Latest / How To Protect The Ocean / Deep Sea Mining Exposed: Inside the Fight to Save the Ocean's Last Frontier

Transcript

Deep Sea Mining Exposed: Inside the Fight to Save the Ocean's Last Frontier · How To Protect The Ocean

• 0:00
  Is deep-sea mining sustainable?
• 0:02
  Not from an environmental impact, I think we know the answer to that,
• 0:05
  but from an economical impact.
• 0:07
  Can people make money from deep-sea mining?
• 0:10
  We're gonna talk about the environment, the economics, all about deep-sea
• 0:14
  mining today, and we're gonna be talking about the importance of the deep sea
• 0:18
  with my guest today, Matthew Gianni.
• 0:20
  He is the co-founder and political and policy advisor for the Deep Sea
• 0:24
  Conservation Coalition out of Europe.
• 0:27
  He's here to talk to us about how he got started in the environmental world,
• 0:31
  going from a deep sea trawling off the coast of California, to landing a
• 0:34
  job at Greenpeace, to now co-founding the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition,
• 0:39
  and working for over 30 years in this business to be able to bring you
• 0:43
  some conservation of the deep sea.
• 0:45
  So we're gonna talk about the importance of the deep sea, the environment,
• 0:47
  and what are the latest updates from the International Seabed Authority
• 0:50
  meeting that just happened in July.
• 0:52
  It's the second meeting they do of the two meetings this year.
• 0:55
  It was happening in Kingston, Jamaica, and there's some really interesting
• 0:58
  things that came out of that meeting.
• 0:59
  So we're gonna talk about it on today's episode of the How
• 1:02
  to Protect the Ocean podcast.
• 1:03
  This is the place where you get your ocean news and updates every
• 1:06
  Monday to Friday, every weekday.
• 1:08
  If you enjoy that kinda stuff, why don't you hit that follow button
• 1:11
  right now on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss Monday's episode,
• 1:15
  and all the way through Friday.
• 1:16
  We have some great episodes coming up, some great topics.
• 1:19
  Next week, it's either fisheries or we're gonna be talking about
• 1:22
  plastic pollution and microfiber.
• 1:24
  So, you never know what you're gonna get on these episodes.
• 1:27
  So stay tuned, follow, and let's talk Matthew Gianni.
• 1:30
  Matthew was an amazing guest.
• 1:32
  He is a lot of fun to be able to discuss it.
• 1:34
  It's the first time I've met him, but having the conversation,
• 1:37
  I believe we could have talked for three more hours at least.
• 1:39
  And we'll have him back on to talk more updates on not only deep-sea mining,
• 1:43
  which is a big, big issue right now, but also we're gonna talk about deep
• 1:46
  sea and why it's important, and all the different animals that come out
• 1:48
  from there that we all love, and some people call monsters, but I think call,
• 1:52
  like, aliens and cool things, and just cool adaptations to the deep sea is
• 1:56
  what we're gonna see over the future.
• 1:57
  But deep-sea mining is right at the forefront of a lot of news that's
• 2:00
  happening, not only from the International Seabed Authority, which is the governing
• 2:04
  authority from the UN that looks after setting the regulations of if deep-sea
• 2:08
  mining is actually gonna happen, whether it's gonna happen, and we got some
• 2:11
  really interesting economic updates on this, not only environmental updates,
• 2:14
  and also movement towards moratorium.
• 2:16
  So we're gonna hear that from Matthew.
• 2:17
  But also, like, we've seen a big push from the US government,
• 2:20
  the Trump administration, that wants to do deep-sea mining.
• 2:23
  We've talked about it on the podcast before.
• 2:25
  There's been some public inquiries or some public comment periods that have been
• 2:28
  ignored, and then the size of the area that they're gonna mine or potentially
• 2:32
  mine have doubled, if not tripled.
• 2:34
  The metals companies involved.
• 2:35
  We're gonna talk all about that today and how that's influencing
• 2:38
  deep-sea mining, and maybe it's just not gonna happen at all.
• 2:42
  So, we're gonna hear that from Matthew.
• 2:43
  So here's the interview from Matthew Gianni, co-founder and
• 2:46
  political and policy advisor for the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition.
• 2:50
  Enjoy the interview, and I'll talk to you after.
• 2:52
  Hey, Matthew.
• 2:53
  Welcome to the How to Protect the Ocean podcast.
• 2:55
  Are you ready to talk about deep sea conservation?
• 2:59
  Hi, Andrew.
• 3:00
  Yes, very much so.
• 3:01
  Thanks for having me on.
• 3:02
  You bet.
• 3:03
  I'm excited for this because, uh, we're gonna be focusing
• 3:06
  a lot on the deep sea today.
• 3:07
  Obviously, you're from the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition.
• 3:10
  We'll talk about that in a second.
• 3:11
  But we're gonna also talk about some updates from the International
• 3:15
  Seabed Authority meeting that happened in Kingston, Jamaica
• 3:17
  recently this, this past summer.
• 3:19
  Uh, and so we're gonna get an update on where everything is at.
• 3:22
  Uh, but I-- what I really wanna focus on too is, is obviously getting to
• 3:26
  know, uh, yourself, Matthew, but also just what's in the deep sea.
• 3:30
  What can we expect?
• 3:30
  You've been working on this for more than 20 years, uh, through the
• 3:33
  Deep Sea Conservation Coalition and, and I s- I think a lot of, a lot
• 3:37
  of us really don't know what's down there, and I think we think, a lot
• 3:41
  of us think it's like a barren sea.
• 3:43
  You know?
• 3:43
  Like, there's nothing down there and there's nothing to worry about
• 3:45
  with whether you're extracting, whether you're trawling, you know.
• 3:49
  These are things that we have to be careful of and make sure that people know
• 3:52
  that it's, there's an abundant sea life.
• 3:54
  Maybe not as abundant as a coral reef, but sometimes there are coral reefs.
• 3:57
  So we're gonna get into all of that today, uh, and I'm excited to do so.
• 4:01
  But Matthew, before we get into that, why don't you just let us
• 4:03
  know who you are and what you do?
• 4:06
  Well, I'm a co-founder of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition.
• 4:10
  It's a coalition of over 140 organizations, uh, looking at working, uh,
• 4:16
  of, including environmental organizations, some human rights organizations, uh,
• 4:21
  coastal fishers organizations, and others, uh, that are interested in conserving and
• 4:26
  protecting, uh, deep ocean ecosystems.
• 4:29
  Very nice.
• 4:29
  Very nice.
• 4:30
  Now, how did you get interested and involved in just ocean
• 4:36
  conservation in general?
• 4:37
  Like, where did that begin?
• 4:39
  Well, it actually began when I was working as a commercial
• 4:41
  fisherman, which I did for 10 years.
• 4:43
  Okay.
• 4:43
  Uh, including five years as a deep sea trawler man.
• 4:46
  So we were fishing- Oh
• 4:47
  off the Central California coast at the time, down to about 1,000 meters, which
• 4:50
  would be, uh, roughly 3,000 feet deep.
• 4:54
  Um, and, um, on the basis of that, I ended up, uh, becoming an environmental
• 4:59
  activist, um, opposing offshore oil development and a major dredge
• 5:04
  disposal project off the, uh, West Coast of the United States, off
• 5:08
  the, off the San Francisco area.
• 5:11
  And eventually ended up going to work for Greenpeace International-
• 5:15
  Hmm … uh, as it started up a international fisheries campaign.
• 5:19
  And, um, worked through a number of different campaigns, became
• 5:23
  involved in international policy and, and, and treaty negotiations.
• 5:28
  Eventually ran the ocean program for Greenpeace International,
• 5:31
  which is how I ended up here in Amsterdam, where I'm currently based
• 5:34
  and have been for quite some time.
• 5:35
  Right.
• 5:36
  And then left Greenpeace in part to start up a coalition, uh, to try and get an
• 5:41
  end to deep water trawling, primarily on seamount ecosystems on the high seas
• 5:46
  through a UN general assembly process.
• 5:48
  And on the basis of that work, eventually got into the issue of deep
• 5:52
  seabed mining So what made you go from-- like, what was it that, that you
• 5:57
  wanted to do more about the deep sea that you couldn't do at, at Greenpeace
• 6:03
  while managing the ocean program?
• 6:04
  I know they cover a lot of different things.
• 6:06
  What made you wanna focus on the deep sea in particular?
• 6:09
  Was it your history of doing deep sea trawling in, in like,
• 6:12
  uh, when you were a fisher?
• 6:14
  Well, partly that.
• 6:15
  Um, uh, I did, uh, the deep sea trawling.
• 6:18
  It's actually a combination of shelf and, and, and continental slope
• 6:21
  trawling, uh, for about five years.
• 6:23
  A highline vessel, we were the top vessel off the Central California coast, probably
• 6:27
  one of the top 20 off the West Coast of, uh, the US, excluding Alaska- Mm-hmm
• 6:31
  … in terms of sheer volume of production.
• 6:33
  But what, uh, amazed me, uh, often enough was all of the stuff that we would bring
• 6:38
  up from the bottom in the net from the deeper areas where we were trawling.
• 6:42
  Glass sponges, corals, uh, all kinds of starfish, uh, uh,
• 6:48
  crabs, et cetera and so forth.
• 6:50
  Um, and most of which was not commercially useful.
• 6:55
  Um- Mm-hmm … it wasn't, uh… It was, it was stuff we would bring up off the bottom
• 6:58
  and then just shovel back over the side after we picked- Huh … out the fish that
• 7:01
  we would, uh, take back into port to sell.
• 7:05
  Uh, but I think what really got me into the deep sea, uh, uh, issue was… A- and
• 7:10
  Greenpeace came along with me on this.
• 7:12
  You know, we- Of course … we, it was a small group of, of, of
• 7:14
  organizations that actually started the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition.
• 7:18
  But what got me was, um, as I was kinda campaigning on sustainable fisheries
• 7:22
  with Greenpeace and so forth, I sat in on a, on a, um, a series of debates,
• 7:28
  uh, about whether, uh, uh, fishing, commercial fishing in this case, could
• 7:32
  drive species biologically extinct.
• 7:35
  Hmm.
• 7:35
  And the general view was, or conclusion of these discussions, mostly with
• 7:39
  scientists, was that yes, fisheries can drive species commercially extinct.
• 7:44
  In other words, take the populations of commercially valuable fish down
• 7:48
  to a level at which it's no longer economical to, to continue fishing them.
• 7:52
  They could, uh, drive species ecologically extinct.
• 7:56
  In other words, species, uh, that would be depleted to such an extent
• 8:00
  that it would no longer occupy the same role in the, in the ecosystem-
• 8:05
  Mm-hmm … but not biologically extinct.
• 8:06
  Uh, yes, a few marine mammals, uh, had documented, you know, there
• 8:10
  were documented extinctions of, uh, I think it was the Steller's
• 8:12
  sea cow in the North- Mm-hmm
• 8:14
  Pacific and a, and a few other animals, but not fish and other species.
• 8:18
  And then in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, '99, 2000, 2001, I became
• 8:24
  aware of studies coming out of the South Pacific, uh, Tony Coslow and Karen
• 8:29
  Garrett-Holmes, I think, um, Bernard Richard de Fourchet, that were-- had
• 8:35
  looked at bottom trawling on seamounts.
• 8:37
  Right.
• 8:38
  Uh, and in particular, a study that, uh, Garrett-Holmes and, uh, Coslow
• 8:42
  had, uh, had, uh, been involved in, where they looked at, at, at
• 8:46
  four seamounts off Tasmania that are roughly 1,000 meters in depth.
• 8:50
  The peaks were about 1,000 meters below the surface.
• 8:52
  Two had been trawled, two had not been trawled, and they
• 8:55
  did visual surveys of the two.
• 8:57
  The two that, uh, the, of the, all four of them, and they found that
• 9:00
  the ones that hadn't been trawled were teeming with coral cover on the
• 9:04
  upper- Right … slopes of the peaks.
• 9:06
  But the ones that were, had been trawled, and one of these seamounts had been
• 9:09
  trawled 600 times and another had been trawled 3,000 times, fishing for a
• 9:13
  type of fish called orange roughy, and this was documented by the Australian
• 9:17
  Fisheries Management Authority.
• 9:18
  Yep.
• 9:18
  Um, they estimated that between 95% and 98% of the, of the coral cover on
• 9:23
  those seamounts had been- G- were gone.
• 9:26
  They had been- Yeah … destroyed.
• 9:27
  Just been gutted.
• 9:27
  It was rubble.
• 9:28
  Yeah.
• 9:29
  And that coupled with Bernard Richard Forges' study, which he was
• 9:33
  identifying relatively high degrees of endemism in seamount ecosystems.
• 9:37
  Mm-hmm.
• 9:38
  And so the conclusion that I took from that was, well, wait a minute now,
• 9:41
  it is possible if there are endemic species on these seamounts and they're
• 9:45
  trawled as heavily as they were, uh, uh, the ones off Aus- off, off
• 9:49
  Australia, which in fact is the case in many parts of the world- Yeah … then
• 9:54
  they could be driving species extinct.
