of that wonderful filmyou at the Ocean Foundation
created last year with Dr SylviaEarle and others of the Ocean
Foundation to talk about thedeep sea, defend the deep.
(04:09):
So thank you, richard, forcoming on today.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Well, let's begin with the three kinds of subsea
mining.
It's not all one thing.
There are hydrothermal vents orsubsea, basically hot springs
under the ocean, and those havearound them generally a copper,
lead and zinc coating aroundwhere the hot water came out of
(04:35):
the seafloor in the past or isstill coming out of the seafloor
today.
And around those vents growvery unique biological
communities that do not dependon sunlight for energy.
Think about that for a minute.
They're not a chlorophyll-basedlife form.
They are living off of sulfidesand heat and they are very
(04:57):
unusual.
Some of them are so unusual wedon't quite understand how they
work yet.
So unusual, we don't quiteunderstand how they work yet,
but they are the key to a newtype of transformation of energy
from the core of the earth,basically geothermal energy,
heat from the magma at thecenter of the earth into life,
(05:19):
and we've never seen thatanywhere else.
And we've never seen thatanywhere else.
We don't know quite what itmeans, but it could have a key
to energy transformation thatcould someday be used by humans.
It's a very unique system.
Well, that's one kind, you know.
Let's just start withhydroothermal vent communities.
(05:42):
There is a second type of subseamining that has to do with what
are called crusts, in otherwords along the seafloor or on
spires, any vertical feature inthe ocean.
The ocean has a uniquecapability of almost plating
metals onto those surfaces.
(06:02):
So anywhere you have a verticalspire for example Davidson
Seamount, off of Monterey Bay,big Sur or down around the
Channel Islands there's any kindof vertical surface.
You want to look at thatbecause those will also become
targets for subsea mining andthey have again their own unique
(06:23):
life forms.
But you have to basicallydestroy the substrate.
You have to take away thispiece of the ocean, seabed or
the geologic structure to grindit up to get the metals.
And the third type of subseamining which I think we're going
to focus on today, if Iunderstood your interest
(06:44):
correctly, are polymetallicsulfide nodules, these
potato-sized rocks, stones thatare spread across the seafloor
for sometimes hundreds of miles.
Basically, in theClarion-Clipperton zone they
extend from off of Hawaii almostall the way to Mexico.
And although they are vastlyspread across the seafloor, each
(07:11):
of these stones is a life formin itself.
In other words, somewherebetween 50 and 70 percent of the
life in the deep ocean dependson these nodules, and the
nodules themselves have in thema biological system, a microbial
system, and so they are notjust rocks or, as some of the
(07:36):
proponents of subsea mining arefond of holding them up in a
hearing and saying it's abattery 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 threetypes of mining, and all of them
are being pursued, some of themmore than others, depending on
the type of metals that theindustry expects to extract,
(08:10):
expects to extract, but theextraction of them poses threats
to biological systems that aremillions of years old.
I mean literally, it tookmillions 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 plowingthe seafloor for minerals
happened 26 years ago, and itlooks exactly like it did the
(08:34):
day we left.
So if it took millions of yearsto evolve these life forms in
the sea, some of which wehaven't discovered yet, about
half of which we haven't namedyet, then we know that for them
to come back, first of all theymay come back in a different
form, and it may take millionsof years.
(08:56):
This is beyond human scale.
In other words, this is not amatter of something that we can
fix or mitigate or repair.
After we do it, we destroy itand it's one and gone.
And we're talking about very,very large areas, particularly
for the nodules extraction.
(09:18):
Now nobody's commerciallymining these yet.
There have been explorationpermits granted under what is
called the International SeabedAuthority, which was created
under the rubric of the Law ofthe Sea.
There's about 170 members ofthe International Seabed
Authority and their basicprinciple believing that you
(09:40):
have to have sound science thatcan show you, that prove
basically conclusively that thisextraction can be done without
harming the larger oceanecosystem.
And international seabedauthority has not reached that
conclusion yet and there areabout two dozen nations that are
out prominently in favor of amoratorium on seabed mining.
(10:06):
For that reason, because of theamount of danger we pose as
extractive entities humans as atop predator, you might say, or
everything in the deep ocean.
We can't function thereourselves because incredible
pressure by the weight of thewater above us.
So everything would be done byremote extractive machines which
(10:30):
we would be controlling fromthe sea surface on a ship.
So nobody can really monitorwhat we're doing.
We're just working miles underour feet with machines that are,
you know, are the size of asmall Safeway.
And that is why I think we'reseeing the debate, because this
(10:54):
is key to the whole oceanecosystem, and the ocean
currently absorbs about 25% ofthe carbon emissions on the
planet.
Humans create carbon emissionswith their industrial activities
.
The ocean is a little toosuccessful at absorbing that
carbon, to the degree that itabsorbs it 25% of what we
(11:18):
generate, and so we can say,well, we're way over here, on
the coast of California or thecoast of Hawaii or the coast of
whatever country.
But the bottom line is, thisaffects the entire ocean
ecosystem and the atmosphere,the oxygen we breathe, and so
it's not surprising that there'sa lot of interest in this.
(11:39):
It's not surprising that thecompanies themselves that want
to do it see ready profits.
They make money taking thingsfrom nature, not putting
anything back, and extractiveindustries like this,
customarily, whether they'retobacco industry or whoever it
is, they always say oh, this isgreen, we call it greenwashing
(12:01):
today.
We call it greenwashing today.
Now they say, well, we have tohave these minerals in order to
convert, particularly ourtransportation sector, from
being hydrocarbon dependentinstead convert it to becoming
electricity dependent, and weneed to get the electricity from
floating offshore wind is theclaim, and build the turbines
(12:23):
and the substations andeverything associated with
floating offshore wind requiresminerals, and particularly the
batteries in the cars, in theelectric cars.
However, actually the automotiveindustry that builds electric
cars has been moving away fromthe types of minerals that would
(12:43):
be gathered by subsea mininginto more readily available
terrestrial, much cheaper, fromterrestrial 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'reseeing the current
administration killingincentives for that conversion
(13:08):
to electrically-basedtransportation.
Anyway, you know anything to dowith energy conservation,
anything to do with non-fossilfuel energy?
The money is being taken awayby this administration, either
by the White House or in theHouse of Representatives.
We're kind of right now perched, if you will, on the razor's
(13:31):
edge of a decision thatultimately is going to determine
the fate of our oceans and lifeitself on Earth.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Life itself on Earth.
That is the one thing that Ikeep coming back to myself and I
can see conservationists,environmentalists, who are
thinking of this in the terms ofthis will help our climate,
help us reverse some of thosethings.
But it's a double-edged swordand there's such a high risk
(14:04):
because we don't reallyunderstand what the possibly
everlasting impacts, dangerousand destructive impacts, that
kind of activity would have.
And once they open that door toa lot of companies that have
lined up out there, likeImpossible Metals out of San
Jose, the metals company out ofVancouver with the Australian
(14:25):
CEO, and the potential fordestruction is high and it's
hard to not see that.
But people are having a hardtime grappling with what they're
hearing.
Like this is a green solutionand yet not considering the
(14:46):
impacts that could be foreverdestructive.
And these rocks, thesepolymetallic nodules, they take
what a million or more years todevelop.
Richard.
Speaker 4 (14:59):
The interesting thing that I've always believed about
working on environmental issuesis an old saying that says we
will only protect what weunderstand, and in this case
because the public.
Generally I trust the public,because people are not as
(15:22):
ignorant as the currentadministration thinks.
They can reason things out andobviously there's a great
connectivity between humanbeings and the ocean.
This is not new.
This goes back culturally tensof thousands of years.
People have been connected tothe ocean and here on the West
Coast this is not our firstrodeo here on the West Coast.
(15:49):
This is not our first rodeo.
We have had in the past aproposal by an interior
secretary named James Watt whowanted to mine along the coast
of Northern California,basically off of Humboldt, del
Norte County and the coast ofOregon on up to about Goose Bay
where the hydrothermal ventminerals.
James Watt had actually a hardminerals leasing plan.
(16:09):
He was planning to hold a leasesale on what's called the Gorda
Ridge and the minerals wouldhave then been brought into
probably Humboldt Bay or CoosBay as a slurry and ground up
and take it away.
It was copper, lead and zinc,which in this was about 1982.
(16:31):
Obviously the economics ofcopper, lead and zinc in 1982
were not attractive to doing themining here off the California
coast.
But we've seen this before.
We've had pressure here.
Hilo, hawaii.
There's a seam out off of Hilocalled Loihi, a new Hawaiian
(16:51):
island in the forming, and thathas a cobalt-rich manganese
crust on it, different than thehydrothermal vents, but that
also has a lot of interestinglife.
Hydrothermal vents, but thatalso has a lot of interesting
life.
And that lease sale wassomething that James Watt, when
he was Secretary of Interior,also proposed and it was stopped
(17:12):
by local concerns, just likeGorda Ridge was stopped here.
This process even though youknow the Trump administration is
trying to circumvent globallaws and ethics, if you will
this process is responsive topublic concern and I think we're
(17:33):
seeing that again.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
And you just mentioned ethics too, and there
was that paper that I sent youand I wanted to get your
thoughts on it, entitled EthicalOpportunities in deep sea
collection of polymetallicnodules from the clarion
clipperton zone, and it'swritten by steven katona, whom
scott and tree know, or scottyou know, and dana palikas and
(17:58):
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 ofnature, if you like surviving as
a living, breathing human beingand studying nature, you learn
that there are intrinsic rights.
