DeBeers, source of blood diamonds, and now ocean floor gems

December 21, 2019 7:30 PM

Unlike most UN bodies, the [International Seabed Authority] receives little oversight. It is classified as “autonomous” and falls under the direction of its own secretary general, who convenes his own general assembly once a year, at the ISA headquarters. For about a week, delegates from 168 member states pour into Kingston from around the world [...] not to prevent mining on the seafloor but to mitigate its damage—selecting locations where extraction will be permitted, issuing licenses to mining companies, and drafting the technical and environmental standards of an underwater Mining Code. History’s Largest Mining Operation Is About to Begin -- It’s underwater—and the consequences are unimaginable. (The Atlantic)
posted by filthy light thief (10 comments total)

Humans are doomed, greed wins. Last one out turn off the lights and lock up, please.
posted by Jacen at 8:48 PM on December 21, 2019 [5 favorites]

Yikes. The ocean is the Earth's biggest source of oxygen via phytoplankton. It's doing a lot of work in carbon sequestration. Both carbon dioxide and probably methane, via methanotrophs. That's just stuff I recall from reading about climate change. Maybe sea bed mining isn't going to disturb all that, but like the article says... we have little idea just what exactly is going on down there. Maybe some of these companies know what they're doing with regards to mitigation, but again... seems like we don't know enough about the impacts. Wanna bet we start disturbing bio and geologic sinks of greenhouse gases?
posted by Mister Cheese at 8:49 PM on December 21, 2019 [5 favorites]

The Deep Ones cannot rise soon enough out of the benthic zone and wipe us off the planet.
posted by bouvin at 3:16 AM on December 22, 2019 [5 favorites]

Learned about this via No Such Thing As A Fish whilst driving and nearly had to pull over to scream and cry.
posted by terrapin at 4:13 AM on December 22, 2019

I've lived in coal mining areas all my life, and my father was a miner.
I've always known I'm getting near home when is start seeing the slag heaps and the roads start undulating.
posted by Burn_IT at 5:48 AM on December 22, 2019 [1 favorite]

This is where I start to wonder about how all those tropes about how we've explored less of the deep sea than of outer space affect how we think about this. Those concepts were presented to kids (and, I imagine, potential research funders) as a way of indicating how much there was to learn and discover under the water; I worry that that same impulse about the vastness of the ocean undermines the message that it's entirely within our capacity to destroy it.

It's simultaneously true that the world, and the ocean, is big--vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big--on the scale of an individual human; and that, on the scale of humanity, the world is very small.

That disconnect in our minds between the size of ourselves and the size of our species is really something, and the disconnect between the two is in many ways a failure of governance. Governance, via Latin gubernare, from Greek kybernan, "to steer or pilot a ship," which is also the root of "cyber." Norbert Wiener used "cybernetics" to try to encapsulate a study of being able to steer things remotely, to articulate the systems in between the steerer and the larger world. In a way, democracy and stakeholdership are ways of flipping the ideas of governance on their head, or at least providing a feedback mechanism. Instead of a unified sovereign dictating to the populace how to manipulate the world, the collective will of those people is supposed to be filtered up to a more centralized body to be refined into more actionable instructions.

And the failure of our various governing structures to do that listening, gathering, and filtering creates much of the disaffectedness and frustration today.

And our inability to reconcile our personal, human scale with the scale of the human race also helps feed disaffectedness where we do have democracies--"my vote doesn't actually matter"--in self-reinforcing ways.

Sorry if the above is just a shaggy-dog story way of getting around to the point that Naomi Klein makes here: Stop Trying to Save the World All By Yourself
posted by pykrete jungle at 7:59 AM on December 22, 2019 [3 favorites]

The other thing that's bugging me--the constant refrain of "well, we need these minerals to make batteries to save the Earth from fossil fuels"--make a whole series of presumptions, if it is an argument being made in good faith. Batteries don't make electricity--they just store it.

Taken in its best light, the argument is that renewable sources of energy like wind, solar, tidal, etc. require batteries to store them after collection and release them when needed--the lack of energy storage being a big barrier to their more widespread adoption. But you don't necessarily need batteries for that.

Hell, if we're going to blue-sky this, you don't even need batteries to store energy in cars. You could use hydrogen, or freaking springs, if you developed a way to store enough energy into a small and light enough package. It's not possible with current technology and infrastructure, but that's no reason to settle for what there is just now.

Or, you know, it could just be a nice-sounding argument to justify exploring for demand for existing minerals that's not projected to change much over the next couple of decades.
posted by pykrete jungle at 9:08 PM on December 22, 2019 [1 favorite]

Stupid question: if these minerals are so finite that we're literally trolling the bottom of the ocean, won't we probably run out one way or the other? Are batteries powered by even the cleanest of energies still a stop gap for some silver bullet we'll just keep crossing our fingers for?
posted by avalonian at 9:27 PM on December 22, 2019

For a while, I got a series of emails that were intended for someone with my same name regarding ocean floor drilling licensing around the Bahamas. There's mention of the cost of surveys, about having to clear some previous charges, and some mention of the 'new' government (Trump) likely being far more open to ocean floor drilling and how they should cozy up to them.
I sometimes think about my nom de net and hope he ends up in the special hell.
posted by secretdark at 8:42 AM on December 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

avalonian: Stupid question: if these minerals are so finite that we're literally trolling the bottom of the ocean, won't we probably run out one way or the other? Are batteries powered by even the cleanest of energies still a stop gap for some silver bullet we'll just keep crossing our fingers for?

The article has some interesting quotes and summaries that get to this. First, there's the manager of exploration at Nautilus Minerals, John Parianos, who noted "everything that’s not grown is mined," and it all comes from somewhere.

Then there's DeepGreen:

DeepGreen is both a product of Nautilus Minerals and a reaction to it. The company was founded in 2011 by David Heydon, who had founded Nautilus a decade earlier, and its leadership is full of former Nautilus executives and investors. As a group, they have sought to position DeepGreen as a company whose primary interest in mining the ocean is saving the planet. They have produced a series of lavish brochures to explain the need for a new source of battery metals, and Gerard Barron, the CEO, speaks with animated fervor about the virtues of nodule extraction.

His case for seabed mining is straightforward. Barron believes that the world will not survive if we continue burning fossil fuels, and the transition to other forms of power will require a massive increase in battery production. He points to electric cars: the batteries for a single vehicle require 187 pounds of copper, 123 pounds of nickel, and 15 pounds each of manganese and cobalt. On a planet with 1 billion cars, the conversion to electric vehicles would require several times more metal than all existing land-based supplies—and harvesting that metal from existing sources already takes a human toll. Most of the world’s cobalt, for example, is mined in the southeastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where tens of thousands of young children work in labor camps, inhaling clouds of toxic dust during shifts up to 24 hours long. Terrestrial mines for nickel and copper have their own litany of environmental harms. Because the ISA is required to allocate some of the profits from seabed mining to developing countries, the industry will provide nations that rely on conventional mining with revenue that doesn’t inflict damage on their landscapes and people.

DeepGreen claims that there's a better way to do deep sea mining or extraction, and with profits from seabed mining going back to developing countries, this could be a boon that supports continued the industrial production that drives the modern world, while decreasing the negative impacts on people and habitats on land.

And because the oceans cover 71 percent of the earth's surface, there's potentially a LOT more out there than on land. In other words, there's much more raw resources we can pull from the earth, including the ocean floors, before we have to focus on recovering metals and minerals from waste (Science Daily, 2014) or gear up our efforts to extract (more) metals from e-waste (Environmental Leader, 2018).
posted by filthy light thief at 11:40 AM on December 24, 2019