• 9:55
  Yeah.
• 9:56
  And in fact, uh, i- including species, uh, that, uh, had not yet been discovered
• 10:02
  by science or was not yet- Mm-hmm … that were not yet known to science.
• 10:04
  And this is something that I subsequently heard Fred Grassle say from Rutgers
• 10:08
  University, a well-known deep sea biologist, mostly, uh, uh, um, studying
• 10:15
  sediments in the deep ocean, where he basically said, I think it was
• 10:18
  in 1992, he said, "We may be losing species on seamounts from bottom,
• 10:23
  uh, because of bottom trawling that we haven't even yet discovered."
• 10:25
  And so I thought, I mean, for me it was twofold.
• 10:28
  One was, this is an outrage and we should do something to try to stop this.
• 10:33
  Yeah.
• 10:33
  And number two, the, the, the, the fact was that at the time, at least on the
• 10:38
  fisheries on the high seas, uh, the countries that were allowing their vessels
• 10:43
  to go out and do this were the champions of, of high seas fisheries sustainability.
• 10:49
  Countries like Australia, New Zealand, the European Union, and,
• 10:53
  and a number of countries from the European Union, Norway, et cetera.
• 10:56
  They were all trawling on these areas on the high seas.
• 10:59
  And I thought, you know, and, and this is against the law.
• 11:02
  I had been involved in treaty negotiations in the mid-1990s, which should have put an
• 11:07
  end to this type of fishing, but didn't.
• 11:09
  Uh, and so decided together with colleagues, let's take this campaign
• 11:13
  to the United Nations General Assembly and see if we can get them to basically
• 11:17
  force these countries to have to reconsider what they're doing and
• 11:20
  ultimately stop the, stop the damage.
• 11:22
  Yeah.
• 11:22
  And it's, it's really interesting too, 'cause seamounts, from my
• 11:25
  understanding, are like a, a high biodiverse area in general.
• 11:29
  And to, to see the studies where they compare the two seamounts and understand
• 11:33
  that there are species that, like you said, we haven't even, probably haven't
• 11:36
  even discovered yet or, or endemic that we know they're endemic to these seamounts,
• 11:41
  could be gone and we could be losing these species at a rate that we just
• 11:44
  don't, we can't, we can't even fathom at this point, because a lot of times,
• 11:49
  uh, whether they're in the boundaries of the EEZ or outside the boundaries
• 11:52
  in the high seas, there's just not enough monitoring programs to, to, to
• 11:56
  monitor all these, all these seamounts.
• 11:58
  Well, that and, and not enough baseline information in the first place- Yeah.
• 12:02
  Exactly … in order to realize what you've lost, uh, because you've studied it
• 12:05
  before, before it was actually exploited.
• 12:08
  Yeah.
• 12:08
  And, you know, the same is true in, in many cases, uh, of, of deep seabed mining.
• 12:13
  It's not yet taken hold, but similar types of, of issues there, where the
• 12:18
  baseline information is so thin and all of the other sorts of information
• 12:23
  you need to understand what the impact of deep seabed mining will be.
• 12:27
  Connectivity among species, uh, the structure of ecosystems, the
• 12:31
  life history characteristics of, of, of species in the deep sea.
• 12:35
  How, how long do they live?
• 12:36
  Yeah.
• 12:37
  How do they reproduce?
• 12:38
  Right.
• 12:39
  What do they look like when they're young, you know, in the, in the larvae form?
• 12:43
  What are their vulnerabilities to, uh, heavy metals that might be released into
• 12:47
  the environment from deep seabed mining?
• 12:49
  Or noise and light, um, in areas where there is none.
• 12:53
  Um- Mm-hmm … and you think of, for example, these extraordinary
• 12:56
  creatures that live in the water column 2 m- 2,000, 3,000, 4,000
• 13:01
  meters depth that are bioluminescent.
• 13:04
  You know?
• 13:05
  Yeah.
• 13:05
  They, they, they generate light in order to attract prey, to attract
• 13:09
  m- uh, uh, uh, mates, to find, you know, others of their species to…
• 13:14
  et cetera and so forth.
• 13:15
  And then if you start shining a lot of light on them, these species, it's,
• 13:18
  it's, it could impact their, you know, their, their, their, their viability.
• 13:23
  Yeah.
• 13:23
  No, absolutely.
• 13:24
  Um, there's, there seems to be, uh, like a, a obviously, uh A focus right now
• 13:32
  on, on the deep sea, right, these days.
• 13:35
  And, and that deep sea is more around, you kind of mentioned
• 13:38
  a little bit, deep sea mining.
• 13:41
  And before we get into sort of the, the nuances of deep sea mining, you
• 13:47
  know, there, there's been this talk of, of, of that there's really not,
• 13:51
  not really that much on the bottom.
• 13:53
  You know, there's- … you know, there's not much geomorphology.
• 13:56
  It's just sand.
• 13:57
  There might be some worms, you know, that kind of stuff.
• 14:00
  Yeah.
• 14:00
  Uh, we know that's not true, right, from, from a lot of the
• 14:03
  exploration that's been done.
• 14:04
  But we also know that very little of the deep sea compared to the, it's
• 14:08
  all of its surface area has actually been, um, you know, been monitored,
• 14:12
  including like the, in the water column of the deep part of the sea, you
• 14:16
  know, not just the, the, the bottom.
• 14:18
  Um- Oh, how can you explain, when, when somebody comes to you and, and then
• 14:23
  they may not know much about the deep sea and they're interested and they ask
• 14:26
  you like, "Why should we care about the deep sea?" What answer do you give them?
• 14:32
  I know it's a general question.
• 14:34
  There's probably a lot that you could go into, but what's the general answer that
• 14:37
  you pretty much give in that respect?
• 14:39
  Well, I, for me it's, you, you can come at it from different angles
• 14:45
  and sometimes, you know, I tr- I try to a- a- adapt a response to what I
• 14:50
  understand to be the interest of the person that's asking the question.
• 14:53
  Of course.
• 14:53
  But basically, um, one of the key issues for me at least, um, that, that, that
• 14:59
  frankly astounds me is that we're in a, and I hate to use the word crisis.
• 15:03
  I mean, it's crisis, crisis, crisis everywhere you look.
• 15:05
  Mm-hmm.
• 15:06
  You know, especially in the newspapers.
• 15:07
  Yeah.
• 15:08
  But, you know, even the G7 countries have put out communiques saying
• 15:12
  we have a biodiversity crisis.
• 15:14
  We have a triple planetary crisis of, of biodiversity loss, climate
• 15:17
  change, and marine pollution.
• 15:20
  Yeah.
• 15:20
  Uh, sorry, pollution generally.
• 15:21
  Yeah.
• 15:22
  Uh, and, and when you think about how much has been lost, I mean- Mm-hmm … there
• 15:27
  are, there are scientists who basically say we are arguably living through a
• 15:32
  sixth mass extinction event on the planet.
• 15:36
  Um, the first being, uh, the… Now I should know this, uh, actually.
• 15:42
  I mean, the most famous extinction was roughly 65 million years
• 15:45
  ago is when the dinosaurs- Yeah
• 15:46
  went extinct.
• 15:46
  But before that there was the Permian, there was the End Triassic, and then
• 15:50
  there were the, it was the, uh, I think it was the End-Or- D- O- Ordovician,
• 15:54
  uh- Right … mass extinction events.
• 15:56
  And this one is being caused by us, the humans on the planet.
• 16:02
  And I just think that why would we go into a whole new frontier of
• 16:07
  the planet and risk destroying so much for so little in return, i.e.,
• 16:14
  uh, a handful, well, relatively small amounts of metals that you can
• 16:18
  get from deep sea bed mining based on all the information we have now.
• 16:22
  Um, uh, a- and, and, and, and lose, uh, you know, r- put, put a whole
• 16:29
  new frontier of, of, of the Earth that has been largely untouched, uh,
• 16:34
  at risk of a mass extinction event.
• 16:37
  Uh, so that's one way to answer it.
• 16:39
  But the other-- there are others.
• 16:40
  There are, you know, for example, um, the deep ocean, uh, according to, for
• 16:45
  example, the UN's World Ocean Assessment, uh, drives planetary processes.
• 16:49
  Um- Mm-hmm … uh, it, uh, and, and, and we don't understand fully how that
• 16:55
  works, what those connections are.
• 16:57
  But if we start messing with the deep sea, we might, uh, end up with a whole
• 17:02
  range of unintended consequences.
• 17:03
  The most important- Yeah … of course, is the ocean, as we know,
• 17:07
  is the world's-- is, is by far the largest natural carbon sink.
• 17:11
  Yes.
• 17:12
  Um, something like 25% of the greenhouse gases that we pump into
• 17:15
  the atmosphere get absorbed, the CO2 gets absorbed in the ocean.
• 17:19
  Without that natural buffer, we would be in serious trouble today.
• 17:23
  We're already heading in toward, you know, serious- Mm-hmm … difficult territory.
• 17:28
  And there are some, uh, real concerns that, uh, deep seabed mining could somehow
• 17:34
  diminish or, uh, the, the, the capacity of the oceans to absorb CO2, maybe in
• 17:39
  small may- ways, maybe in bigger ways.
• 17:41
  Uh, we don't know.
• 17:42
  And, uh, my understanding of that concern lies mostly in relation to
• 17:47
  the mesopelagic zone, which is one of the main vectors for taking carbon out
• 17:51
  of the surface waters and basically sequestering it for large peri- long
• 17:56
  periods of time into the deep sea.
• 17:58
  Right.
• 17:58
  And the, the plume flows that would be generated, the discharge flows that would
• 18:03
  be generated from the mining ships on the surface bringing up this material
• 18:06
  from the bottom and then dumping out the wastewater and the excess, uh, uh, bits
• 18:11
  and pieces of the so-called mining fines, uh, as well as the sediment that would
• 18:16
  come up with that, um, could impact, uh, the, the capacity of the mesopelagic
• 18:21
  zone to basically get that carbon out of surface waters, get it down below
• 18:25
  the 1,000 to 2,000-meter depth range, and basically lock it away for- Mm-hmm
• 18:30
  uh, a, a few hundred, uh, centuries to thousands of years.
• 18:34
  And so there is a concern.
• 18:36
  The other thing is, you know, there's, there's, there's so much we, we, we
• 18:39
  still don't know about the deep sea.
• 18:40
  I mean, you probably heard, uh, this was back in, uh, 2024.
• 18:43
  I, I, I worked with this guy, Andrew Sweetman.
• 18:45
  Mm-hmm.
• 18:46
  Discovery of, of, of dark oxygen.
• 18:48
  Yes.
• 18:49
  That the manganese nodules, which is the primary ore of interest to
• 18:54
  the deep seabed mining industry.
• 18:56
  Right.
• 18:56
  Um, and these lie on the deep abyssal plains, which in fact aren't quite plains.
• 19:01
  They are-- There's, there's quite a range of topography down there.
• 19:04
  Um, these are areas of the oceans that sit at 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 meters depth,
• 19:09
  um, all the way down at, at the bottom end of the so-called continental slopes.
• 19:15
  And, um, his-- he's basically found that, uh, the, the nodules might be producing
• 19:25
  oxygen Um, and the not clear how this, is it microbial activity on these nodules?
• 19:33
  Is it, uh, uh, electrolysis, I think it is, you know, where it's breaking
• 19:37
  hydrogen and oxygen, H2O, you know, water into hydrogen and oxygen.
• 19:42
  Um, he still has to ground truth or, or again, kind of verify to repeat the,
• 19:47
  uh, the experiment, uh, or the, the, the, the finding, which he's now in the
• 19:51
  process of doing with his colleagues.
• 19:53
  Um, and, um, and the question is, is this really a s- i- is this actually occurring?
• 20:00
  And if so, does this oxygen production in the deep ocean actually, is
• 20:05
  it important to the functioning- Yeah … of those ecosystems?
• 20:08
  Yeah.
• 20:08
  And to me, again, the extraordinary thing here is, you know, we've been--
• 20:11
  the, the, the mining industry has been interested in mining these nodules.
• 20:15
  This is primarily in the Eastern Pacific, uh, just north of the equator, up to
• 20:19
  about 20 or 30 degrees north, uh, a huge area of about, uh, 1.7 million square
• 20:26
  miles, 4.5 million square kilometers.
• 20:29
  The bottom is littered with, with these nodules.
• 20:32
  Um, but the extraordinary thing is that, that the, that the mining industry
• 20:36
  or the proto-mining industry has been looking at this area for over 50 years.
• 20:41
  You know, there were, there were companies out there poking around
• 20:43
  down there in the '60s, early '70s.
• 20:44
  Nodules were actually discovered by the Challenger expedition in-
• 20:48
  Right … in 1974, I believe it was.