In other words, ecosystems aresubject to what I call the
(18:22):
rights of nature.
Ecosystems are subject to whatI call the rights of nature.
Natural systems, particularlyeverything, including us, has
evolved over millions of years,but some particular kinds of
what we would call extractiveminerals if we were miners, are
much more than that.
They're actually a substratefor life, and some of these
(18:44):
unique life forms have utilityto human beings.
One of the COVID tests, forexample, that we have used to
get through the pandemic unlessyou're among those who don't
believe there was a pandemic oris still a pandemic one of the
substances actually came fromthe deep sea.
That doesn't mean we go thereand extract a whole bunch of
(19:06):
that.
We go there and we learn thegenetic template of it and then
we make it in the laboratory.
There are indications stillpreliminary studies that
indicate that.
I mean if I were president ofthe United States, the first
thing I would work on, justbecause so many of my friends
have succumbed to cancer, is acure for cancer.
(19:28):
If we do come up with a curefor cancer, the odds are pretty
good it's going to come from thedeep sea Again, not because we
go and harvest a whole bunch ofsomething, but because we learn
how this other type of life formsurvives under these incredible
hostile to us but friendly toit conditions, and in the
(19:53):
process we might learn somethingthat saves humanity from some
of the worst things that happento 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 ofresearch that are now being
pursued.
Hopefully, some of them willsurvive the budget assaults that
have gone on on science, andthe indications of those
pathways of research are thatthey would take us to a cure for
cancer.
(20:25):
There are indications that theconversion of energy from one
form to another, in other words,heat and sulfides into a life
form instead of solar energyfrom the sun, may be a key to
how we power our city someday.
Science doesn't stop and wecan't stop it, even if the guy
(20:47):
in the White House thinks we can.
You can't just outlaw education, attack universities, cut off
the funding for the top NOAAscientists and other marine
scientists and just take awaytheir money and expect science
to stop.
Science doesn't stop and justtake away their money and expect
science to stop.
Science doesn't stop.
(21:08):
Climate impacts don't stop justbecause you outlaw the mention
of the word climate ingovernment websites.
Climate change will happenYears, if not decades, further
behind than we would have beenhad we not gone through these
attacks on science.
But you can't stop theevolutionary 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 theInternational Monetary Fund, one
of the top financial economistsin the world, who now founded a
company a few years back calledBlue Green Future, who's
helping island nations andtribes in the Amazon.
Native American tribes here inthe US value living nature as
(21:53):
opposed to extractive nature.
And the value of living naturehow much more valuable that can
be to us humans to continueliving on this earth.
Speaker 4 (22:05):
I tend to side on the side of life when I see
something thriving, probablybecause I grew up in an
agricultural setting and youtake very good care of whatever
you're in charge of plants oranimals or trees, or in my case
it was mostly walnut trees butbecause you know that that's how
you survive.
(22:26):
Your connectivity to nature isyour survival.
So healthy nature means healthyhumans.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Nurturing nature.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
Nurturing nature is nurturing humans.
And I would point out thatbecause 1,000 marine scientists
and policy experts from 70nations wrote a letter to the
United Nations saying we need tohold off on licensing of mining
operations in the seabed, theymight know something.
(22:56):
In other words, that's detached,objective, peer-reviewed
science, but it fits togetherwith some of the indigenous
beliefs, particularly in PacificIsland nation cultures that go
back forever, that believe thatall life originated in the deep
sea.
(23:16):
That's the cultural norm incertain places and that's why
the International SeabedAuthority calls this ecosystem
on the seabed, particularly notjust the nodules themselves but
the whole issue of what's on theseabed they call it the common
heritage of mankind, or I wouldcall it the common heritage of
(23:39):
humankind.
And because that is writteninto the actually the Law of the
Sea Treaty, which the US neversigned for all the wrong reasons
, but because that's writteninto the Law of the Sea, that is
the guiding principle of theInternational Seabed Authority
is protecting and sharing thecommon heritage of humankind.
(23:59):
And that's why they have notbeen willing to greenlight
destructive activities, becausewe 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 anarea of the Chlorian-Clipperton
zone that looked like they werecreated yesterday.
(24:21):
We can't go back and puttogether 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 arecoping with a kind of cumulative
pile of mistakes that were madeby 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 abjectpanic in the Gulf of Mexico
saying that the DeepwaterHorizon rig is on fire, people
are dead and which way is thespill going to go?
I hope I never get a call likethat on the Sonoma coast, but
(25:10):
it's possible.
In other words, we are capableas a species of creating
planetary scale messes and wedeal with them in the most
rudimentary, primitive way.
In other words, we could createmesses that are so big we can
never clean them up.
They cause damage that isliterally beyond any scale of
(25:33):
our ability to respond.
We clean up oil spills witheffectively using or trying to
use what are essentially diapers.
I've been to many or up oilspills with effectively using or
trying to use what areessentially diapers.
I've been to many or more oilspills than I care to remember
In the deep sea.
We have no mitigation technologyat all.
We're building machines to goget stuff and rip it out of the
seabed or suck it up from theseabed.
(25:54):
We don't have any mitigationdevices that nobody's even
thought about them.
You know the scale of thedestruction is such that you
couldn't go back and let's sortof plaster things back together.
Some of these companies' nameslike Impossible Metals you know
that's a really appropriate name.
(26:15):
It's literally an impossibleplace to get metals, both
economically and ethically.
But you need to be able tothink about how things are going
to be when we get done doingwhatever we're going to do,
because you go back to theseventh generation principle of
native people.
(26:35):
We're talking about far beyondseven generations of damage.
We're talking about millenniaof damage in the deep ocean and
that's why people like SylviaEarle and some of the top NOAA
scientists, who now are jobless,were raising red flags and the
whole dismantling of NOAA.
If you look at it carefully, itdidn't take the lower echelon of
(27:00):
interns and you know bad enoughthe loss of institutional
memory and years of monitoringand science.
It took the top people.
It took the top scientistsfirst.
This was the problem with ElonMusk and Doge.
Was it targeted?
The base of knowledge thatallows us to successfully, or
(27:23):
relatively successfully, managethe ocean?
And it came in and took the toptier and for that reason, all
that's left will be, yes, menand women who say it's okay to
do this.
In fact, one of them's sayingit right now about DC mining.
Why?
Because everybody else is gone.
The agency wasn't just gutted.
(27:44):
The agency was basically givena surgery that made it only say
yes to destructive activitiesand that is so disrespectful to
the individuals most of thewomen, actually who invented the
Coastal Zone Management Actitself in Congress, the NOAA
(28:06):
scenario for managing our oceans, which is a pretty big thing to
manage.
To take out the brains, if youwill, or the heart of that
science, it should be criminal.
I mean, literally people shouldbe 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 hadbeen gutted, that it has the
Coast Guard, it forecasts theweather.
Speaker 4 (28:34):
The same thing happened over at the Department
of Interior Doge, actuallyimplanted in the Interior
Department oil industrywell-known oil industry
lobbyists to make sure thatInterior falls straight and
narrow.
But what happened at NOAA wasnot just gutting NOAA, it was
more like a prefrontal lobotomythat was taking out the top
(28:57):
scientists so that bad thingscould be brought before noah.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
And then, uh, when that happened, noah would say
yes, who's left is the yes manyeah, you mentioned too that the
scientists and others were toldat noah that if they didn't
approve of these leases theywould be let go, you know.
So either they walk now or theywill be let go if they did not
(29:25):
do these.
Speaker 4 (29:26):
Yes, it has been brought to my attention that
people who had decades ofhistory at NOAA and the agency
were told either you approveoffshore drilling within
National Marine Sanctuaries oryou leave, and they fortunately
had the ethical integrity to saygoodbye, in spite of the fact
(29:50):
they devoted their entire lifeto this piece of ocean, to these
marine sanctuaries.
You cannot rebuild that kind ofthe sea.
We can't influence it.
(30:21):
We're observers essentially inJamaica when it meets.
But the Trump administrationfigured out a workaround they
think we believe it's illegal inwhich the seabed around
American Samoa, in the exclusiveeconomic zone around American
Samoa, can be leased forminerals extraction.
(30:45):
Now American Samoa has objectedto this.
They support a moratorium onseabed mining, but the Trump
administration said forget it,get out of the way.
So the Trump administration isplanning to use something called
the Deep Sea Hard MineralResources Act, another law that
(31:06):
only applies to the US, thatthey claim allows NOAA to review
applications, issue explorationpermits and approve commercial
recovery permits for US entitiesoperating in international
waters.
Now, a plain reading of thatlaw doesn't give us that right.
(31:28):
We've never been cowboys likethis in the global community
before, but that lease salecould happen very soon I mean
literally within weeks, and it'sbeing promoted by a gentleman
named Eric Noble who is theprincipal deputy assistant
(31:48):
secretary of commerce for Oceansand Atmosphere.
This is what's left of NOAA.
I said would be a yes man, andhe is, and so he's ignoring the
international seabed authority.