• 20:50
  Um, and only now we're starting to see things like something that could be such
• 20:56
  a huge, uh, uh, element of the ecology and the, and the, and the biology, uh,
• 21:03
  of, of that area, uh, only, only now being, being potentially discovered.
• 21:08
  And again, Andrew's clear.
• 21:09
  He says, "I'm, I'm convinced this is deep oxygen.
• 21:12
  I've gone through these, these experiments.
• 21:14
  I've, I've looked at the machinery.
• 21:15
  It's 10 years, uh, and I'm convinced." But he recognizes he needs to repeat
• 21:21
  the ex- the, the, the, the finding, the experiments- Yeah … to, to see if that's
• 21:25
  happening, and then look at the potential for what role that that oxygen plays i-
• 21:31
  in, in, in the deep ocean ecosystems.
• 21:33
  So again- So is he doing that, is he doing that now, like currently?
• 21:36
  That's, that's the experiment that he's, he's doing now or- Yeah, I don't-
• 21:39
  … when is it gonna- … I don't know if he's-- I think he's going out soon.
• 21:41
  Um- Yeah … I'm not sure he's out yet.
• 21:43
  Uh, he's got a grant from the Nippon Foundation in, uh, Japan- Right
• 21:47
  to go out and look at it.
• 21:47
  To explore it.
• 21:47
  And interestingly, the Ni- the Nippon Foundation was kind of, uh,
• 21:52
  interested in actually mining nodules themselves- Mm … in Japanese waters.
• 21:56
  Um, but apparently have taken a step back, uh, in part because of Andrew's discovery
• 22:02
  and thinking, "Okay, we, we maybe we need to know a lot more about what's going
• 22:06
  on down there before we start, you know, exploiting these ecosystems to, uh, to
• 22:10
  the detriment of, of basically the- Right
• 22:13
  the, the ecology of these areas and to, to us as humankind if this, uh, mining
• 22:18
  industry takes off, uh, on a large scale." And the interesting things too is you,
• 22:22
  I'm sure you're aware of this, but um- Scientists have said, and I'm thinking
• 22:27
  of a piece that was done by Stephanie Kaiser, uh, Craig Smith from University
• 22:31
  of Hawaii, and Pedro Martinez, uh, in a special issue of, uh, Marine Biodiversity
• 22:36
  that ran in 2017, but they basically say up to half of the larger animals, uh,
• 22:42
  in the deep ocean, the meta- the, the megafauna, the, the, the macrofauna, the
• 22:46
  metazoan species, are nodule-obligate species, which means they actually
• 22:51
  depend on the nodules, um, uh, for, for some portion of their life history.
• 22:57
  Uh, and when you remove them, they say it will probably be a, a, it
• 23:02
  could take millions of years for these animals to come back in these
• 23:06
  ecosystems because it takes millions of years for these nodules to grow.
• 23:09
  Yeah.
• 23:09
  And so you're not just plucking rocks off the bottom, you're actually
• 23:13
  plucking a living ecosystem with each nodule you bring up, uh, for
• 23:17
  about half of the species, at least the larger species, the more complex
• 23:20
  animals that live in the deep ocean.
• 23:22
  And, and it's something that I think you alluded to earlier, the extraordinary
• 23:26
  diversity of species in the deep sea is, is, is, is, is, is i- in many respects
• 23:31
  a, a new discovery only over the last 20 years or so, um, primarily because of
• 23:37
  interest in mining and mining the nodules.
• 23:40
  Um, uh, the International Seabed Authority, which regulates mining in
• 23:44
  the international areas of the world's ocean, which is about roughly 50 to 75%
• 23:49
  of the, uh, well, uh, half to two-thirds of the overall seabed of the oceans- Yeah
• 23:54
  um, uh, requires two things of a company or a country that wants to get
• 24:01
  a contract to explore for the mining, uh, potential, mining opportunities.
• 24:08
  Mm-hmm.
• 24:08
  Uh, the first, they have to, uh, assess the area, the claim area that they
• 24:12
  get- Yep … uh, issued through, by, you know, through a contract from the
• 24:16
  International Seabed Authority, assess the potential of the, of the, the metals
• 24:20
  or the mineral grades in, in those areas.
• 24:23
  And the second is that they have to collect environmental baseline
• 24:26
  information, uh, in order to produce an environmental impact assessment if they
• 24:30
  want to decide to go from exploration to full-scale commercial mining.
• 24:35
  And that's for making sure that they are not going to impact the
• 24:38
  environment in and around the area that they're gonna be in, right?
• 24:41
  That they're gonna work in.
• 24:41
  Basically, yeah.
• 24:42
  Yeah.
• 24:43
  And some of the best information, ironically, has come from,
• 24:47
  uh, the, the, the contractors.
• 24:49
  Yeah.
• 24:49
  Um, so I mean, there is, there is, there is quite a bit of, uh, of
• 24:52
  research going on in the deep ocean, uh, independent of any commercial interest.
• 24:56
  And so- Right … for example, I was involved in, uh, well, three European
• 25:00
  Union-funded deep sea research projects, one of which was looking at
• 25:03
  the potential for, uh, impact of deep seabed mining, uh, and was the largest
• 25:07
  publicly, uh, funded Uh, project of its kind in the world at the time, so
• 25:13
  attracted scientists from around the world to various meetings and so forth.
• 25:17
  Yeah.
• 25:17
  But, uh, much of it has been produced by the contractors, uh, the
• 25:22
  companies that want to go mining.
• 25:23
  Hmm.
• 25:24
  Com- companies and the, and the countries that have got these
• 25:27
  exploration contracts with the ISA.
• 25:29
  And again, I say ironically because the lead company that's been involved in this
• 25:34
  is one called, uh, The Metals Company.
• 25:36
  Yeah.
• 25:37
  Its CEO is a guy named Gerard Barron.
• 25:39
  Yeah.
• 25:39
  Um, and he was famously quoted, I think in a Time magazine article
• 25:43
  that ran in September of 2021, that it's a biological desert down there.
• 25:49
  In other words, there's basically nothing living, uh, that we need to
• 25:53
  worry about, and it won't be possible to impact the marine environment
• 25:56
  because it's a dead environment.
• 25:58
  There's nothing, there's nothing there- Yeah … uh, worth, worth,
• 26:02
  uh, that's gonna get impacted.
• 26:04
  Uh, and the reality is the, the, the kind of science… And to The Metals
• 26:08
  Company's credit, they are allowing the scientists that they contract to come
• 26:11
  in and do this baseline information to publish their findings, uh, as
• 26:16
  have some of the other contractors.
• 26:18
  Uh, there's one called the, uh, the, uh, Global Sea, uh- Seabed Resources, GSR from
• 26:24
  Belgium, um, uh, a, a number of others.
• 26:28
  Um, they're, they're kind of coming and going as, as it stands these days.
• 26:31
  Yeah.
• 26:32
  But, a- and the science is all pointing to the fact that, whoa, this
• 26:35
  is a biologically very rich area.
• 26:38
  There's not a high abundance of animals, uh, but there is an
• 26:42
  extraordinary diversity of animals, including many, many which we're
• 26:46
  just discovering for the first time.
• 26:48
  Uh, and, and, and, and, and that is basically stalling the effort to get at
• 26:56
  least the International Seabed Authority to adopt regulations and start, uh,
• 27:03
  allowing commercial mining to take place.
• 27:05
  And- Because- Sorry, go ahead.
• 27:08
  Yeah, I'm sorry.
• 27:08
  Go ahead … because the, the, the rules, the regulations, uh, well, I should say
• 27:14
  the, the actual treaty law under which the International Seabed operates, uh, has a
• 27:19
  provision that basically says the ISA must ensure the effective protection of the
• 27:23
  marine environment from harmful effects arising out of seabed mining activities.
• 27:28
  And what a lot of countries that, that are involved in these negotiations
• 27:31
  are saying is, "Well, back in the '70s, nobody knew that there was
• 27:34
  much living down here." You know?
• 27:36
  Right.
• 27:36
  The assumption was you could protect the, y- uh, protecting the environment would
• 27:40
  be an easy thing to do because there really wasn't an, much of an environment,
• 27:43
  a living environment to protect.
• 27:45
  And now we know the picture is very, very different.
• 27:48
  Yeah.
• 27:48
  And so they're saying until we can fully understand what lives down there,
• 27:53
  how these species interact, how these, uh, uh, uh, ecosystems function, and
• 27:59
  in addition, what kinds of goods and services do deep sea ecosystems provide
• 28:04
  us, humankind, uh, in terms of their impacts of, of planetary processes,
• 28:09
  uh, we're not gonna allow mining.
• 28:11
  We're not gonna vote for it.
• 28:12
  Yeah.
• 28:12
  We're not gonna, we're not gonna agree to it because we simply
• 28:14
  don't know what the risks are.
• 28:16
  We know what the risks are.
• 28:16
  We don't know the scale of the risk, and we don't know how bad it's gonna be.
• 28:20
  Um, and- Now, the interesting thing about this too is, is this has been, it
• 28:24
  seems like, uh, like these policies were, were there with the ISA for, for quite
• 28:28
  some time, uh, that you just mentioned, where, you know, you can't harm the,
• 28:33
  the bottom, you can't harm the deep sea.
• 28:35
  However, it seemed like just a couple years ago, before there was a change
• 28:39
  in the chair at the ISA, that things were leaning a little differently.
• 28:42
  They were leaning more towards exploratory mining, even though the,
• 28:46
  many of the countries said, "No, we have a moratorium." There seemed to be more
• 28:49
  countries who were, who were going to it.
• 28:51
  Uh, the chair at the time, uh, I, I don't remember the, the, the gentleman's name,
• 28:55
  but he was, he was kind of being Not to say outwardly accused, but allegedly
• 29:00
  making more deals about mining than, than worrying about the en- the environment.
• 29:05
  And that was a concern to a lot of nonprofit organizations, NGOs,
• 29:08
  and, and, and the environmental community and scientists and so forth.
• 29:12
  Um, and then now with the new chair, who's an oceanographer, uh, background
• 29:16
  as an oceanographer, it seems like these are being more held, uh, a lot
• 29:21
  closely, you know, to being like, "Hey, let's follow this. Let's make
• 29:24
  sure that this is what we're gonna be doing." Did you-- Have you noticed that
• 29:28
  switch as well with this new chair?
• 29:30
  Well, uh, to be honest with you, Andrew, not really, and
• 29:34
  that's a big disappointment.
• 29:36
  Hmm.
• 29:36
  The previous secretary general was Michael Lodge.
• 29:39
  Right.
• 29:39
  Um, he served as secretary general of the International Seabed
• 29:42
  Authority from 2016 to 2024.
• 29:45
  Um, he lost an election for a third term to Letícia Carvalho, an oceanographer from
• 29:50
  Brazil, um, who ran a very good campaign.
• 29:53
  The Brazilians were, were brilliant in terms of doing their- Yeah.
• 29:56
  It was a surprise, I think, to a lot of people that, that she got it, but
• 30:00
  everybody was like, "This is great." Yeah.
• 30:01
  Yeah.
• 30:02
  Exactly.
• 30:02
  Here, now- Yeah … finally a change.
• 30:03
  Yeah.
• 30:03
  Because basically, Michael Lodge was seen as, as heavily promoting deep seabed
• 30:08
  mining, and, uh, allegedly kind of working with the Metals Company to try to get,
• 30:15
  um, a, a fast track process to, uh, adopt regulations to allow deep seabed mining.
• 30:21
  And this was this kind of obscure provision in the Law of the Sea
• 30:23
  Convention called the two-year rule.
• 30:26
  Technically, it's in the 1994 agreement that amended the, the elements
• 30:30
  of the Law of the Sea convention.
• 30:31
  Uh, but basically, the Metals Company needed the country of Nauru, which
• 30:37
  sponsors it, uh, at the ISA, uh, to trigger a two-year rule so that it could
• 30:42
  then say to investors, "Hey, we now have a legal pathway to get a mining license, uh,
• 30:48
  in two years' time, one way or the other."
• 30:51
  And I won't go into the details of this provision.
• 30:53
  If you're interested in, it's paragraphs 15-- paragraph 15 of section one
• 30:57
  of the annex of the 1994 agreement.
• 30:59
  Look it up.
• 31:00
  But, uh,
• 31:03
  but, you know, it, it, it's, it's with- it, it's the kind of the, the treaty law
• 31:07
  that this, this organization runs under.
• 31:09
  And, um You know, the, um, the, uh, uh, uh, uh, an investigative reporter
• 31:16
  for The New York Times, uh, Eric Lipton, he's won a Pulitzer Prize.
• 31:20
  Uh, he's n- uh, well, I won't tell what he's doing now, but, uh, he's--
• 31:24
  he, he was one of the guys behind, uh, the exposé on, uh, well, maybe not an
• 31:28
  exposé, but, uh, the calculations that the Trump administra- that the Trump
• 31:33
  family has, um, uh, made about $2.2 billion in its first year of office.
• 31:37
  Uh, but at any rate, he was looking at the ISA.
• 31:39
  He, he went to the meetings of the ISA, he-- and so forth, and he uncovered
• 31:44
  somehow a cache of internal memos and documents and so forth, going
• 31:48
  all the way back to the, uh, early 2000s, if not earlier, of the ISA.
• 31:53
  And his conclusion was, and this is a, an article that he published in, uh,
• 31:56
  August of 2022, that in actual fact, the predecessors of the Metals Company
• 32:02
  had illegally obtained information from the ISA Secretariat- Right
• 32:06
  on where the best areas of nodules resided in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, this
• 32:11
  area- Yeah … in the Eastern Pacific.
• 32:13
  I remember hearing that.
• 32:13
  Um, and, um, you know, he put, he put those documents up online, uh, but
• 32:19
  separate from The New York Times website, uh, after publishing the article.
• 32:24
  And you can see some connections there, which, uh, uh, were, uh, less, less,
• 32:29
  um, how, how would you g- oh, I don't know, less savory, I think, uh- Yeah
• 32:33
  would be the right word.
• 32:34
  Yeah.
• 32:34
  It was troubling definitely to be like, look, we're supposed to be, uh, as,
• 32:37
  you know, uh, Dr. Andrew Thaler, who's a good friend of mine, has, no, you
• 32:41
  know, he's been involved in deep sea mining since his PhD, like in terms
• 32:44
  of, of looking at the issue and, and, and wrote a, a editorial of a deep sea
• 32:49
  magazine, Deep Sea Mining magazine.
• 32:51
  Mm-hmm.
• 32:51
  And he said, "This is the chance for us as a human species to do-- if we're gonna
• 32:56
  do something, to do it right, and to ensure that the protection of this zone
• 33:01
  that we don't know much about in, in, in, in all relativity here, like we, and we
• 33:06
  just don't know, that we could probably do it right and do it very carefully.
• 33:11
  And we have the chance to set, you know, the, the limitations and the restrictions
• 33:16
  right off the bat." But it seemed like that Uh, Michael Lodge was not doing that.
• 33:22
  It seemed like he was just more like, "Hey, let's just go and let's do this,"
• 33:26
  as you mentioned, you know, leaking some reports and, and things like that.
• 33:30
  And that, that, that's, that's definitely concerning, right?
• 33:32
  Yeah, it was.
• 33:33
  It was.
• 33:34
  And, you know, the whole, uh, process of negotiating the regulations which
• 33:39
  needed to be in place in order to allow mining to begin went into hyperdrive
• 33:44
  when Nauru triggered the two-year rule on behalf of the Metals Company.
• 33:48
  And eventually, countries rebelled after two years of three meetings, hundreds
• 33:54
  of pages of draft regulations, thousands of brackets, meaning the text that's
• 33:59
  not yet been agreed but been- Yeah
• 34:00
  proposed.
• 34:01
  Um, and after about two years of this, countries just said, "Enough
• 34:06
  is enough. We can't d- we can't maintain this pace. We don't have
• 34:09
  the capacity to do this," et cetera.
• 34:11
  It's extremely complex.
• 34:12
  Mm-hmm.
• 34:12
  And fundamentally, uh, there are some serious kind of, you know, concerns such
• 34:17
  as, yes, you know, we need to understand this ecosystem before we can possibly,
• 34:22
  these areas, uh, slated for mining, before we can possibly regulate them to
• 34:27
  prevent damage to the marine environment.
• 34:29
  Um, and we just don't have that understanding.
• 34:31
  And that was, that, that, that kind of unders- that, that kind of sense of, of
• 34:38
  where things were at kind of crossed the political groups and the- Yeah … various
• 34:42
  kind of coalitions, uh, as it were, uh, within the negotiating process of the ISA.
• 34:47
  Uh, and, um, you know, I think that's in part why Michael Lodge was voted out.
• 34:51
  Right.
• 34:52
  Right.
• 34:52
  'Cause he said, "Okay, look, you really wanna get this." Yeah.
• 34:56
  There were some countries that were actually backing
• 34:58
  that too- Yes … as well.
• 34:59
  Yes.
• 35:00
  But they would not have b- been, uh, they would not have risked themselves
• 35:05
  triggering the so-called two-year rule.
• 35:07
  They let Nauru do it on behalf of the TMC rather than, um Doing it themselves.
• 35:13
  But Norway, for example, was saying, "Yes, we need to get these regulations in
• 35:16
  place," because Norway was planning at the time to mine in international waters- Yes
• 35:23
  … off the Norwegian coast, but in an area considered under the Law of the Sea to be
• 35:28
  part of Norway's own extended continental shelf, and therefore Norway could
• 35:33
  mine there- They have the jurisdiction
• 35:34
  without getting permission from the, uh, uh, ISA.
• 35:36
  Right.
• 35:37
  But what Norway, I think, uh, was hoping for, and I think what Japan
• 35:42
  was considering as well at the time, was if we're gonna go mining, we want
• 35:46
  to mine, we want to be able to show that we're mining according to the
• 35:50
  regulations adopted by the international community of nations as a whole.
• 35:54
  Yeah.
• 35:54
  Uh, it's sustainable, it can be done, and therefore once the ISA has regulations
• 36:00
  in place, we can then use those regulations to go mining, and we're not
• 36:03
  gonna suffer market approbation and, and restrictions and, and so forth and so on.
• 36:08
  Well, and I think also, like, when you're the first country to do something
• 36:11
  that's not very popular with the public, there's a lot of pressure on
• 36:16
  that country, you know, just from the outward negative attention that they get.
• 36:21
  And I know some countries will do it no matter what because
• 36:23
  it's good for their country, but also some don't wanna do that.
• 36:27
  You know, some don't like that bad reputation.
• 36:29
  Um, you know, you can almost, if you look at, you know, something like whaling with
• 36:33
  Japan, you know, for, for decades and decades they fought to whale in the South,
• 36:37
  South Ocean, uh, Southern Ocean, and then they finally just said, "We're just
• 36:40
  gonna keep it within our borders because we keep getting this negative attention.
• 36:44
  It's, it's just not good for us," and, and so forth.
• 36:46
  I, I'm not saying that's the, the only reason, but I'm sure there
• 36:48
  were many other reasons, but- Yeah … that was a, a big part of it.
• 36:51
  Um- That's right … do you think that has to do with it, that, that international
• 36:54
  pressure to be like, "Hey, look, if we haven't agreed to this yet You know,
• 36:58
  there are gonna be some protests.
• 36:59
  There are gonna be some people like Greenpeace and so forth who are gonna be
• 37:02
  going and they're gonna be saying, "Hey, you shouldn't be doing this because it's
• 37:05
  not internationally, you know, agreed upon and we haven't even agreed upon the
• 37:09
  regulations to make sure we're protecting that environment." Uh, that's right.
• 37:13
  That's absolutely right.
• 37:14
  You know, one of the things, again, hardwired into the Law of the Sea,
• 37:17
  which is the treaty, uh, that actually governs, uh, how the ISAs operate, is
• 37:22
  that the ISA is to, is, is obliged to, quote, "act on behalf of," unquote, and
• 37:29
  quote, "for the benefit of," unquote, "humankind as a whole." Not for individual
• 37:34
  countries, not for companies that wanna make a profit, but for something
• 37:38
  that's going to contribute to the wellbeing, uh, of humankind as a whole.
• 37:42
  And this, again, is another dilemma, uh, facing negotiators at the ISA because
• 37:47
  there are some countries that do wanna get these mining regulations in place
• 37:51
  for themselves or the contractors that they sponsor to go mining, or at least
• 37:55
  to say for the private companies, "Okay, now we've got regulations in place.
• 37:59
  You can make your own sorts of judgments as to whether you can mine profitably
• 38:03
  or not, knowing what the regulations are gonna cost you." But the, the,
• 38:08
  the obligation is there to justify the mining, uh, on behalf-- as, as something
• 38:13
  that's going to be done on behalf of all of us and for the benefit of everybody.
• 38:16
  Yeah.
• 38:17
  And the-- anybody that looks at this industry at the moment and looks at
• 38:22
  the pressures that, that, that are, that are kind of, you know, trying
• 38:27
  to get the mining, um to, to, to, to move forward, to become a commercial
• 38:32
  reality, recognizes this isn't being done for the benefit of anybody but
• 38:36
  a handful of countries and a handful of companies that wanna make money.
• 38:40
  It's not gonna produce much in terms of- Right … global supplies of
• 38:43
  cobalt, copper, nickel, and, and, and, and manganese, which is, which are
• 38:47
  the four metals that are contained in these nodules that are recoverable-
• 38:49
  Mm-hmm … uh, economically.
• 38:52
  You hear lithium is in the nodules, you hear rare earth are in the nodules.
• 38:55
  Well, they're not.
• 38:56
  I mean, yes, you have trace elements of these, but all of the debate at
• 39:00
  the International Seabed Authority since 2019 when they first began
• 39:05
  considering the economics of, of the mining industry for nodules, um,
• 39:10
  rare earths have been considered a, a, a non-starter simply because- Hmm
• 39:14
  processing these nodules to extract the rare earth, rare earths would make it
• 39:18
  much more expensive to process the nodules for the manganese, cobalt, the cobalt,
• 39:23
  copper, and nickel primarily- Gotcha … which are the big money earners there.
• 39:26
  Um, and so again, that's stalling the process because, you know, countries,
• 39:32
  uh, negotiators negotiating in good faith on the basis of what was agreed
• 39:35
  in the 1970s, which is when the Law of the Sea negotiations first took
• 39:39
  place, are saying, "If we're going to abide by this principle, uh, and this
• 39:43
  legal obligation, we cannot start, uh, allowing mining to go forward now."
• 39:48
  Right.
• 39:48
  It's just, it's not going to pay out to humankind as a whole.
• 39:51
  You know, the idea- Yeah … back in the '70s was that the, the amounts of metals
• 39:56
  in the deep sea are so vast that the ISA, uh, authorizing mining for these metals
• 40:04
  would bring in a huge amount of money to the International Seabed Authority,
• 40:07
  which would then be shared out amongst all countries of the world, and in particular,
• 40:12
  uh, benefit developing countries.
• 40:14
  It would be a- Yeah … financial boom- Right … uh, to developing countries.
• 40:17
  And of course, today, we now know, looking at the economics of this industry, that
• 40:21
  in fact it's going to generate very little money, uh- Huh … particularly as in
• 40:26
  terms of royalty payments for the ISA.
• 40:28
  And those royalty payments will largely go to funding the ISA itself to keep on
• 40:34
  operating and, uh, to, uh, accommodate or meet an obligation of the International
• 40:40
  Seabed Authority that again, in, in the Law of the Sea Convention rather, from
• 40:44
  the, again, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, from the 1970s, that the, um, the ISA would
• 40:52
  have to pay developing countries who had substantial terrestrial mining economies
• 40:57
  for the same metals compensation for any loss of income to those countries as a
• 41:02
  result of the decrease in prices as a, uh, coming from, uh, seabed mining and
• 41:08
  seabed minerals being put onto the market.
• 41:10
  And so a lot of the analysis, and in fact we just, we just re- released
• 41:14
  an analysis, uh, uh, done by Koyaan.
• 41:17
  Uh, a fellow named Johnny West owns this company.
• 41:19
  He's been advised a lot of ch- uh, uh, uh, countries that are
• 41:23
  l- you know, negotiating, uh, uh, uh, arrangements or contracts with
• 41:28
  terrestrial mining industries.
• 41:30
  Um, he's calculated, and, and I've actually done similar calculations, that
• 41:34
  the ISA is likely to operate at a loss- Interesting … if it's gonna meet, uh,
• 41:38
  if, if they're gonna meet that obligation to compensate developing countries whose-
• 41:41
  Yeah … economies are substantially dependent upon mining the same metals.
• 41:45
  Right.
• 41:45
  And so, you know, e- economically it doesn't make sense.
• 41:48
  For the ISA in particular, it's, it's, it's, it's a huge risk.
• 41:52
  You can't, they can't guarantee they're gonna effectively protect the marine
• 41:55
  environment for harmful effects.
• 41:57
  Um, you can't mi- you know, you can't, you can't basically regulate an industry's
• 42:01
  impact on the environment if you don't understand what that environment is.
• 42:04
  Yeah.
• 42:05
  And, and, and then, and the metrics are pretty clear.
• 42:07
  You know, I mean, there's a lot that, you know, y- when, when you
• 42:09
  talk about baseline information and so forth, you know, uh, a- and, and
• 42:14
  connectivity and, and, and so forth, it gets a little bit complicated.
• 42:17
  But there are some simple metrics.
• 42:19
  When I get asked, for example, um, you know, "Okay, scientists say we n-
• 42:25
  always say we need more information.
• 42:27
  I mean, how much is enough?
• 42:28
  When do we know we have enough?" And I say, "Well, okay.