He's claiming that he's goingto expedite permitting and
approvals for mining aroundamerican samoa, in spite of just
(32:10):
about everybody in theimmediate vicinity of the
pacific ocean objecting.
Again, you've taken away noah'sbrain and you are left with a
button that you push that onlysays yes.
It's like a fortune tellingmachine that can only say yes,
and so we're seeing thathappening literally.
Uh, I'd say within the next fewweeks we will see a lease sale
(32:35):
and if that's going to happen,then I would say right behind it
will be a revisitation by thesame agency of things like the
Gorda Ridge right here off ofNorthern California.
I worry about Humboldt BayHarbor, which is being improved
ostensibly to pave the way forfloating offshore wind.
(32:56):
So you need harbor improvementsfor that.
Ostensibly to pave the way forfloating offshore wind.
So you need harbor improvementsfor that.
And unless conditions are puton those harbor improvements at
Humboldt Bay, what you couldeasily see at Humboldt Bay is.
(33:16):
It would become the miningharbor or the base for mining on
the Gorda Ridge, which is notthat far offshore, bringing the
minerals into Humboldt Bay as aslurry, which is a very toxic
slurry.
And don't call me at three inthe morning if a barge full of
that slurry creates athree-dimensional spill in or
(33:38):
around California's.
Some of California's mostimportant fisheries operate out
of Humboldt Bay.
Don't call me, because there'sno technology to clean up a
three-dimensional spill.
None, not a nothing.
It was part of the problem withDeepwater Horizon is it became
a three-dimensional plume.
So as mining comes to ourstate's coast soon, we're
(34:03):
totally unprepared.
We could put conditions on theuse of Humboldt Bay and restrict
it to renewable technology, butwe haven't, we aren't and we
may not succeed at that, becausea lot of the companies that are
pursuing floating offshore windare in fact oil companies and
(34:24):
as the floating offshore windand other wind energy
technologies are beingsuppressed, the money's drying
up to do renewables.
So I think we're having aconstraining effect on
renewables.
A constraining effect onrenewables.
At the same time we're seeing apush for the destructive
(34:47):
extractive technologies thatignore the rights of nature,
that ignore ethics, ignoreindigenous belief systems about
the source of life on thisplanet and ignore the fact that
we're going to destroy thingsthat took millions of years to
create and evolve, without everunderstanding how they work.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Very well said, Richard.
Speaker 4 (35:04):
It is insane.
Really, the only word thatreally 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 thatlisteners and viewers who may
not understand them that well,might know a little bit more
about how they got started, butthings like the ISA, the
International Seabed Authority,as well as the law of the sea
(35:32):
and then how US territories workwork.
Speaker 4 (35:45):
The largest wilderness on the planet is in
the ocean.
About 95% of the habitablespace on earth is in the ocean.
Because of thethree-dimensionality of the
ocean, we think we're living inthis little thin layer that you
you know like we're likemicrobial critters on the
surface of the planet.
But actually if you go and lookat the ocean, about 95% of
(36:08):
habitable space on Earth is inthe ocean.
So the ability to govern that,govern the parts of the ocean
that are more than most nationshave, an exclusive economic zone
, it's called where you control.
In the US it's 200 medicalmiles out from the coast.
(36:29):
Beyond that is internationalwaters 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 anentity called the International
Seabed Authority, a governancemechanism that everybody
(36:50):
respects, and our appointee tothat under the last
administration was able toobserve lobby work with other
members.
But now we have a seat at thetable 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
(37:11):
it and the problem there is.
I think we're going to run intotrouble because other nations
see us acting as outlaws, othernations will say, well, if the
US is going to be the outlawunder the law of the sea, then
we will too.
This stands, I think, a goodchance of basically tearing up
(37:35):
the governance mechanism whichhas already lent leases for
exploration.
Like I say, the extent of theClaring-Clipperton Fracture Zone
is wider than the US continent.
There are leases to manynations there that have been
restricted to exploration andscience, which makes sense to
(37:57):
understand how you mightmitigate impact and in the
course of that, we now have theUS being the outlaw all of a
sudden.
They used to have a saying inthe old West bandits would come
into town.
Tree the town oh, no,disrespect tree, but the bottom
(38:18):
line, tree the town means youneed a new sheriff and I would
suggest, given that veryexcellent comments were made by
our Congressman, jared Huffman,who is the ranking minority on
the House Natural ResourcesCommittee, before a recent
hearing on subsea mining, inwhich it became clear that if he
(38:39):
had been the chair of the HouseNatural Resources Committee,
we'd be in a lot better shape,because he raised the issues
that need to be raised about thescience missing science, about
the uniqueness of theseecosystems and our inability to
mitigate the damage we're goingto do to those ecosystems.
(39:00):
And of course, his districtincludes the Gorda Ridge.
In other words, the southernend of the Gorda Ridge is off of
his congressional district.
So we're watching with greatinterest the outcome of the next
House races.
That could put him in a positionof being the chair of the
(39:20):
committee.
That would have something tosay.
But meanwhile the Republicanmajority, as we just saw, with
erasing large parts of therenewable incentives and tax
breaks out of the previousadministration's plan to
transition away from hydrocarbonfuels, the Republicans are
(39:42):
living in abject fear ofPresident 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 upa primary opponent and take
their seat.
And one thing Congress peoplelike more than almost anything
(40:02):
is to keep their seat, and soit'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 votemargin in the reconciliation
vote.
In the middle of the night washe threatened enough people on
the Republican side with variousbad things that could happen to
them, including a well-fundedopponent in a primary?
And none of it's based onscience.
(40:31):
It's all based on politicalpressure.
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 hiscronies and allies.
You know that helped him getelected.
Money for miners, we could callit.
And it may not even make moneyfor miners.
I mean, it's very, veryexpensive, as you can imagine,
(41:01):
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 downthere.
Every once in a while a lot ofnews is made as tourists try to
go visit the Titanic wreck orsomething and their submersible
vehicle implodes so quickly thatthey don't even know what
(41:29):
happened.
I mean, they think it's apretty humane way to die.
But then there's life formsthat have evolved to sustain
that pressure, find food andlive there.
It's not impossible to livethere, it's just we can't live
there.
So we send machines which wehave to operate with artificial
(41:50):
intelligence from a greatdistance up above, and nobody's
going to be able to monitor thisactivity.
I think one of the reasonsindustry is so attracted to the
deep sea bed is you can't keepan eye on them.
I mean, it's bad enough thatthey've done the horrendous
house cleaning that they've doneat EPA, but not only will there
(42:14):
be nobody minding the store,but the store is literally light
years away in terms of beingable to keep an eye on what's
going on down there.
And yet some of the mostfragile ecological processes on
the planet are going on downthere.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
I'm glad you brought this up.
The governance of thesecompanies in such a remote
location it's hard enough tomanage, say, fishing in our
oceans, in our deep seas.
Speaker 4 (42:44):
Exactly.
We have a very fragileecosystem with no governance
mechanism, the governancemechanism that we are creating
and evolving.
The International SeabedAuthority is saying, whoa, put
on the brakes.
We're not ready to go there yetbecause of the damage we could
do to this collective commonheritage of humankind.
(43:06):
And then along comes America.
First philosophy no science.
Whatever the president happensto say on any given day is
supposed to be the truth, and hejust throws things out there
and says, oh, we'll go mine it,it'll be fine, you know.
And so they promote the myththat it's somehow less harmful
(43:29):
than terrestrial mining, thatrecycling of metals won't work,
when I mean, there have beenvery advanced metals recycling
programs going on in the EU for30, 40 years, where metals are
collected and reused.
We don't do that here becausewe couldn't make as much money.
Corporate profits don't rely onrecycling.
(43:53):
They rely on new raw materialsbeing converted into products.
We're supposed to ignore thefact that recycling could
probably answer a lot of theneeds that we have for some of
these metals if we had gottenserious 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 lithiumcomes from.
It comes from layers of uhminerals out in nevada or in
(44:39):
certain southern california lakebeds.
It's not an ocean derivedmaterial, but, uh, you know, the
battery technology is movingaway from ocean source materials
as we speak, and so the problemthat I see is that, because
(44:59):
we've taken the scientists andmade them walk the plank, if you
will, we don't have thescientists who help us look over
the horizon at the future oftechnology.
In other words, the frontiersof science are no longer in view
because the people who had thetraining, the degrees, the
(45:23):
technology for example, theNational Marine Sanctuary System
has been quietly monitoringshoreline segments all along the
California coast withinsanctuaries.
We've got four grand nationalmarine sanctuaries.
Shoreline segments have beenmonitored, and to track the
(45:45):
migration or evolution of thethings 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 orretire the people who were doing
it, so we don't have a look atwhat's coming anymore by the
(46:09):
scientists who were trained totell us what's coming, whether
it's a hurricane, a tsunami oran ecological change.
We haven't got that tool and wemight be able to recreate it in
my grandchildren's lifetime.
We aren't going to recreate itquickly because they selectively
(46:30):
got rid of Doge and the WhiteHouse selectively got rid of
Doge and the White Houseselectively got rid of the
people that could have helped usunderstand how human beings
might survive in a changingworld, because we won't see the
change coming, but the changewill come without us seeing it
coming, and that's a lot moredangerous.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
In some of these last few minutes I wanted to bring
Scott on and address yourquestions.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
Yeah, I was just asking, Richard.