• 42:31
  There are some, you know, some fairly, uh, complex an- answers to that, but here's
• 42:35
  a simple one." And the one I ci- cite is, is this, that, um, and bear with me on
• 42:40
  this, but, uh- Of course … y-y-y- is, um, uh, Marielle Rabone and her colleagues
• 42:45
  at the Natural History Museum in London, uh, published a paper in 2003, I think it
• 42:49
  was Where they looked at the collections, uh, in natural history museums around the
• 42:57
  world of organisms that had been brought up from the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, the
• 43:03
  area of the Eastern Pacific where most of the mining interest currently lies.
• 43:07
  And they came up with, uh, 5,500-plus, uh, organisms, uh, that, um, that,
• 43:13
  that were geolocated to having been collected over the previous decades,
• 43:17
  not just in the last few years.
• 43:19
  Um, and, uh, of which only 500 had been tox- taxonomically identified.
• 43:25
  In other words- Hmm … only a 10th of these organisms, or less, had actually
• 43:29
  been id- well, they were roughly 10th, uh, 500-plus, uh, had been taxonomically
• 43:34
  identified, meaning there is some indication, some knowledge of how these
• 43:38
  organisms function, wh- whether they fee- filter feed or digest food, whether
• 43:43
  they're living in sediments or they're sessile organisms, meaning they attach
• 43:47
  themselves to the, uh, to the nodules and grow, such as corals and sponges.
• 43:51
  Um, and there's still another 5,000 to go.
• 43:57
  Yeah.
• 43:57
  Uh, the, the IS- the International Seabed Authority launched a, the, um, Sustainable
• 44:03
  Seabed Knowledge Initiative together with the IOC as part of the UN Decade of Ocean
• 44:07
  Science, I think in 2002, '22 rather- Yeah … at the UN Ocean Conference in, in Lisbon.
• 44:14
  And, and they set themselves a target of identifying, taxonomically
• 44:18
  identifying over 1,000 species by 2030 And so assuming they meet that goal,
• 44:25
  there's still another 4,500 to go.
• 44:28
  Um, and of course Robodeau and her colleagues, and they were looking
• 44:30
  at metazoan species, not all the microbes and everything or the, the-
• 44:33
  Yeah … biofauna or the microfauna.
• 44:35
  Um, uh, uh, uh, they estimated there's probably at least another
• 44:40
  6,000 yet to be discovered.
• 44:41
  Geez.
• 44:42
  Possibly many more.
• 44:43
  Yeah.
• 44:44
  And so here's a simple metric that, that, that you can explain to people
• 44:48
  negotiating these regulations at the ISA why they need to wait until they have a
• 44:53
  much better understanding, because there is still a whole range of species that
• 44:56
  would be vulnerable to the mining- Yeah
• 44:58
  that you don't know anything about.
• 45:00
  You don't know what, how they contribute to just the, the, the natural processes
• 45:05
  of, of the deep sea that, that- Yeah … can be crucial, and we have no idea.
• 45:09
  Yeah.
• 45:10
  And you don't know how they reproduce.
• 45:11
  Yeah.
• 45:11
  You don't know how, you know, what, what, what their young look like or- Yeah
• 45:15
  what the vulnerabilities they are, they, they would be to sediment in the
• 45:19
  water column at the larval stage, or if they're filter-feeding organisms-
• 45:23
  Right … how that they may clog those apparatuses, uh, and make it far more
• 45:27
  difficult for those species to survive.
• 45:29
  So- Agree … yeah.
• 45:30
  No, and, and every year, you know, the, the ISA meets twice a year to discuss
• 45:35
  and negotiate certain terms and items within, within the ISA documents.
• 45:41
  Um, they just finished a two-week stint of looking at, in, in, from in July,
• 45:45
  look, in, in Kingston, Jamaica, uh, looking at a lot of different things.
• 45:50
  Um, can you walk us through those me- Were you at the meetings and, and can you
• 45:53
  walk us through the- Yeah … the, the sort of the updates from those meetings?
• 45:57
  Yeah.
• 45:57
  Let me just pull up something on my screen here- Sure
• 45:59
  um, to remind myself, 'cause there was quite a bit- There was a lot, yeah.
• 46:02
  There was a lot being discussed there.
• 46:04
  But, uh, let me just see here So, well, one of the big topics, uh, on the agenda,
• 46:10
  it was actually a three-week meeting.
• 46:12
  Okay.
• 46:13
  Um, two, two weeks of the Council of the ISA, which is
• 46:17
  now meeting only twice a year.
• 46:18
  Up until 2025, it was meeting three times a year between 2022 and 2025.
• 46:24
  Gotcha.
• 46:24
  Um, or between 2022 and 2024, actually.
• 46:27
  Um, and then, uh, after the two weeks of the council meeting in July, there
• 46:32
  was the annual meeting, it's only once a year, of the Assembly of the ISA, which
• 46:36
  is the supreme body of the ISA, as it's called in the Law of the Sea Convention.
• 46:41
  But in reality, the, the, the-- all of the negotiation or virtually all
• 46:47
  of the negotiation for, on the, on the mining regulations and the royalty
• 46:51
  regime and so forth takes place within the meeting of the Council of the ISA.
• 46:55
  And it's a body of 36 countries, uh, of the 172 now, I believe, countries
• 47:02
  that are, that are members of the ISA that actually is charged with
• 47:05
  negotiating the, um, the regulations.
• 47:08
  But one of the biggest issue… Well, so, so, um, a-again, this year, as
• 47:14
  in the previous, the last few years, they, they made limited progress
• 47:19
  on negoti- on agreeing things in the, in the, in the regulations.
• 47:22
  Mm-hmm.
• 47:23
  Um, there are still well over 100 pages, I think it's about 200 pages, but again,
• 47:28
  lots of brackets and so forth, in the current draft text of these negotiations
• 47:34
  There is ano- there are ancillary documents, uh, of several hundred pages
• 47:38
  more, including draft standards and guidelines, um, drafts of, uh, uh, uh,
• 47:45
  uh, provisions that didn't quite fit into the current draft text but should
• 47:50
  be considered because countries are still proposing them, so they have to figure out
• 47:54
  where to put it in and so forth and so on.
• 47:56
  A- and, and probably as many brackets, meaning unresolved issues in the text,
• 48:02
  uh, this year as there were last year.
• 48:04
  Uh, there was a debate over setting a timeline, um, or a, a roadmap
• 48:12
  for completing the negotiations.
• 48:14
  Uh, and they've done that twice already and missed the deadline.
• 48:17
  Yeah.
• 48:17
  So they did a, did a roadmap in, uh…
• 48:19
  Well, they actually did a roadmap in, well, not a roadmap per
• 48:21
  se, but a timeline, um, in 2017 to adopt regulations by 2020.
• 48:27
  That didn't happen.
• 48:29
  Right.
• 48:29
  Uh, then Nauru triggered the two-year rule, which meant that they needed to
• 48:34
  adopt regulations in by 2023 or else consider giving a provisional license to,
• 48:41
  in this case, the metals company to mine.
• 48:43
  Uh, they didn't do either.
• 48:45
  Uh, they set a kind of a tentative timeline for 2025 and missed that as well.
• 48:50
  Uh, so what they've, what they were talking about this past, um,
• 48:54
  beginning last year was rather than a new timeline, a roadmap.
• 48:58
  Identify the key issues that need to be resolved and kind of try
• 49:02
  to pick them off one by one as a indication of, of progress, uh,
• 49:07
  toward eventually completing, uh, the regulations, or at least making progress
• 49:11
  toward completing the regulations.
• 49:13
  But they couldn't agree, uh, on the, um, on, on the key issues
• 49:17
  that needed to be resolved.
• 49:18
  Uh, and one of the more fundamental ones, uh, uh, uh, is the fact that are they
• 49:23
  negotiating regulations at the moment to, um, only from nodule mining, or are
• 49:30
  they negotiating regulations for the three types of ores that the ISA has
• 49:35
  developed exploration regulations for?
• 49:38
  So the other two types being the ores called polymetallic sulfides that you
• 49:43
  find associated with hydrothermal vents, or the ores on the sides of some seamount
• 49:48
  ecosystems, some seamounts rather in the deep ocean, uh, called, uh, ferromanganese
• 49:53
  cobalt crusts, uh, which is basically an ore that it's, it's kind of like
• 49:57
  a, an accumulation of, of hard- Right
• 50:00
  substrate on the surfaces of these, um, of, of the seamounts.
• 50:04
  Or a third option is are they negotiating a kind of framework set of regulations
• 50:09
  that would, would apply to any type of mineral deposits that would be mined in
• 50:13
  the international seabed area, including some that haven't yet been discovered?
• 50:17
  Right.
• 50:17
  Um, and that's a pretty fundamental, uh, uh, you know, difference of
• 50:22
  views amongst the states as to what actually they're negotiating the
• 50:25
  regulations for, what type of mining and, and where and so forth and so on.
• 50:30
  Um, but a really key issue, and this is at the council, uh, was the
• 50:35
  whole issue of unilateral mining.
• 50:37
  As you know, the United States is now, NOAA is now, uh, uh, uh, taking on
• 50:42
  applications to go mine in the- Yes … international seabed a- area, uh, in Uh,
• 50:48
  i- i- in a, in a way without getting the authorization of the International Seabed
• 50:54
  Authority to do it, um, in a way that we- that risks fundamentally undermining
• 51:00
  the Law of the Sea Convention itself and the whole structure of the international
• 51:03
  maritime order that's been established.
• 51:04
  Yeah.
• 51:04
  Which the US has not signed to, right?
• 51:06
  The, the- Yeah … UN.
• 51:07
  Yeah.
• 51:07
  The, the US has not ratified.
• 51:09
  Ratified, sorry.
• 51:10
  And so the US, the, the, the current administration, but, but has always
• 51:13
  cooperated with the ISA- Yes … up until the Trump administration.
• 51:17
  Right.
• 51:17
  Under the current administration, their argument is, and this goes
• 51:20
  back to the Reagan years, "Well, we haven't ratified the Law of the Sea
• 51:24
  Convention, uh, uh, and therefore we're not bound by all of its provisions."
• 51:28
  The United States accepts all of the provisions of the Law of the Sea
• 51:31
  Convention as customary international law, except for the seabed mining provisions.
• 51:37
  Mm. Um, and so therefore, it's not acting in contravention of international law.
• 51:41
  Now, that's an issue of some debate.
• 51:43
  Uh, but the reality is that the, if the Metals Company goes mining,
• 51:48
  and they're the, the first at the table here trying to- Yeah
• 51:50
  get a mining license from NOAA, um, uh, it will be operating in contravention
• 51:56
  of the Law of the Sea Convention.
• 51:57
  Uh, particularly given that many of the, the individuals and the companies
• 52:03
  that are part of the, the, um, the Metals Company framework, as it were,
• 52:08
  its subs- subsidiaries in, in Canada, well, it, its headquarters is in Canada.
• 52:13
  It's Canada, yeah.
• 52:13
  Subsidiaries in Canada.
• 52:14
  It's got subsidiaries in, in Singapore, in Australia, in the British Virgin Islands.
• 52:20
  Um, the, the other companies that are either bought into TMC, other
• 52:25
  companies, I should say, either bought into TMC, uh, such as Allseas, which
• 52:30
  is the company that owns the mining ship, without which TMC cannot mine.
• 52:35
  Yeah.
• 52:35
  TMC doesn't own a mining ship.
• 52:37
  It's this company, a Dutch-Swiss company called Allseas that actually
• 52:40
  converted a m- uh, uh, a, an offshore dr- drill v- um, oil- Yep … drilling
• 52:47
  vessel- Yep … uh, platform, uh, from Petrobras in Brazil to, to a mining ship.
• 52:51
  Um, and, and the companies that w- that TMC is stating that it needs
• 52:57
  to, to be a- to, to, to enter into contract with to process the nodules
• 53:02
  when they bring them up off the bottom and bring them up to shore.
• 53:05
  So there's one called PAMCO in Japan, another called Korea Zinc in Korea.
• 53:10
  Uh, and these are all companies based in countries which have ratified the
• 53:15
  Law of the Sea Convention and are under a legal obligation- Mm-hmm … to
• 53:19
  prevent companies, citizens, and their state agencies over which they hold,
• 53:24
  h- you know, have jurisdiction from participating in a mining operation
• 53:30
  in the international seabed area that is not authorized by the ISA, a
• 53:34
  so-called unilateral mining operation.
• 53:37
  Hmm.
• 53:38
  And so this is getting really complicated, and this was a big part
• 53:42
  of the discussion at the council.
• 53:44
  Uh, the ISA has actually, the council of the ISA has charged the secretary
• 53:49
  general and the legal and technical commission, its main advisory body,
• 53:53
  to do an investigation of whether the subsidiaries of TMC are going
• 53:58
  to be acting illegally if TMC gets a license from the US and starts mining.
• 54:03
  Um, and the TMC, through its basically proxy, which is- Yeah … Nauru, the
• 54:09
  country that sponsors it, um, went to court, uh, to try to block this
• 54:14
  investigation, and they were successful in doing so, albeit temporarily,
• 54:20
  but temporarily at a critical moment when it could have lost its license
• 54:25
  with the U- with, with the ISA.
• 54:27
  Uh, and so, you know, this was a major issue of discussion, uh, at the council.
• 54:33
  Uh, the council decided to, to continue with the negotiations with the, with the
• 54:38
  inquiry, um, in spite of the fact that TMC tried to actually kill the inquiry
• 54:43
  through going to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.
• 54:45
  It's kind of the- Yeah
• 54:46
  court of the oceans.
• 54:47
  It was set up to adjudicate disputes between, um, uh, states over
• 54:52
  implementation of the Law of the Sea Convention, and extraordinarily enough,
• 54:56
  it does allow… It on- only states can take cases to the International Sea,
• 55:01
  uh, to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, uh, which can issue
• 55:04
  binding orders, uh, with one exception.
• 55:08
  And that exception is contractors to the ISA, private companies or state
• 55:12
  agencies, uh, well, private companies.
• 55:14
  They- They can't bring it.
• 55:15
  They can bring, they can bring cases against the ISA to the
• 55:18
  seabed, to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.
• 55:21
  Okay.
• 55:21
  Civil society can't do it.
• 55:23
  Right.
• 55:23
  Environmental organizations can't take cases there.
• 55:25
  But the contractors can.
• 55:26
  Unions can't, you know, even companies can't, but
• 55:29
  contractors- Interesting … can.
• 55:30
  And so they use that, I mean, their, their, their lawyers are very astute.
• 55:35
  Yes.
• 55:35
  They have been able to manipulate the ISA, uh, with the, with the
• 55:39
  support of the secretary general and a number of countries, in
• 55:43
  particular, uh, in this case, Nauru.
• 55:45
  Um, they, they, they, they can, they understand and, and, and can exploit the
• 55:50
  weaknesses in the actual decision-making structure of the ISA, and there are
• 55:54
  quite a few, um, uh, going back to the '90s and even to the 1970s, hardwired
• 56:00
  into the Law of the Sea Convention.
• 56:02
  Um, and, uh, you know, they tried to do it, and they were, they basically The,
• 56:09
  um, co- the, the, the contract that TMC had through n- through its, its subsidiary
• 56:16
  Nori with the ISA was set to expire in June, uh, July rather, of this year- Yeah
• 56:20
  last month.
• 56:21
  Um, and they got it extended for another five years because of this
• 56:26
  kind of legal maneuvering that they were intending- Oh, interesting
• 56:28
  … to, to do at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.
• 56:31
  And, and so, so again, coming to the assembly meeting, one of
• 56:34
  the big debates there was about corporate capture of the ISA.
• 56:38
  You know, it, uh, is the ISA overly, um, uh, pliant to the interests of,
• 56:46
  of private companies in particular that want to go mining, you know?
• 56:49
  Yeah.
• 56:49
  And you look at the triggering of the two-year rule in 2021
• 56:55
  that, excuse me You know, TMC and its subsidiary Nori demanding to
• 56:59
  get a, a license in 2003, 2004,
• 57:05
  2005, and now going to the US to get a license and, uh, but wanting to keep
• 57:10
  its contract with the ISA to be sure that nobody else gets that contract.
• 57:16
  Yeah.
• 57:17
  Or nobody else gets that area- Gets that area … which they have a contract
• 57:19
  over, because that's the area that they wanna mine under a NOAA license.
• 57:22
  Yeah.
• 57:22
  Right smack in the middle of the contract that they have with the ISA.
• 57:25
  And of course, from our point of view is we, you know, we said to d- countries,
• 57:28
  "You should just cut them loose."
• 57:30
  You know, uh, do not allow, you know, either terminate the
• 57:33
  contract or do not extend it.
• 57:34
  And- Right … and, and, you know, this, this con- th- this, this, this
• 57:39
  company is, is, is manipulating this whole process in ways that are not
• 57:43
  beneficial to the ISA itself, are not beneficial to the integrity of the Law
• 57:49
  of the Sea Convention, and are certainly not beneficial to humankind as a whole.
• 57:53
  Um, and- Let me ask you this.
• 57:54
  How can, like, a country like the US, who hasn't ratified the UN Convention Law of
• 57:59
  the Sea, be able, like, how's, how can the metals company be able to work with them
• 58:04
  to be able to do, like, in international borders or even within their borders?
• 58:08
  Can anybody mine within their borders, their exclusive economic zone borders?
• 58:13
  Yeah.
• 58:13
  Yeah, that's the case.
• 58:14
  Under the Law of the Sea Convention- Okay … um, you know, it, it, they have
• 58:18
  full sovereignty over exploitation of mineral resources, i.e. mining, both
• 58:22
  within its 200-mile zones, their 200-mile zones, but also beyond that in areas of
• 58:28
  the so-called extended continental shelf.
• 58:30
  Oh.
• 58:30
  So you have the internet- I see
• 58:31
  so, and that's, I, I've forgotten which provision of the Law
• 58:34
  of the Sea Convention it is.
• 58:35
  Right.
• 58:35
  Yeah.
• 58:35
  But generally, that, that could be up to another 150 miles
• 58:38
  out beyond the 200-mile limit.
• 58:40
  Which, which increases a lot of the area, too, when you're looking at, like,
• 58:43
  a small island like American Samoa or, or Marian Islands or things like that,
• 58:47
  where they're targeting right now.
• 58:49
  Yeah.
• 58:49
  Yeah.
• 58:50
  Although, in that case, again, there's a debate.
• 58:52
  Russia and China have both challenged the US on this.
• 58:54
  Ch- the US, um, declared its extended continental shelf, uh, several years ago.
• 59:00
  Um, uh, and basically Russia and China, and some of the others actually,
• 59:05
  but Russia and China were the most adamant about this at the ISA meeting,
• 59:08
  saying, "Well, wait a minute, you haven't ratified the Law of the
• 59:10
  Sea Convention, so you get no right to an extended continental shelf."
• 59:12
  Right.
• 59:13
  You know.
• 59:13
  Yeah.
• 59:14
  If you don't agree to the… So yeah.
• 59:15
  Yeah.
• 59:16
  Yeah.
• 59:16
  It's true.
• 59:17
  Yeah.
• 59:17
  Can't have your cake and eat it too at this point.
• 59:19
  That's right.
• 59:19
  That's right.
• 59:20
  Yeah.
• 59:20
  Yeah.
• 59:20
  So, um, so with, with a lot of these, um- these provisions and these
• 59:25
  updates in, like, from these meetings.
• 59:28
  Where are we now within, uh, like deep sea mining?
• 59:32
  So according to ISA, my understanding is there's still a moratorium and a mo- uh,
• 59:37
  there's more momentum towards a moratorium than anything else after this meeting.
• 59:41
  Is that correct?
• 59:42
  Yeah, I think that's correct.
• 59:44
  Yeah.
• 59:44
  Yeah.
• 59:45
  Okay.
• 59:45
  I mean, the, the- they're still far apart on most of the key issues,
• 59:49
  the, the, the negotiators at the ISA.
• 59:51
  Uh, they're realizing it's not gonna be economical to mine.
• 59:54
  Um, you know, the ISA risks, uh, uh, uh, uh, operating at a loss.
• 59:59
  But more importantly, too, it's, you know, th- there are other things.
• 1:00:02
  There, there's, the, there's, the, there's, the, the, the, there's continued
• 1:00:06
  discussion of what the ISA should charge companies that want to mine- Yeah
• 1:00:12
  in terms of royalties.
• 1:00:13
  Right.
• 1:00:14
  And as well as, uh, some other things.
• 1:00:17
  So for example, one of the big topics of debate has been a so-called
• 1:00:20
  environmental compensation fund.
• 1:00:23
  Uh, the idea being that, um, uh, that, that if something goes wrong
• 1:00:29
  a- and the contractor goes bankrupt, uh, and the sponsoring state can't
• 1:00:34
  cover the damage, the cost- Yeah
• 1:00:36
  of the damage, uh, that, that's occurred, then there has to be a fund, a kind
• 1:00:40
  of a last resort fund established by the ISA, paid for by the contractors-
• 1:00:44
  Yes … or, you know, you know, funded by the contractors before any mining starts.
• 1:00:50
  And the view generally is twofold.
• 1:00:54
  One, that fund has to be well endowed, uh, because the ch- the, the, the, the,
• 1:00:59
  the potential for something to go wrong.
• 1:01:02
  Uh, well, three things actually.
• 1:01:03
  The first, the potential for something to go wrong is gonna be higher at the, as
• 1:01:06
  the industry starts up- Right … rather than, you know- Yeah … if, if it
• 1:01:10
  does start that they could iron out some, some of the problems or whatever.
• 1:01:14
  The second is That, um, the, the, the, but, but in the meantime,
• 1:01:21
  well, so s- but secondly, that would be a fund of last resort.
• 1:01:26
  Uh, and the, both the contractor and the s- the sponsoring state, who is
• 1:01:32
  equally responsible for, uh, together with the ISA, for ensuring that a
• 1:01:36
  contractor actually abides by the regulations, follows the rules, um,
• 1:01:41
  would be liable for any damages, um, and they have to be well insured.
• 1:01:46
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:01:46
  And this is, this is, I think one of the, one of the side effects of this
• 1:01:50
  is that from, from what I can see, is that a number of insurance companies
• 1:01:55
  are, have basically come out and said, "We're not gonna insure this industry."
• 1:01:58
  Right.
• 1:01:58
  "Because we have no idea what the cost of this insurance will be." It's true.
• 1:02:01
  "We don't know how, know, know how to price this." Yeah.
• 1:02:03
  You know?
• 1:02:04
  And the third element is, and this is part of this debate, is would this fund or
• 1:02:09
  the insurance, or both, only require, uh, uh, a, sort of a, to, to, uh, be able to
• 1:02:16
  clean up whatever damage occurred- Yeah.
• 1:02:19
  Yeah … or would it also require compensation to other ocean users-
• 1:02:23
  Yeah … or coastal communities or coastal states for loss- Yeah
• 1:02:25
  … economic losses to their businesses?
• 1:02:27
  You know, so you could see, for example, you know, whale watching
• 1:02:31
  industries- Mm-hmm … the fishing industry, you know, the, uh, um,
• 1:02:34
  turtle conservation societies- Yeah
• 1:02:36
  and so forth, you know, if these species or if the fish were impacted by the mining
• 1:02:40
  and this caused e- economic losses to these industries that have been built
• 1:02:44
  around these- Yeah … um, would it also compensate, have to compensate for those?
• 1:02:47
  And I think, and I think this is where what, what I said earlier,
• 1:02:51
  uh, to what Andrew Thaler said was, was like, this is where we can do it
• 1:02:54
  right, is to put in these, these…
• 1:02:57
  A- as much as we don't want, I, I don't want to see deep sea mining happen, we
• 1:03:00
  put in these provisions to make sure that the people who are gonna be affected
• 1:03:04
  the most are gonna be taken care of.
• 1:03:06
  I mean, we saw that with the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
• 1:03:09
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:03:09
  How many people it affected, how many industries it affected
• 1:03:12
  beyond the oil and gas industry.
• 1:03:15
  You know, we saw, you know, I, I lived down there for a little bit,
• 1:03:17
  and we saw, you know, fishers that were affected, ecotourism that was
• 1:03:21
  affected, tourism in, in general.
• 1:03:23
  Um, you know, it was a big proportion of- Yeah.
• 1:03:26
  Yeah … of that area.
• 1:03:26
  And it's still being, you know, we're still- Yeah … finding studies
• 1:03:29
  that show, that continue to show damage, and we're more, you know,
• 1:03:32
  almost 15 years, uh, past that.
• 1:03:35
  And so- Yep … uh, I, I think every regulation, if you look at
• 1:03:39
  any regulation, uh, that's written in Canada and US anyway, there's
• 1:03:43
  always a, a, a, a development fund.
• 1:03:45
  Like, there's always a fund to pay for damages.
• 1:03:47
  If you're gonna damage an environment- Mm … you're gonna have to pay for
• 1:03:49
  something that will make it better or make somewhere else better.
• 1:03:53
  Um, even then, there's always, there's always contradiction within there.
• 1:03:56
  But At least they have to, they have, they're responsible, they're held
• 1:04:00
  accountable to, to the payment of, of what damage they're gonna cause
• 1:04:03
  and who they're going to affect.
• 1:04:05
  Um, one of the things that I've noticed in, in, um, uh, the negotiations or at
• 1:04:10
  least even the public comment period for the American Samoa and Northern
• 1:04:14
  Mariana Islands, like there were a lot of people, like a majority of the
• 1:04:17
  people, like more than 90% of the people who said, "No, we don't want this."
• 1:04:21
  That's right.
• 1:04:22
  And, and, and they decided to extend, you know, the, the result is the government,
• 1:04:26
  is the US government decided to extend the, the, the area that they could mine.