I was saying this will all beBiden's fault when it comes
apart.
About five slides back you hada 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 thatit's obviously going to use to
go across the bottom.
Isn't that probably a number ofthe nodule, the precious
nodules that they want tocollect?
The reason I'm bringing that upis 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 tosaunter across the deep ocean
(47:36):
bottom picking up noduleswithout any disruption.
And when you look at the teethon 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 nodulesabout six inches at least of the
seafloor.
Sediment pumps it into the shipup on the surface, and that
ship on the surface then has abig circular centrifugal force
(48:12):
to separate the nodules out fromthe silt and then the silt is
dumped over the side of the shipand 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 nowclaims that they have an
artificial intelligence pluckernow claims that they have an
(48:37):
artificial intelligence plucker.
I grew up harvesting walnutsfrom my earliest childhood, so
there are different ways, butthe pluckers grabs, using
artificial intelligence,individual nodules, still
getting some silt, keeping inmind that each nodule has life
in it anyway, and then those goto the surface and are cleaned
up and there's a smaller siltplume.
(48:58):
That's the theory.
Now, artificial intelligenceworking on the seabed thousands
of feet down, if it encountersgeographic anomalies in the sea,
if the seabed is not perfectlyflat, it comes to a hill or a
canyon, it's not going to work.
In other words, that is anunproven technology that is
(49:21):
being used to sort of cover upone of the many concerns about
subsea mining by claiming we'lljust pick them one at a time, in
fact those are in thepromotional videos, if you go,
they have animations on it atImpossible Metals, I think it's
also the metals company andother companies that are lining
(49:42):
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 afocus group, they develop a
messaging oh, this is whatpeople are worried about tilt
plumes and so they try to comeup with a reassuring answer.
That may be impossible Maybethat's why they got the name.
(50:11):
It may be impossible to do, butit sounds good.
And even if that works, thesheer volume of material you
have to excavate from the seabedis huge, and so that explains
why.
I mean, there's a wholeconstellation of corporations
and manufacturers that won'ttouch seabed metals, of
corporations and manufacturersthat won't touch seabed metals.
(50:33):
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 newtobacco 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 theplumes are going to settle.
Speaker 4 (50:55):
They can settle a very long ways away, and the
scale at which the extractionwould be taking place, you know,
is just phenomenally huge.
And so my opinion is that weneed to be precautionary about
(51:17):
anything this big affecting anyplace this sensitive, and this
is almost a bigger issue thanthe fate of the rainforest, in a
way, in terms of oxygen, theability of the ocean to absorb
carbon from the atmosphere andthat's why we began work about a
(51:39):
year ago on a film whichexplains all of this, has filmed
footage of most of the thingswe've talked about, and in the
course of doing that film, Ithought well, this is, at the
time, kind of a little ironic ina way, because people had never
(52:00):
heard of Seabed Mining and itwasn't something people cared
about.
And now, every time thePresident of the United States
walks in front of a microphone,he's indirectly promoting our
film, which may explain why wewon the uh science award in the
international ocean filmfestival.
Uh, I mean, the film is made,it's free, you can watch it
online at the url, the deepmovieorg.
(52:22):
But you know, the bottom lineis suddenly everybody wants to
know about something that wejust made a film about, which is
kind of I don't know what doyou call it.
It's timely.
My philosophy includesserendipity yeah, that's true as
(52:43):
something that can happen, andso, in this case, it is
serendipitous that we made afilm that people now want to see
us that we made a film thatpeople now want to see.
Speaker 2 (52:54):
There were a couple of other things that we've heard
too, trying to show that thisis less invasive, less harmful,
and what you said earlier abouthow the oceans cover most of the
planet and the life within themis three-dimensional.
The comparisons aren't quitethe same.
They're trying to say this isjust a small percentage of this
vast ocean and yet it's likebulldozing down the entire
(53:18):
Amazon forest on land oxygenthat 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 theboulders in Camp 4 and climbing
El Cap.
You know, is this a 2,000-footwall or is this a 30-foot
boulder?
And this issue, in terms of theglobal environment and the
context, is the 2,000-foot walland the people who are fighting
(53:58):
it on various Pacific islands aswe speak.
They don't have the money to goto Washington and lobby
Congress or any respectwhatsoever from a White House
that thinks this is going to bewonderful.
He doesn't care.
And so America Samoa right nowis in the crosshairs.
(54:19):
I suggest that other islandnations 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.
I know that here on theSonoma-Mendocino-Humboldt coast,
we had something happened herealmost 50 years ago now, where a
lot of people who lived heregot concerned enough to take
care of this coast and, in thecourse of taking care of this
(54:49):
coast, created a place that isso well protected with national
marine sanctuaries, with theUNESCO International Biosphere
Reserve, more recently withstate marine protected areas,
that all over the world peopleinterested in coastal planning
come here to study what we'vedone.
You know our national marinesanctuaries are, you know
(55:12):
various layers of protection, sothat they can go home to
Indonesia or wherever andemulate what we've done here.
I don't think we're going tojust stop.
I see a next generation comingand I just think that this coast
(55:33):
what I call the Mennonoma Coastwill not only continue to be a
global tourism destinationbecause of the natural beauty,
but will continue to be a modelfor coastal planning,
intelligent coastal planning oninto the future, well beyond
when.
I'm not here to worry about it,and I just want to thank the
(55:55):
literally millions of people whocreated these sanctuaries and
are going to, I think, standagainst things like order ridge
mining and encourage you to lookfurther offshore you can't see
the deep ocean, but it isincredibly 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, wasshowing in our own communities
and maybe some up and down thecoast, but defend the deep the
movie you were just talkingabout, as well as a couple of
clips from our episodes coveringboth deep sea mining and
(56:37):
offshore drilling.
I think that that's somethingthat we should talk about, Scott
and Treat, and maybe even haveyou up here, richard, to
participate.
But it could be held here inthe Sea Ranch at Del Mar Hall or
atala Arts Center or up atPoint Arena Theater.
But I think it's important toraise more awareness here
locally too.
Speaker 4 (56:59):
Happy to do that.
I'm not that far away, the tripis beautiful and never let it
be said that a small, dedicatedgroup of people cannot change
the course of global events.
I think Margaret Mead said thatfirst.
I'm paraphrasing, but amovement that started here to
take care of this coast is stillalive and I'm always happy to
(57:21):
show up.
We can provide a full-screenbroadcast quality print of the
film.
You can show it in a park on anisland in the Pacific.
It's a world we live in, asdigital media, of course, is
ubiquitous.
It can be anywhere in the worldinstantly.
Speaker 2 (57:38):
Thank you, richard Charter, and thank you Scott and
Tring Mercer for helping us alldiscuss these issues and topics
out of many issues that arefacing us, and what is being
done and what we can do aboutthem.
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 criticalissues and positive actions for
our planet.
Resilient Earth is produced byPlanet Centric Media, a 501c3
non-profit, and Seastorm StudiosInc, located on the rugged
(58:27):
North Sonoma Coast of NorthernCalifornia.
I'm Leanne Lindsay Coast ofNorthern California.
I'm Leanne Lindsay producer andhost, along with co-hosts and
co-producers Scott and TreeMercer of Mendenoma, whale and
Seal Study, located on the SouthMendocino and North Sonoma
Coasts.
The music for this podcast isby Eric Alleman, an
(58:52):
international composer, pianistand writer living in the Sea
Ranch.
Discover more of his music,animations, ballet, stage and
film work at ericalemancom.
You can find Resilient Earth onSpotify, apple and Amazon
(59:12):
Podcasts, iheartradio, youtube,soundcloud and wherever you find
your podcasts.
Please support us bysubscribing or donating to our
cause.
Welcome to the Resilient Earth Podcast, where
we talk with speakers from theUnited States and around the
world about the critical issuesfacing our planet and the
positive actions people aretaking, from the tiniest of
actions to the grandest ofgestures, so that we can
continue to thrive and survivefor generations to come.
(00:32):
I'm Leanne Lindsay, producerand host, along with co-hosts
and co-producers Scott and TreeMercer of Mindenoma, whale and
Seal Study, located on the SouthMendocino and North Sonoma
coasts.
The music for this podcast isby Eric Alleman, an
(00:55):
international composer, pianistand writer living in the Sea
Ranch.
Discover more of his music,animations, ballet, stage and
film work at ericalamancom.
You can find Resilient Earth onSpotify, apple and Amazon
(01:18):
Podcasts, iheart Radio, youtube,soundcloud and wherever you
find your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
The ocean floor is full of deposits of critical
minerals.
Some are in the crust ofunderwater mountains or around
hydrothermal vents, and some theones we'll be focusing on
tonight take the form ofpotato-shaped nodules, little
lumpy spheres formed overmillions of years.
Those nodules now line someparts of the deep ocean floor
and contain valuable metals likenickel and cobalt, which can be
(01:58):
used for things like batteriesfor electric cars.