• 1:04:29
  Like that- Yeah.
• 1:04:30
  Yeah … like almo- more than doubled it or even doubled it, which is insane.
• 1:04:33
  I saw your podcast on that.
• 1:04:34
  Yeah.
• 1:04:34
  It was crazy.
• 1:04:35
  It's insane.
• 1:04:35
  I didn't realize that either.
• 1:04:36
  Yeah.
• 1:04:37
  They're saying everybody like, you know, 68,000 people said no, and there's like
• 1:04:40
  three people who are like, "Yeah, we don't mind." And then they're like, "Oh
• 1:04:42
  yeah, we're gonna double the area." It's like, it doesn't make sense, you know?
• 1:04:45
  And it, it's showing that they're, they don't care about what the people
• 1:04:48
  say, and they're just gonna go ahead.
• 1:04:50
  And, and I think what's, what's really revealing here, Matthew, is
• 1:04:54
  what you mentioned, is it's, it's sh- it's showing that it's not
• 1:04:58
  gonna be very economical, you know?
• 1:05:00
  And I've heard other things where even if, if you start mining today,
• 1:05:04
  that those metals will not get into production for like another 50 years,
• 1:05:08
  like from a commercial standpoint.
• 1:05:10
  And so I just… And with the, the way the batteries are
• 1:05:13
  changing and evolving- Oh, yeah.
• 1:05:14
  Yeah … for EVs, it, it looks like we're not even gonna need these
• 1:05:18
  types of metals in the long run.
• 1:05:20
  Um, so it seems like, you know, maybe it had a chance 15 years ago, uh, when
• 1:05:25
  all these things were developing, but it seems like it's, it's kind of past its
• 1:05:29
  point of, of, uh, really like, like- Yeah
• 1:05:33
  of actually producing something, you know?
• 1:05:35
  Yeah, that's right.
• 1:05:36
  It's, it's do by date.
• 1:05:37
  Du-due date.
• 1:05:38
  Yeah.
• 1:05:38
  When they, when they call it the, you know, it's, it's-
• 1:05:39
  Yeah … it's expired, is what it is.
• 1:05:41
  It's expired.
• 1:05:41
  Yeah.
• 1:05:42
  It's like, it's like spoiled milk, you know?
• 1:05:44
  As a business plan, you know, it's, it, it's out of date.
• 1:05:46
  Yeah.
• 1:05:47
  It's expired.
• 1:05:47
  Yeah.
• 1:05:48
  Yeah.
• 1:05:48
  So like, so I guess the question- Well- … to you is, to, to ask f- to,
• 1:05:51
  for you is like the Metals Company, obviously they've had a lot of investment.
• 1:05:54
  They have this priority to try and mine and, and they're probably getting
• 1:05:57
  a little bit more, more desperate, you know, in terms of trying to do
• 1:06:01
  this by circumventing the ISA and, and so to speak, and go through the US.
• 1:06:06
  It's not very economical.
• 1:06:07
  What's the benefit for them?
• 1:06:09
  I, I guess they're gonna benefit from their shareholders and, and
• 1:06:12
  that standpoint, but from the long run, like, it doesn't seem like
• 1:06:16
  a very reliable plan in the long run for this thing to work out.
• 1:06:20
  Yeah.
• 1:06:21
  No, I agree.
• 1:06:21
  I mean, I think what I've heard a number of commentators say, and Victor,
• 1:06:26
  Victor Vescovo one, being one of them, um, uh, is that they think it's
• 1:06:31
  a pump and dump exercise basically.
• 1:06:33
  Mmm.
• 1:06:34
  That you, you, you pump up the price of the stock, uh, and then cash out and-
• 1:06:40
  Right … let somebody else deal with the, with, uh, the future of the, uh,
• 1:06:44
  of, of the company and the industry.
• 1:06:46
  Um- It's interesting … but, you know, and this is something that, that Barron
• 1:06:49
  has been accused of doing as well.
• 1:06:51
  Well- Yeah
• 1:06:51
  maybe not accused, but he, he bought into Nautilus Minerals- Yeah … um, for
• 1:06:56
  several tens of thous- uh, several, yes, a couple hundred thousand dollars back
• 1:07:01
  at some point, uh, before he was, uh, with, uh, TMC, and then, uh, previously
• 1:07:09
  called DeepGreen, and then sold his stock for something like $34 million.
• 1:07:12
  So- Geez … um, and- This is Barron Trump?
• 1:07:17
  Pardon me?
• 1:07:18
  This is Barron Trump, is that who you're talking about?
• 1:07:19
  No, no, no, no.
• 1:07:20
  G- Gerard Barron- Oh, Gerard Barron … the CEO- I'm sorry.
• 1:07:22
  Okay … T- uh, of, of TMC.
• 1:07:24
  Oh, gotcha.
• 1:07:25
  And so, you know, he, he and, and his colleagues, I mean, the, the people, you
• 1:07:30
  know, that are part of the management of the c- of the, uh, company, um, when
• 1:07:34
  they went public and they needed Nauru to trigger the two-year rule, uh, in order
• 1:07:39
  to be able to effect a reverse merger and go public on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange,
• 1:07:45
  uh, which they did in September of 2021, um, they had to get Nauru to do it because
• 1:07:52
  country-- investors were, uh, uh, as far as we could tell, investors were starting
• 1:07:57
  to get cold feet about the merger.
• 1:07:58
  The, the, the investors in the other company.
• 1:08:00
  It was called a Sustainable Opportunities Acquisition Company.
• 1:08:04
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:08:04
  It was a SPAC, a special acquisition company.
• 1:08:07
  Okay.
• 1:08:07
  Sustainable Opportunities, n-not acquisition.
• 1:08:10
  Um, and I won't go into the details there, but they launched, uh, at $10 a share.
• 1:08:15
  Right.
• 1:08:15
  And the share price steadily declined to, uh, uh, uh, about a dollar
• 1:08:20
  a share for a number of years.
• 1:08:21
  Uh, and then when the Trump administration started to, you know, uh, uh, indicating
• 1:08:27
  interest in, um, in, uh, uh, seabed mining, uh, even before that, uh, when,
• 1:08:33
  uh, you know, um, what's his name?
• 1:08:36
  Howard Lutnick, um- Yep … whose company's Cantor, uh, what is it?
• 1:08:41
  Cantor Fitzgerald, um, had been invested in TMC, and it became o- obvious that
• 1:08:47
  he was gonna be, you know, he, he was one of the chairs of the transition
• 1:08:50
  team for the Trump administration.
• 1:08:52
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:08:52
  And then, of course, became, uh, Secretary of Commerce.
• 1:08:54
  Um, the price started going up.
• 1:08:56
  And then, of course, Trump, uh, execu- the executive order comes out saying, you
• 1:09:01
  know, fast-track deep seabed mining, uh, uh, operations, et cetera and so forth.
• 1:09:05
  The, the, uh, the, the, the, the price of the stock has started to climb,
• 1:09:09
  got up to about $10 a share again, a little bit more, and then came back
• 1:09:12
  down again, and so forth and so on.
• 1:09:13
  So it's been in a lot of flux.
• 1:09:14
  Yeah.
• 1:09:15
  Yeah.
• 1:09:15
  Whether he'll… You know.
• 1:09:17
  But when he went public, when, when Barron went public, uh, he had 17
• 1:09:21
  million shares, uh, in the company.
• 1:09:23
  Uh, and, uh, so value was, uh, uh, $170 million.
• 1:09:28
  Geez.
• 1:09:29
  Um, uh, so a nice, you know- Yeah … a, a, a good, good profit there.
• 1:09:33
  When you take a company public, as I understand it, I'm no expert on this,
• 1:09:38
  uh, as a principal of the company, you can't sell your shares for- Sure
• 1:09:42
  a certain period of time- Right … 12 or 18 months or whatever.
• 1:09:45
  Um, and by the time that, that those dates came around, the, the share price
• 1:09:49
  was worth, uh, you know, uh, uh, a, a, a, a- Back to like- … to a tenth
• 1:09:52
  of the, of the- Yeah … what it, what it, what it was when it went public.
• 1:09:56
  Right.
• 1:09:56
  But, but coming back to what you said earlier, for me at least,
• 1:10:00
  I, I have trouble seeing how you can possibly mine nodules Right.
• 1:10:07
  In the sense of doing it in a sustainable or an environmentally friendly manner.
• 1:10:12
  Yeah.
• 1:10:12
  Because in order to even, you know, the, the, the production targets
• 1:10:16
  that are discussed at the ISA are 3 million tons dry weight per year, um,
• 1:10:21
  per, per nodule mining license area, um, over a 30-year contract, which
• 1:10:26
  is the, the, the agreed period- Yep
• 1:10:28
  that a contract would run.
• 1:10:29
  Um, basically it would require mining somewhere between 8,000 and 12,000
• 1:10:34
  square kilometers, roughly 5,000 square miles- Mm-hmm … of, of nodules.
• 1:10:40
  Strip mining an area of, of 5,000 square miles, 12,000 square kilometers
• 1:10:45
  in a, in a, in a contract area.
• 1:10:48
  Um, and the contract areas for nodules are, that are issued by the ISA are
• 1:10:53
  roughly 75,000, uh, square kilometers.
• 1:10:56
  They're a little bit less.
• 1:10:57
  You, you can get up to 75,000 square kilometers.
• 1:10:59
  Yeah.
• 1:11:01
  None of the nodules-- The, the nodules aren't evenly distributed,
• 1:11:04
  uh, across a, a, a claim area.
• 1:11:06
  They're in sort of strips or clumps or aggregations.
• 1:11:10
  And so you would end up mining, say several hundred to maybe a couple
• 1:11:14
  thousand, uh, tons here, and then another 500 tons there, and so forth
• 1:11:18
  and so on, until-- I'm sorry, a couple thousand square kilometers
• 1:11:22
  to 500 square kilometers, et cetera.
• 1:11:24
  Well, maybe not even that much.
• 1:11:25
  Yeah.
• 1:11:26
  I take that back.
• 1:11:26
  Anyway, but you, you would- Yeah … you would be getting it--
• 1:11:29
  You would mi- be mining across the, the, the claim area where the nodules
• 1:11:34
  were in the highest concentrations.
• 1:11:36
  And so spreading the impact out across much, if not most of the, the actual
• 1:11:41
  75,000 square kilometers, even if you're only mining 10,000 or 12,000- Right
• 1:11:46
  square kilometers total- Yeah … in a 30-year period.
• 1:11:49
  And what you get out of that, um, you know, setting the economics aside,
• 1:11:54
  uh, and the increased costs, uh, that would be, uh, uh, would, would be
• 1:12:00
  related to, um, royalty payments and environmental compensation fund and,
• 1:12:05
  you know, increased price for insurance and so forth, is you get a very small
• 1:12:09
  amount of metal, uh, based on current global production, uh, terrestrially.
• 1:12:15
  And let me just bring up those figures for you.
• 1:12:17
  I've done these calculations.
• 1:12:18
  I keep updating them, but the last time was in 2024.
• 1:12:23
  And basically, um, let's see here Bear with me.
• 1:12:29
  Yeah, no worries.
• 1:12:30
  So you, you would, if, if, if-- so mining 3 million metric tons,
• 1:12:35
  I mean, metric tons dry weight per year, um, would give you about 0.13%.
• 1:12:42
  Gives you about 30,000 tons, roughly speaking.
• 1:12:45
  And these are, you know, I'm, I'm being generous here.
• 1:12:47
  Yeah.
• 1:12:48
  Because you got to subtract the amount of, you know, the, the, their, their,
• 1:12:51
  their, the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the percentages in the nodules
• 1:12:56
  in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone are roughly very similar, plus or minus 20%.
• 1:13:01
  Gotcha.
• 1:13:01
  Um, they, they differ a lot when you go over to the Cook Islands,
• 1:13:04
  for example- Yeah … or the central Indian Ocean, some of these other
• 1:13:06
  nodule, uh, ar- areas where, where there's some interest in nodule mining.
• 1:13:10
  But basically you get 30,000 tons of copper, which is approximately
• 1:13:14
  0.13% of what is mined, was mined terrestrially in 2024.
• 1:13:21
  You would get, and I'm being generous here, 36,000 could get, let's put
• 1:13:25
  it that way, 36,000 tons of nickel, which is 0.8%, so less than 1% of
• 1:13:31
  what was mined terrestrially in 2024.
• 1:13:34
  And for cobalt, uh, you could get, uh, close to 2%.
• 1:13:38
  I calculate roughly 5,000 to 6,000 tons of cobalt out of
• 1:13:42
  three million tons of nodules, or about 1.9%, uh, of the, uh- Right
• 1:13:47
  of the amount that's mined terrestrially today.
• 1:13:49
  And if you actually-- And, and that's, that's, that's primary production
• 1:13:53
  terrestrially I'm talking about here.
• 1:13:55
  Yeah.
• 1:13:55
  If you add in the fact that a lot of the copper, cobalt, and nickel
• 1:14:00
  on the market today is actually recycled- Yeah … which means you're
• 1:14:03
  putting even a lower percentage of new material, uh, on the market, uh,
• 1:14:09
  based on what's currently available.
• 1:14:10
  So in the US, I, I've not found global, uh, statistics on this, but you-- looking
• 1:14:15
  at, um, US Geological Survey commodity statistics, uh, for the US, about roughly
• 1:14:21
  25% of the cobalt on the market is recycled or, or from scrap, 35% of the
• 1:14:26
  copper the same, and 54% of the nickel, interestingly- Wow … on the, on the
• 1:14:30
  market is either scrap or recycled.
• 1:14:32
  Scrap being leftover from production of steel, for example.
• 1:14:35
  You still got a whole pile of nickel left over and, uh,
• 1:14:37
  and so you're gonna reuse it.
• 1:14:39
  Um, so all this is to say it's a, it's a huge area that you're gonna impact on
• 1:14:45
  the seabed itself and just above it in, in a, in a, in a far larger area that
• 1:14:51
  will suffer some impact in the water column as a result of the discharge of
• 1:14:56
  the, um, of the wastewater sediment and mining fines that are pumped back off the
• 1:15:01
  boat after you bring the nodules up to the surface, um, a- and onto the boat.
• 1:15:05
  And, and, uh, you know, you're contributing a very small
• 1:15:12
  amount to global supplies.
• 1:15:14
  And why, so why, you know, what is the benefit- Yeah … of, of even any
• 1:15:21
  mining at all for nodules in- if you need to mine at least three million
• 1:15:25
  tons a year to make it economically- Viable … viable according to the ISA.
• 1:15:30
  Um, and those numbers have been challenged at the ISA itself.
• 1:15:35
  They were- Yeah … they were numbers that came up from, uh, that, that
• 1:15:37
  were the, the, the e- economics estimates of the ISA were done by
• 1:15:41
  a, a team at, uh, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Right.
• 1:15:45
  So MIT And so, you know, so yeah, uh, uh, some guys.
• 1:15:48
  And, and basically what they were trying to do is in effect make it look as,
• 1:15:53
  as attractive to the ISA as possible.
• 1:15:55
  Right.
• 1:15:55
  Uh, and one of, one of the ways they did that was to basically say, um, you
• 1:15:59
  could convert the manganese into a very high value manganese, something like-
• 1:16:03
  Yeah … 99 point something percent pure, but the market is limited.
• 1:16:07
  Right.
• 1:16:07
  And the price elasticity is huge.
• 1:16:10
  You know, after the third or fourth mining operation, putting that much
• 1:16:13
  high value manganese on the market is gonna d- decrease the price.
• 1:16:17
  Yeah.
• 1:16:18
  Uh, and, and- S- … and similarly with the economics, uh, b- but the, but the
• 1:16:22
  other-- the, the flip side of this is, yeah, and similar with the economics,
• 1:16:24
  if you are going to-- if you're looking at deep seabed mining to substantially
• 1:16:28
  contribute to global supplies, and I've done the same calculations for
• 1:16:31
  the, um Um, uh, the, um, uh, IEA, the, the International to- no, the
• 1:16:39
  International, ugh, IEA, Energy Agency.
• 1:16:42
  Yeah.
• 1:16:43
  Uh, I, I don't think I got that right actually.
• 1:16:45
  No, it's not the International… Anyway, we're looking at their
• 1:16:48
  projections of demand of cobalt, copper, and nickel for 2030 and 2040.
• 1:16:51
  And, uh, and you get even less, uh, uh, deep seabed mining would
• 1:16:55
  e- per, per mining license would contribute even less- Right … uh,
• 1:16:59
  uh, to, to global supplies there.
• 1:17:01
  So if you're looking-- So in order to actually substantially, uh, increase
• 1:17:07
  global supplies, and I take your point on batteries, for example.
• 1:17:10
  Yeah.
• 1:17:10
  They're phasing out cobalt- Right … and nickel.
• 1:17:12
  It's, it's lithium iron phosphate- Yep … has replaced manganese nickel
• 1:17:16
  cobalt or manganese nickel, uh, aluminum- Yeah … uh, uh, batteries.
• 1:17:21
  And now there's a whole s- new slew of technologies coming
• 1:17:23
  online or materials technologies- Yep … coming online for batteries.
• 1:17:26
  But if, so, but you would have to mine so much of the seabed and impact
• 1:17:31
  so much of the water column in order to make a significant contribution,
• 1:17:35
  not replace terrestrial mining- Right
• 1:17:36
  but just maybe add 10% or 20%, uh, to the amount that would be terrestrially
• 1:17:42
  mined, that it's, it, it, it's, it's first of all, it becomes
• 1:17:45
  even less economical because the impact on prices would be huge.
• 1:17:50
  Uh, but it's, it's also sacrificing so much of, of the seabed, so much
• 1:17:55
  of the biology and ecology of, of the deep ocean, uh, for limited- For
• 1:18:01
  limited, yeah … potential gain.
• 1:18:01
  You know, you think, "Okay, what is-" Just doesn't make sense.
• 1:18:04
  "What is the societal calculation here? What is the ethical
• 1:18:07
  approach here?" Exactly.
• 1:18:08
  "Do we really need to do this?" You know?
• 1:18:10
  Exactly.
• 1:18:10
  Um, you know, have we not learned from 300 years of the Industrial Revolution
• 1:18:14
  that going into whole new frontier areas and, and, and strip mining, uh- Yeah
• 1:18:18
  … these areas or clear cutting these areas without knowing what the ecological
• 1:18:22
  impacts would be, and only waking up 50 or 100 years later and saying, "Oops.
• 1:18:26
  Boy, that was a mistake."
• 1:18:30
  Now we're gonna try to reverse this.
• 1:18:31
  Oh, true.
• 1:18:31
  You know?
• 1:18:31
  So.
• 1:18:31
  Yeah.
• 1:18:32
  No, absolutely.
• 1:18:33
  Yeah.
• 1:18:33
  Absolutely.
• 1:18:34
  And the other thing is with the ISA is, and this is, this is-- I, I won't go
• 1:18:37
  into the detail because it's so esoteric.
• 1:18:39
  It, it's not that esoteric, but it's, it's hard to explain
• 1:18:42
  without a, a, a lot of time.
• 1:18:44
  Of course.
• 1:18:44
  But ba- but basically you have, for example Sitting on the council of
• 1:18:49
  the ISA, you have, uh, ab- about 20 countries that are sponsoring,
• 1:18:53
  uh, either themselves or private companies for exploration licenses.
• 1:18:58
  China, Korea, Russia, Japan, I won't say all 20 of them, but, uh, India,
• 1:19:02
  Germany, uh, France, UK, Belgium, Poland, Nauru, Tonga, uh, Cook Islands,
• 1:19:10
  Jamaica, uh, Singapore, et cetera.
• 1:19:13
  The ISA has got a real weakness in its decision-making process.
• 1:19:17
  Um, and I won't go into the detail here, but basically if… And this
• 1:19:21
  is the way-- And I've, and I've been going to ISA meetings for 12 years
• 1:19:24
  now, since 2014, and just seeing how the whole decision-making process
• 1:19:28
  work independent of its environmental, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, regulations,
• 1:19:33
  uh, in this case for exploration.
• 1:19:34
  But if they all want-- If the first companies go and make a profit, let's
• 1:19:39
  say it does become economical The e- the economic pressure, the, the, uh,
• 1:19:44
  uh, uh, on the ISA to open up more areas for mining, by private companies
• 1:19:49
  teaming up with developing countries to get explo- e- exploration licenses,
• 1:19:54
  by states deciding to get in, uh, uh, into the game, will be so great that
• 1:19:59
  it's impossible to imagine that the ISA could say to, to, to China, "Okay, China,
• 1:20:04
  you're gonna have to wait until 2031.
• 1:20:06
  Belgium, you're next.
• 1:20:07
  You get a license in 29, uh, 2029.
• 1:20:10
  Uh, UK, come back in 2038.
• 1:20:13
  You know, uh, Nauru, you know, uh, next year," et cetera and so forth.
• 1:20:18
  If they all want to get licenses, they'll get them.
• 1:20:21
  The political pro- pressure and in particular the economic pressure, if the
• 1:20:24
  big money pours into this industry- Yeah
• 1:20:27
  if TMC makes good money, gets bought out by one of the big name-
• 1:20:30
  Yeah … uh, mining companies, and they start pouring billions into
• 1:20:33
  developing the technology and billions into building the infrastructure
• 1:20:36
  to, to go do this, all bets are off.
• 1:20:38
  The economics will likely drive the development of that industry.
• 1:20:42
  Yeah.
• 1:20:42
  You know, the ISA may be able to place some constraints around the
• 1:20:46
  edges of that development, but basically it's gonna be, you know,
• 1:20:48
  money talks and regulations walk.
• 1:20:50
  Yeah.
• 1:20:51
  No, totally get it.
• 1:20:52
  Matthew, this has been absolutely fascinating.
• 1:20:54
  I think we could probably talk about this for another two, three more hours.
• 1:20:57
  But, uh, I'd love to invite you back, uh, to talk more about deep sea mining,
• 1:21:01
  but also just the deep sea in general.
• 1:21:03
  This has been a fascinating- Yeah … chat.
• 1:21:05
  Um, and we really appreciate you, you coming on the episode and, and
• 1:21:08
  being able to, uh, chat with us and give us updates on what's happening.
• 1:21:12
  I think it's, it's very informative to see, uh, the future or maybe not the
• 1:21:16
  future of deep sea mining, uh, based on these, on these new revelations.
• 1:21:21
  So thank you so much for, for joining us.
• 1:21:22
  We really appreciate it and looking forward to having you back on.
• 1:21:25
  All right.
• 1:21:25
  Thank you, Andrew.
• 1:21:26
  A, a pleasure, uh, talking with you and, uh, I, I'm be happy to come back anytime.
• 1:21:30
  Awesome.
• 1:21:31
  Thanks.
• 1:21:32
  Thank you, Matthew, for joining us on today's episode of the "How
• 1:21:34
  to Protect the Ocean" podcast.
• 1:21:35
  It was great to have you on.
• 1:21:36
  So much to talk about, so much to review and digest.
• 1:21:40
  I would love to hear from you, though.
• 1:21:41
  Like, from this interview, it looks like deep sea mining is
• 1:21:44
  not sustainable economically.
• 1:21:46
  We know the environmental impacts, or we don't know the environmental
• 1:21:49
  impacts, but we can predict that they're not gonna be good But just even
• 1:21:52
  looking at the economics of the whole situation, it doesn't look like there
• 1:21:55
  could be a lot of revenue generated.
• 1:21:56
  And you wonder, what's the point?
• 1:21:57
  Why is there such a big push to mine these metals when batteries are getting better,
• 1:22:02
  they don't require as much of the metals that are being mined from the ocean?
• 1:22:06
  They're gonna be made differently.
• 1:22:08
  Is there really anything that can be done to stop it, and do we really need it?
• 1:22:12
  There's a lot of questions around there, and I would love to hear from you.
• 1:22:16
  If you're listening to this on Spotify, comment.
• 1:22:17
  I'd love to hear your thoughts on deep sea mining and whether there's a future
• 1:22:20
  in it from an investor relations point of view and an economic point of view.
• 1:22:24
  Obviously, we kinda know the environment, but I'd love to hear
• 1:22:26
  your thoughts on that as well.
• 1:22:28
  And of course, if you wanna hit me up on my socials, ask me questions,
• 1:22:31
  those links are in the show notes.
• 1:22:33
  And of course, the website for Deep Sea Conservation Coalition will be in there.
• 1:22:37
  You can get more information on them and what they're up to, not only
• 1:22:40
  from a deep sea mining standpoint, but also from a deep sea trawling
• 1:22:43
  standpoint, which is a very important issue that needs to be addressed.
• 1:22:46
  So this organization has been working on it for a long time,
• 1:22:49
  and they're very knowledgeable.
• 1:22:50
  I think it's great to see Matthew, as a former fisher, now, you know, being
• 1:22:54
  a huge advocate for the ocean from a political and policy advisor standpoint.
• 1:22:59
  It's just, it's great to see how everybody who works in and around the
• 1:23:02
  ocean, or a lot of people who work in and around the ocean, want to protect
• 1:23:05
  it, and it just goes to show that fishers wanna protect it as well.
• 1:23:08
  So yeah, that's the episode for today.
• 1:23:10
  All the links for Deep Sea Conservation Coalition will be in here.
• 1:23:13
  Hopefully, Matthew will come back one day to update us on more of their work,
• 1:23:16
  especially from the trawling standpoint.
• 1:23:18
  Again, I would love to hear from you, but that's it for today's episode of
• 1:23:21
  the How to Protect the Ocean podcast.
• 1:23:23
  I'm your host, Andrew Lewin.
• 1:23:24
  Have a great day.
• 1:23:24
  We'll talk to you next time, and happy conservation.