So obviously people are veryinterested in getting their
hands on them, and the head ofone company leading the charge,
the Metals Company, has gone onoutlets like 60 Minutes to argue
that those nodules could end upsaving the planet.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
I love the fact that they're the way we're gonna get
away from fossil fuels.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
I love the fact that in these are all the metals we
need to go and build thosebatteries.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
That man is named Gerard Barron and he's an actual
person and not, as you may havethought, chatgpt's answer to
make Sean Penn the most SeanPenn.
He's positioned himself at theforefront of this industry and
reportedly once hired amarketing firm to portray him as
an Australian, elon Musk.
Barron stresses that he's thereal deal.
His company says it's securedaccess to enough metal to power
(02:45):
280 million electric vehiclesequivalent to the entire fleet
of cars in the US and he'sprojecting they could start
commercially exploiting the deepsea as early as 2026.
But the place he's planning todo that is the CCZ, even though
it's one of the few remainingenvironments on Earth that is
close to pristine, andextracting those nodules could
(03:06):
do irreparable damage.
So before we stand back andwatch this guy's company throw
open the door tocommercial-scale plunder, it
might be worth looking at whatexactly he's proposing to do and
whether it's actually worthdoing at all.
So tonight let's talk aboutdeep-sea mining, and to hear
Barron tell it, mining thesenodules is really just a simple
matter of scooping them off thefloor.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Last week tonight with John Oliver, leads us into
our show today.
We are here to talk about deepsea mining and the issues
surrounding it from both sidesof the fence and how there are
those who feel that this is asolution for the climate crisis
we're in and on the other side,it's those who feel that this is
(03:48):
an irreversible damage thatcould happen.
And you are one of the toppeople to speak with, especially
because of that wonderful filmyou at the Ocean Foundation
created last year with Dr SylviaEarle and others of the Ocean
Foundation to talk about thedeep sea, defend the deep.
(04:09):
So thank you, richard, forcoming on today.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Well, let's begin with the three kinds of subsea
mining.
It's not all one thing.
There are hydrothermal vents orsubsea, basically hot springs
under the ocean, and those havearound them generally a copper,
lead and zinc coating aroundwhere the hot water came out of
(04:35):
the seafloor in the past or isstill coming out of the seafloor
today.
And around those vents growvery unique biological
communities that do not dependon sunlight for energy.
Think about that for a minute.
They're not a chlorophyll-basedlife form.
They are living off of sulfidesand heat and they are very
(04:57):
unusual.
Some of them are so unusual wedon't quite understand how they
work yet.
So unusual, we don't quiteunderstand how they work yet,
but they are the key to a newtype of transformation of energy
from the core of the earth,basically geothermal energy,
heat from the magma at thecenter of the earth into life,
(05:19):
and we've never seen thatanywhere else.
And we've never seen thatanywhere else.
We don't know quite what itmeans, but it could have a key
to energy transformation thatcould someday be used by humans.
It's a very unique system.
Well, that's one kind, you know.
Let's just start withhydroothermal vent communities.
(05:42):
There is a second type of subseamining that has to do with what
are called crusts, in otherwords along the seafloor or on
spires, any vertical feature inthe ocean.
The ocean has a uniquecapability of almost plating
metals onto those surfaces.
(06:02):
So anywhere you have a verticalspire for example Davidson
Seamount, off of Monterey Bay,big Sur or down around the
Channel Islands there's any kindof vertical surface.
You want to look at thatbecause those will also become
targets for subsea mining andthey have again their own unique
(06:23):
life forms.
But you have to basicallydestroy the substrate.
You have to take away thispiece of the ocean, seabed or
the geologic structure to grindit up to get the metals.
And the third type of subseamining which I think we're going
to focus on today, if Iunderstood your interest
(06:44):
correctly, are polymetallicsulfide nodules, these
potato-sized rocks, stones thatare spread across the seafloor
for sometimes hundreds of miles.
Basically, in theClarion-Clipperton zone they
extend from off of Hawaii almostall the way to Mexico.
And although they are vastlyspread across the seafloor, each
(07:11):
of these stones is a life formin itself.
In other words, somewherebetween 50 and 70 percent of the
life in the deep ocean dependson these nodules, and the
nodules themselves have in thema biological system, a microbial
system, and so they are notjust rocks or, as some of the
(07:36):
proponents of subsea mining arefond of holding them up in a
hearing and saying it's abattery 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 threetypes of mining, and all of them
are being pursued, some of themmore than others, depending on
the type of metals that theindustry expects to extract,
(08:10):
expects to extract, but theextraction of them poses threats
to biological systems that aremillions of years old.
I mean literally, it tookmillions 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 plowingthe seafloor for minerals
happened 26 years ago, and itlooks exactly like it did the
(08:34):
day we left.
So if it took millions of yearsto evolve these life forms in
the sea, some of which wehaven't discovered yet, about
half of which we haven't namedyet, then we know that for them
to come back, first of all theymay come back in a different
form, and it may take millionsof years.
(08:56):
This is beyond human scale.
In other words, this is not amatter of something that we can
fix or mitigate or repair.
After we do it, we destroy itand it's one and gone.
And we're talking about very,very large areas, particularly
for the nodules extraction.
(09:18):
Now nobody's commerciallymining these yet.
There have been explorationpermits granted under what is
called the International SeabedAuthority, which was created
under the rubric of the Law ofthe Sea.
There's about 170 members ofthe International Seabed
Authority and their basicprinciple believing that you
(09:40):
have to have sound science thatcan show you, that prove
basically conclusively that thisextraction can be done without
harming the larger oceanecosystem.
And international seabedauthority has not reached that
conclusion yet and there areabout two dozen nations that are
out prominently in favor of amoratorium on seabed mining.
(10:06):
For that reason, because of theamount of danger we pose as
extractive entities humans as atop predator, you might say, or
everything in the deep ocean.
We can't function thereourselves because incredible
pressure by the weight of thewater above us.
So everything would be done byremote extractive machines which
(10:30):
we would be controlling fromthe sea surface on a ship.
So nobody can really monitorwhat we're doing.
We're just working miles underour feet with machines that are,
you know, are the size of asmall Safeway.
And that is why I think we'reseeing the debate, because this
(10:54):
is key to the whole oceanecosystem, and the ocean
currently absorbs about 25% ofthe carbon emissions on the
planet.
Humans create carbon emissionswith their industrial activities
.
The ocean is a little toosuccessful at absorbing that
carbon, to the degree that itabsorbs it 25% of what we
(11:18):
generate, and so we can say,well, we're way over here, on
the coast of California or thecoast of Hawaii or the coast of
whatever country.
But the bottom line is, thisaffects the entire ocean
ecosystem and the atmosphere,the oxygen we breathe, and so
it's not surprising that there'sa lot of interest in this.
(11:39):
It's not surprising that thecompanies themselves that want
to do it see ready profits.
They make money taking thingsfrom nature, not putting
anything back, and extractiveindustries like this,
customarily, whether they'retobacco industry or whoever it
is, they always say oh, this isgreen, we call it greenwashing
(12:01):
today.
We call it greenwashing today.
Now they say, well, we have tohave these minerals in order to
convert, particularly ourtransportation sector, from
being hydrocarbon dependentinstead convert it to becoming
electricity dependent, and weneed to get the electricity from
floating offshore wind is theclaim, and build the turbines
(12:23):
and the substations andeverything associated with
floating offshore wind requiresminerals, and particularly the
batteries in the cars, in theelectric cars.
However, actually the automotiveindustry that builds electric
cars has been moving away fromthe types of minerals that would
(12:43):
be gathered by subsea mininginto more readily available
terrestrial, much cheaper, fromterrestrial 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'reseeing the current
administration killingincentives for that conversion
(13:08):
to electrically-basedtransportation.
Anyway, you know anything to dowith energy conservation,
anything to do with non-fossilfuel energy?
The money is being taken awayby this administration, either
by the White House or in theHouse of Representatives.
We're kind of right now perched, if you will, on the razor's
(13:31):
edge of a decision thatultimately is going to determine
the fate of our oceans and lifeitself on Earth.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Life itself on Earth.
That is the one thing that Ikeep coming back to myself and I
can see conservationists,environmentalists, who are
thinking of this in the terms ofthis will help our climate,
help us reverse some of thosethings.
But it's a double-edged swordand there's such a high risk
(14:04):
because we don't reallyunderstand what the possibly
everlasting impacts, dangerousand destructive impacts, that
kind of activity would have.
And once they open that door toa lot of companies that have
lined up out there, likeImpossible Metals out of San
Jose, the metals company out ofVancouver with the Australian
(14:25):
CEO, and the potential fordestruction is high and it's
hard to not see that.
But people are having a hardtime grappling with what they're
hearing.
Like this is a green solutionand yet not considering the
(14:46):
impacts that could be foreverdestructive.
And these rocks, thesepolymetallic nodules, they take
what a million or more years todevelop.
Richard.
Speaker 4 (14:59):
The interesting thing that I've always believed about
working on environmental issuesis an old saying that says we
will only protect what weunderstand, and in this case
because the public.
Generally I trust the public,because people are not as
(15:22):
ignorant as the currentadministration thinks.
They can reason things out andobviously there's a great
connectivity between humanbeings and the ocean.
This is not new.
This goes back culturally tensof thousands of years.
People have been connected tothe ocean and here on the West
Coast this is not our firstrodeo here on the West Coast.
(15:49):
This is not our first rodeo.
We have had in the past aproposal by an interior
secretary named James Watt whowanted to mine along the coast
of Northern California,basically off of Humboldt, del
Norte County and the coast ofOregon on up to about Goose Bay
where the hydrothermal ventminerals.
James Watt had actually a hardminerals leasing plan.
(16:09):
He was planning to hold a leasesale on what's called the Gorda
Ridge and the minerals wouldhave then been brought into
probably Humboldt Bay or CoosBay as a slurry and ground up
and take it away.
It was copper, lead and zinc,which in this was about 1982.
(16:31):
Obviously the economics ofcopper, lead and zinc in 1982
were not attractive to doing themining here off the California
coast.
But we've seen this before.
We've had pressure here.
Hilo, hawaii.
There's a seam out off of Hilocalled Loihi, a new Hawaiian
(16:51):
island in the forming, and thathas a cobalt-rich manganese
crust on it, different than thehydrothermal vents, but that
also has a lot of interestinglife.
Hydrothermal vents, but thatalso has a lot of interesting
life.
And that lease sale wassomething that James Watt, when
he was Secretary of Interior,also proposed and it was stopped
(17:12):
by local concerns, just likeGorda Ridge was stopped here.
This process even though youknow the Trump administration is
trying to circumvent globallaws and ethics, if you will
this process is responsive topublic concern and I think we're
(17:33):
seeing that again.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
And you just mentioned ethics too, and there
was that paper that I sent youand I wanted to get your
thoughts on it, entitled EthicalOpportunities in deep sea
collection of polymetallicnodules from the clarion
clipperton zone, and it'swritten by steven katona, whom
scott and tree know, or scottyou know, and dana palikas and
(17:58):
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 ofnature, if you like surviving as
a living, breathing human beingand studying nature, you learn
that there are intrinsic rights.
In other words, ecosystems aresubject to what I call the
(18:22):
rights of nature.
Ecosystems are subject to whatI call the rights of nature.
Natural systems, particularlyeverything, including us, has
evolved over millions of years,but some particular kinds of
what we would call extractiveminerals if we were miners, are
much more than that.
They're actually a substratefor life, and some of these
(18:44):
unique life forms have utilityto human beings.
One of the COVID tests, forexample, that we have used to
get through the pandemic unlessyou're among those who don't
believe there was a pandemic oris still a pandemic one of the
substances actually came fromthe deep sea.
That doesn't mean we go thereand extract a whole bunch of
(19:06):
that.
We go there and we learn thegenetic template of it and then
we make it in the laboratory.
There are indications stillpreliminary studies that
indicate that.
I mean if I were president ofthe United States, the first
thing I would work on, justbecause so many of my friends
have succumbed to cancer, is acure for cancer.
(19:28):
If we do come up with a curefor cancer, the odds are pretty
good it's going to come from thedeep sea Again, not because we
go and harvest a whole bunch ofsomething, but because we learn
how this other type of life formsurvives under these incredible
hostile to us but friendly toit conditions, and in the
(19:53):
process we might learn somethingthat saves humanity from some
of the worst things that happento 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 ofresearch that are now being
pursued.
Hopefully, some of them willsurvive the budget assaults that
have gone on on science, andthe indications of those
pathways of research are thatthey would take us to a cure for
cancer.
(20:25):
There are indications that theconversion of energy from one
form to another, in other words,heat and sulfides into a life
form instead of solar energyfrom the sun, may be a key to
how we power our city someday.
Science doesn't stop and wecan't stop it, even if the guy
(20:47):
in the White House thinks we can.
You can't just outlaw education, attack universities, cut off
the funding for the top NOAAscientists and other marine
scientists and just take awaytheir money and expect science
to stop.
Science doesn't stop and justtake away their money and expect
science to stop.
Science doesn't stop.
(21:08):
Climate impacts don't stop justbecause you outlaw the mention
of the word climate ingovernment websites.
Climate change will happenYears, if not decades, further
behind than we would have beenhad we not gone through these
attacks on science.
But you can't stop theevolutionary 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 theInternational Monetary Fund, one
of the top financial economistsin the world, who now founded a
company a few years back calledBlue Green Future, who's
helping island nations andtribes in the Amazon.
Native American tribes here inthe US value living nature as
(21:53):
opposed to extractive nature.
And the value of living naturehow much more valuable that can
be to us humans to continueliving on this earth.
Speaker 4 (22:05):
I tend to side on the side of life when I see
something thriving, probablybecause I grew up in an
agricultural setting and youtake very good care of whatever
you're in charge of plants oranimals or trees, or in my case
it was mostly walnut trees butbecause you know that that's how
you survive.
(22:26):
Your connectivity to nature isyour survival.
So healthy nature means healthyhumans.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Nurturing nature.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
Nurturing nature is nurturing humans.
And I would point out thatbecause 1,000 marine scientists
and policy experts from 70nations wrote a letter to the
United Nations saying we need tohold off on licensing of mining
operations in the seabed, theymight know something.
(22:56):
In other words, that's detached,objective, peer-reviewed
science, but it fits togetherwith some of the indigenous
beliefs, particularly in PacificIsland nation cultures that go
back forever, that believe thatall life originated in the deep
sea.
(23:16):
That's the cultural norm incertain places and that's why
the International SeabedAuthority calls this ecosystem
on the seabed, particularly notjust the nodules themselves but
the whole issue of what's on theseabed they call it the common
heritage of mankind, or I wouldcall it the common heritage of
(23:39):
humankind.
And because that is writteninto the actually the Law of the
Sea Treaty, which the US neversigned for all the wrong reasons
, but because that's writteninto the Law of the Sea, that is
the guiding principle of theInternational Seabed Authority
is protecting and sharing thecommon heritage of humankind.
(23:59):
And that's why they have notbeen willing to greenlight
destructive activities, becausewe 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 anarea of the Chlorian-Clipperton
zone that looked like they werecreated yesterday.
(24:21):
We can't go back and puttogether 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 arecoping with a kind of cumulative
pile of mistakes that were madeby 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 abjectpanic in the Gulf of Mexico
saying that the DeepwaterHorizon rig is on fire, people
are dead and which way is thespill going to go?
I hope I never get a call likethat on the Sonoma coast, but
(25:10):
it's possible.
In other words, we are capableas a species of creating
planetary scale messes and wedeal with them in the most
rudimentary, primitive way.
In other words, we could createmesses that are so big we can
never clean them up.
They cause damage that isliterally beyond any scale of
(25:33):
our ability to respond.
We clean up oil spills witheffectively using or trying to
use what are essentially diapers.
I've been to many or up oilspills with effectively using or
trying to use what areessentially diapers.
I've been to many or more oilspills than I care to remember
In the deep sea.
We have no mitigation technologyat all.
We're building machines to goget stuff and rip it out of the
seabed or suck it up from theseabed.
(25:54):
We don't have any mitigationdevices that nobody's even
thought about them.
You know the scale of thedestruction is such that you
couldn't go back and let's sortof plaster things back together.
Some of these companies' nameslike Impossible Metals you know
that's a really appropriate name.
(26:15):
It's literally an impossibleplace to get metals, both
economically and ethically.
But you need to be able tothink about how things are going
to be when we get done doingwhatever we're going to do,
because you go back to theseventh generation principle of
native people.
(26:35):
We're talking about far beyondseven generations of damage.
We're talking about millenniaof damage in the deep ocean and
that's why people like SylviaEarle and some of the top NOAA
scientists, who now are jobless,were raising red flags and the
whole dismantling of NOAA.
If you look at it carefully, itdidn't take the lower echelon of
(27:00):
interns and you know bad enoughthe loss of institutional
memory and years of monitoringand science.
It took the top people.
It took the top scientistsfirst.
This was the problem with ElonMusk and Doge.
Was it targeted?
The base of knowledge thatallows us to successfully, or
(27:23):
relatively successfully, managethe ocean?
And it came in and took the toptier and for that reason, all
that's left will be, yes, menand women who say it's okay to
do this.
In fact, one of them's sayingit right now about DC mining.
Why?
Because everybody else is gone.
The agency wasn't just gutted.
(27:44):
The agency was basically givena surgery that made it only say
yes to destructive activitiesand that is so disrespectful to
the individuals most of thewomen, actually who invented the
Coastal Zone Management Actitself in Congress, the NOAA
(28:06):
scenario for managing our oceans, which is a pretty big thing to
manage.
To take out the brains, if youwill, or the heart of that
science, it should be criminal.
I mean, literally people shouldbe 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 hadbeen gutted, that it has the
Coast Guard, it forecasts theweather.
Speaker 4 (28:34):
The same thing happened over at the Department
of Interior Doge, actuallyimplanted in the Interior
Department oil industrywell-known oil industry
lobbyists to make sure thatInterior falls straight and
narrow.
But what happened at NOAA wasnot just gutting NOAA, it was
more like a prefrontal lobotomythat was taking out the top
(28:57):
scientists so that bad thingscould be brought before noah.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
And then, uh, when that happened, noah would say
yes, who's left is the yes manyeah, you mentioned too that the
scientists and others were toldat noah that if they didn't
approve of these leases theywould be let go, you know.
So either they walk now or theywill be let go if they did not
(29:25):
do these.
Speaker 4 (29:26):
Yes, it has been brought to my attention that
people who had decades ofhistory at NOAA and the agency
were told either you approveoffshore drilling within
National Marine Sanctuaries oryou leave, and they fortunately
had the ethical integrity to saygoodbye, in spite of the fact
(29:50):
they devoted their entire lifeto this piece of ocean, to these
marine sanctuaries.
You cannot rebuild that kind ofthe sea.
We can't influence it.
(30:21):
We're observers essentially inJamaica when it meets.
But the Trump administrationfigured out a workaround they
think we believe it's illegal inwhich the seabed around
American Samoa, in the exclusiveeconomic zone around American
Samoa, can be leased forminerals extraction.
(30:45):
Now American Samoa has objectedto this.
They support a moratorium onseabed mining, but the Trump
administration said forget it,get out of the way.
So the Trump administration isplanning to use something called
the Deep Sea Hard MineralResources Act, another law that
(31:06):
only applies to the US, thatthey claim allows NOAA to review
applications, issue explorationpermits and approve commercial
recovery permits for US entitiesoperating in international
waters.
Now, a plain reading of thatlaw doesn't give us that right.
(31:28):
We've never been cowboys likethis in the global community
before, but that lease salecould happen very soon I mean
literally within weeks, and it'sbeing promoted by a gentleman
named Eric Noble who is theprincipal deputy assistant
(31:48):
secretary of commerce for Oceansand Atmosphere.
This is what's left of NOAA.
I said would be a yes man, andhe is, and so he's ignoring the
international seabed authority.
He's claiming that he's goingto expedite permitting and
approvals for mining aroundamerican samoa, in spite of just
(32:10):
about everybody in theimmediate vicinity of the
pacific ocean objecting.
Again, you've taken away noah'sbrain and you are left with a
button that you push that onlysays yes.
It's like a fortune tellingmachine that can only say yes,
and so we're seeing thathappening literally.
Uh, I'd say within the next fewweeks we will see a lease sale
(32:35):
and if that's going to happen,then I would say right behind it
will be a revisitation by thesame agency of things like the
Gorda Ridge right here off ofNorthern California.
I worry about Humboldt BayHarbor, which is being improved
ostensibly to pave the way forfloating offshore wind.
(32:56):
So you need harbor improvementsfor that.
Ostensibly to pave the way forfloating offshore wind.
So you need harbor improvementsfor that.
And unless conditions are puton those harbor improvements at
Humboldt Bay, what you couldeasily see at Humboldt Bay is.
(33:16):
It would become the miningharbor or the base for mining on
the Gorda Ridge, which is notthat far offshore, bringing the
minerals into Humboldt Bay as aslurry, which is a very toxic
slurry.
And don't call me at three inthe morning if a barge full of
that slurry creates athree-dimensional spill in or
(33:38):
around California's.
Some of California's mostimportant fisheries operate out
of Humboldt Bay.
Don't call me, because there'sno technology to clean up a
three-dimensional spill.
None, not a nothing.
It was part of the problem withDeepwater Horizon is it became
a three-dimensional plume.
So as mining comes to ourstate's coast soon, we're
(34:03):
totally unprepared.
We could put conditions on theuse of Humboldt Bay and restrict
it to renewable technology, butwe haven't, we aren't and we
may not succeed at that, becausea lot of the companies that are
pursuing floating offshore windare in fact oil companies and
(34:24):
as the floating offshore windand other wind energy
technologies are beingsuppressed, the money's drying
up to do renewables.
So I think we're having aconstraining effect on
renewables.
A constraining effect onrenewables.
At the same time we're seeing apush for the destructive
(34:47):
extractive technologies thatignore the rights of nature,
that ignore ethics, ignoreindigenous belief systems about
the source of life on thisplanet and ignore the fact that
we're going to destroy thingsthat took millions of years to
create and evolve, without everunderstanding how they work.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Very well said, Richard.
Speaker 4 (35:04):
It is insane.
Really, the only word thatreally 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 thatlisteners and viewers who may
not understand them that well,might know a little bit more
about how they got started, butthings like the ISA, the
International Seabed Authority,as well as the law of the sea
(35:32):
and then how US territories workwork.
Speaker 4 (35:45):
The largest wilderness on the planet is in
the ocean.
About 95% of the habitablespace on earth is in the ocean.
Because of thethree-dimensionality of the
ocean, we think we're living inthis little thin layer that you
you know like we're likemicrobial critters on the
surface of the planet.
But actually if you go and lookat the ocean, about 95% of
(36:08):
habitable space on Earth is inthe ocean.
So the ability to govern that,govern the parts of the ocean
that are more than most nationshave, an exclusive economic zone
, it's called where you control.
In the US it's 200 medicalmiles out from the coast.
(36:29):
Beyond that is internationalwaters 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 anentity called the International
Seabed Authority, a governancemechanism that everybody
(36:50):
respects, and our appointee tothat under the last
administration was able toobserve lobby work with other
members.
But now we have a seat at thetable 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
(37:11):
it and the problem there is.
I think we're going to run intotrouble because other nations
see us acting as outlaws, othernations will say, well, if the
US is going to be the outlawunder the law of the sea, then
we will too.
This stands, I think, a goodchance of basically tearing up
(37:35):
the governance mechanism whichhas already lent leases for
exploration.
Like I say, the extent of theClaring-Clipperton Fracture Zone
is wider than the US continent.
There are leases to manynations there that have been
restricted to exploration andscience, which makes sense to
(37:57):
understand how you mightmitigate impact and in the
course of that, we now have theUS being the outlaw all of a
sudden.
They used to have a saying inthe old West bandits would come
into town.
Tree the town oh, no,disrespect tree, but the bottom
(38:18):
line, tree the town means youneed a new sheriff and I would
suggest, given that veryexcellent comments were made by
our Congressman, jared Huffman,who is the ranking minority on
the House Natural ResourcesCommittee, before a recent
hearing on subsea mining, inwhich it became clear that if he
(38:39):
had been the chair of the HouseNatural Resources Committee,
we'd be in a lot better shape,because he raised the issues
that need to be raised about thescience missing science, about
the uniqueness of theseecosystems and our inability to
mitigate the damage we're goingto do to those ecosystems.
(39:00):
And of course, his districtincludes the Gorda Ridge.
In other words, the southernend of the Gorda Ridge is off of
his congressional district.
So we're watching with greatinterest the outcome of the next
House races.
That could put him in a positionof being the chair of the
(39:20):
committee.
That would have something tosay.
But meanwhile the Republicanmajority, as we just saw, with
erasing large parts of therenewable incentives and tax
breaks out of the previousadministration's plan to
transition away from hydrocarbonfuels, the Republicans are
(39:42):
living in abject fear ofPresident 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 upa primary opponent and take
their seat.
And one thing Congress peoplelike more than almost anything
(40:02):
is to keep their seat, and soit'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 votemargin in the reconciliation
vote.
In the middle of the night washe threatened enough people on
the Republican side with variousbad things that could happen to
them, including a well-fundedopponent in a primary?
And none of it's based onscience.
(40:31):
It's all based on politicalpressure.
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 hiscronies and allies.
You know that helped him getelected.
Money for miners, we could callit.
And it may not even make moneyfor miners.
I mean, it's very, veryexpensive, as you can imagine,
(41:01):
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 downthere.
Every once in a while a lot ofnews is made as tourists try to
go visit the Titanic wreck orsomething and their submersible
vehicle implodes so quickly thatthey don't even know what
(41:29):
happened.
I mean, they think it's apretty humane way to die.
But then there's life formsthat have evolved to sustain
that pressure, find food andlive there.
It's not impossible to livethere, it's just we can't live
there.
So we send machines which wehave to operate with artificial
(41:50):
intelligence from a greatdistance up above, and nobody's
going to be able to monitor thisactivity.
I think one of the reasonsindustry is so attracted to the
deep sea bed is you can't keepan eye on them.
I mean, it's bad enough thatthey've done the horrendous
house cleaning that they've doneat EPA, but not only will there
(42:14):
be nobody minding the store,but the store is literally light
years away in terms of beingable to keep an eye on what's
going on down there.
And yet some of the mostfragile ecological processes on
the planet are going on downthere.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
I'm glad you brought this up.
The governance of thesecompanies in such a remote
location it's hard enough tomanage, say, fishing in our
oceans, in our deep seas.
Speaker 4 (42:44):
Exactly.
We have a very fragileecosystem with no governance
mechanism, the governancemechanism that we are creating
and evolving.
The International SeabedAuthority is saying, whoa, put
on the brakes.
We're not ready to go there yetbecause of the damage we could
do to this collective commonheritage of humankind.
(43:06):
And then along comes America.
First philosophy no science.
Whatever the president happensto say on any given day is
supposed to be the truth, and hejust throws things out there
and says, oh, we'll go mine it,it'll be fine, you know.
And so they promote the myththat it's somehow less harmful
(43:29):
than terrestrial mining, thatrecycling of metals won't work,
when I mean, there have beenvery advanced metals recycling
programs going on in the EU for30, 40 years, where metals are
collected and reused.
We don't do that here becausewe couldn't make as much money.
Corporate profits don't rely onrecycling.
(43:53):
They rely on new raw materialsbeing converted into products.
We're supposed to ignore thefact that recycling could
probably answer a lot of theneeds that we have for some of
these metals if we had gottenserious 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 lithiumcomes from.
It comes from layers of uhminerals out in nevada or in
(44:39):
certain southern california lakebeds.
It's not an ocean derivedmaterial, but, uh, you know, the
battery technology is movingaway from ocean source materials
as we speak, and so the problemthat I see is that, because
(44:59):
we've taken the scientists andmade them walk the plank, if you
will, we don't have thescientists who help us look over
the horizon at the future oftechnology.
In other words, the frontiersof science are no longer in view
because the people who had thetraining, the degrees, the
(45:23):
technology for example, theNational Marine Sanctuary System
has been quietly monitoringshoreline segments all along the
California coast withinsanctuaries.
We've got four grand nationalmarine sanctuaries.
Shoreline segments have beenmonitored, and to track the
(45:45):
migration or evolution of thethings 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 orretire the people who were doing
it, so we don't have a look atwhat's coming anymore by the
(46:09):
scientists who were trained totell us what's coming, whether
it's a hurricane, a tsunami oran ecological change.
We haven't got that tool and wemight be able to recreate it in
my grandchildren's lifetime.
We aren't going to recreate itquickly because they selectively
(46:30):
got rid of Doge and the WhiteHouse selectively got rid of
Doge and the White Houseselectively got rid of the
people that could have helped usunderstand how human beings
might survive in a changingworld, because we won't see the
change coming, but the changewill come without us seeing it
coming, and that's a lot moredangerous.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
In some of these last few minutes I wanted to bring
Scott on and address yourquestions.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
Yeah, I was just asking, Richard.
I was saying this will all beBiden's fault when it comes
apart.
About five slides back you hada 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 thatit's obviously going to use to
go across the bottom.
Isn't that probably a number ofthe nodule, the precious
nodules that they want tocollect?
The reason I'm bringing that upis 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 tosaunter across the deep ocean
(47:36):
bottom picking up noduleswithout any disruption.
And when you look at the teethon 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 nodulesabout six inches at least of the
seafloor.
Sediment pumps it into the shipup on the surface, and that
ship on the surface then has abig circular centrifugal force
(48:12):
to separate the nodules out fromthe silt and then the silt is
dumped over the side of the shipand 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 nowclaims that they have an
artificial intelligence pluckernow claims that they have an
(48:37):
artificial intelligence plucker.
I grew up harvesting walnutsfrom my earliest childhood, so
there are different ways, butthe pluckers grabs, using
artificial intelligence,individual nodules, still
getting some silt, keeping inmind that each nodule has life
in it anyway, and then those goto the surface and are cleaned
up and there's a smaller siltplume.
(48:58):
That's the theory.
Now, artificial intelligenceworking on the seabed thousands
of feet down, if it encountersgeographic anomalies in the sea,
if the seabed is not perfectlyflat, it comes to a hill or a
canyon, it's not going to work.
In other words, that is anunproven technology that is
(49:21):
being used to sort of cover upone of the many concerns about
subsea mining by claiming we'lljust pick them one at a time, in
fact those are in thepromotional videos, if you go,
they have animations on it atImpossible Metals, I think it's
also the metals company andother companies that are lining
(49:42):
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 afocus group, they develop a
messaging oh, this is whatpeople are worried about tilt
plumes and so they try to comeup with a reassuring answer.
That may be impossible Maybethat's why they got the name.
(50:11):
It may be impossible to do, butit sounds good.
And even if that works, thesheer volume of material you
have to excavate from the seabedis huge, and so that explains
why.
I mean, there's a wholeconstellation of corporations
and manufacturers that won'ttouch seabed metals, of
corporations and manufacturersthat won't touch seabed metals.
(50:33):
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 newtobacco 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 theplumes are going to settle.
Speaker 4 (50:55):
They can settle a very long ways away, and the
scale at which the extractionwould be taking place, you know,
is just phenomenally huge.
And so my opinion is that weneed to be precautionary about
(51:17):
anything this big affecting anyplace this sensitive, and this
is almost a bigger issue thanthe fate of the rainforest, in a
way, in terms of oxygen, theability of the ocean to absorb
carbon from the atmosphere andthat's why we began work about a
(51:39):
year ago on a film whichexplains all of this, has filmed
footage of most of the thingswe've talked about, and in the
course of doing that film, Ithought well, this is, at the
time, kind of a little ironic ina way, because people had never
(52:00):
heard of Seabed Mining and itwasn't something people cared
about.
And now, every time thePresident of the United States
walks in front of a microphone,he's indirectly promoting our
film, which may explain why wewon the uh science award in the
international ocean filmfestival.
Uh, I mean, the film is made,it's free, you can watch it
online at the url, the deepmovieorg.
(52:22):
But you know, the bottom lineis suddenly everybody wants to
know about something that wejust made a film about, which is
kind of I don't know what doyou call it.
It's timely.
My philosophy includesserendipity yeah, that's true as
(52:43):
something that can happen, andso, in this case, it is
serendipitous that we made afilm that people now want to see
us that we made a film thatpeople now want to see.
Speaker 2 (52:54):
There were a couple of other things that we've heard
too, trying to show that thisis less invasive, less harmful,
and what you said earlier abouthow the oceans cover most of the
planet and the life within themis three-dimensional.
The comparisons aren't quitethe same.
They're trying to say this isjust a small percentage of this
vast ocean and yet it's likebulldozing down the entire
(53:18):
Amazon forest on land oxygenthat 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 theboulders in Camp 4 and climbing
El Cap.
You know, is this a 2,000-footwall or is this a 30-foot
boulder?
And this issue, in terms of theglobal environment and the
context, is the 2,000-foot walland the people who are fighting
(53:58):
it on various Pacific islands aswe speak.
They don't have the money to goto Washington and lobby
Congress or any respectwhatsoever from a White House
that thinks this is going to bewonderful.
He doesn't care.
And so America Samoa right nowis in the crosshairs.
(54:19):
I suggest that other islandnations 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.
I know that here on theSonoma-Mendocino-Humboldt coast,
we had something happened herealmost 50 years ago now, where a
lot of people who lived heregot concerned enough to take
care of this coast and, in thecourse of taking care of this
(54:49):
coast, created a place that isso well protected with national
marine sanctuaries, with theUNESCO International Biosphere
Reserve, more recently withstate marine protected areas,
that all over the world peopleinterested in coastal planning
come here to study what we'vedone.
You know our national marinesanctuaries are, you know
(55:12):
various layers of protection, sothat they can go home to
Indonesia or wherever andemulate what we've done here.
I don't think we're going tojust stop.
I see a next generation comingand I just think that this coast
(55:33):
what I call the Mennonoma Coastwill not only continue to be a
global tourism destinationbecause of the natural beauty,
but will continue to be a modelfor coastal planning,
intelligent coastal planning oninto the future, well beyond
when.
I'm not here to worry about it,and I just want to thank the
(55:55):
literally millions of people whocreated these sanctuaries and
are going to, I think, standagainst things like order ridge
mining and encourage you to lookfurther offshore you can't see
the deep ocean, but it isincredibly 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, wasshowing in our own communities
and maybe some up and down thecoast, but defend the deep the
movie you were just talkingabout, as well as a couple of
clips from our episodes coveringboth deep sea mining and
(56:37):
offshore drilling.
I think that that's somethingthat we should talk about, Scott
and Treat, and maybe even haveyou up here, richard, to
participate.
But it could be held here inthe Sea Ranch at Del Mar Hall or
atala Arts Center or up atPoint Arena Theater.
But I think it's important toraise more awareness here
locally too.
Speaker 4 (56:59):
Happy to do that.
I'm not that far away, the tripis beautiful and never let it
be said that a small, dedicatedgroup of people cannot change
the course of global events.
I think Margaret Mead said thatfirst.
I'm paraphrasing, but amovement that started here to
take care of this coast is stillalive and I'm always happy to
(57:21):
show up.
We can provide a full-screenbroadcast quality print of the
film.
You can show it in a park on anisland in the Pacific.
It's a world we live in, asdigital media, of course, is
ubiquitous.
It can be anywhere in the worldinstantly.
Speaker 2 (57:38):
Thank you, richard Charter, and thank you Scott and
Tring Mercer for helping us alldiscuss these issues and topics
out of many issues that arefacing us, and what is being
done and what we can do aboutthem.
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 criticalissues and positive actions for
our planet.
Resilient Earth is produced byPlanet Centric Media, a 501c3
non-profit, and Seastorm StudiosInc, located on the rugged
(58:27):
North Sonoma Coast of NorthernCalifornia.
I'm Leanne Lindsay Coast ofNorthern California.
I'm Leanne Lindsay producer andhost, along with co-hosts and
co-producers Scott and TreeMercer of Mendenoma, whale and
Seal Study, located on the SouthMendocino and North Sonoma
Coasts.
The music for this podcast isby Eric Alleman, an
(58:52):
international composer, pianistand writer living in the Sea
Ranch.
Discover more of his music,animations, ballet, stage and
film work at ericalemancom.
You can find Resilient Earth onSpotify, apple and Amazon
(59:12):
Podcasts, iheartradio, youtube,soundcloud and wherever you find
your podcasts.
Please support us bysubscribing or donating to our
cause.
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