Getting half from the rainforest and half from the depths would cause (1+30)/2 = 15.5 times as much destruction as just getting it from the depths.
(Assuming the numbers are correct; Gell-Mann Amnesia says that sadly it's reasonable cynicism to suggest we live in a world of misleading newspaper reports).
I thought the article was reasonably upfront about the limitations of the use of total biomass as a measure of ecological value. But the subtitle, unfortunately, omits those details.
There is a bit of "until next time" in all of this: nickel only covers a small part of the ocean floor, and humanity is not normally interested in exploitation down there, meaning that the vast majority of the seabed will remain intact. But we have to be aware as a society that the first time we extract a resource somewhere is almost never the last.
Deep sea mining has its own risks that aren't readily apparent. I'd like to see how long mining equipment at 12k ft under the sea lasts compared to land.
We have all seen the hot vents, the large worms/crabs etc that subsist on the large sulfur bearing hot springs. Large colonies of bacteria live on these sulfur based nutrients. There is a large ecology from bacteria all the way to large worms/crabs/etc - an amazing diversity. These sulfur streams also carry cobalt/copper/zinc - all crustal minerals. Most of these sulfides are soluble at very high temperatures. They start to precipitate as soon as they exit the vent = black clouds of diverse sulfides = bacteria food = supports the whole food chain.
These vents migrate and once they move away from the vent they cool, There is a zone of up to a kilometer or more within which the ecology lives. Once the live zone moves away = dead zone. The dead zone is full of the nodules and these zone are huge and dead. They can be mined for minerals = no need to mine the life zone.
The nodules are hard and dense, They get covered by silt and deep ocean detritus that is easy to break and mine with zero harm to life-forms, tube worms etc.
What is needed is a deep sea sieve with a separator/flusher connected to a conveyor to the surface. This what they do now. There are enough modules for mankind for 1000 years or more.
> They get covered by silt and deep ocean detritus that is easy to break and mine with zero harm to life-forms, tube worms etc. What is needed is a deep sea sieve with a separator/flusher connected to a conveyor to the surface.
What effect does it have to disturb/stir up all that silt? Isn‘t that going to create huge plumes that might take ages to settle? Could that be using up the little oxygen left at these depths?
We have no idea, and it really doesn't matter because it's going to happen anyway; even if we do know, nobody's going to not do it because it might wipe out some ecosystems.
We'll wreck everything, carelessly, like we've always done.
It isn't necessarily defeatist. We could expect human nature to prevail despite our best efforts to curb it, and use that expectation to be prepared with mitigations and backup plans.
We don't even take particularly good care of the parts of the earth we live in and directly need to survive, why are we going to get it right in a remote and hostile environment like that?
Sure, I'm all for trying, but I don't hold out a ton of hope. I'd love to be wrong.
> There are enough modules for mankind for 1000 years or more
At the current rate I suppose? But if we keep the current “growth” rate, we would consume 60 times more ressources by the end of the century… (I used 5% increase a year as an approximation, and we aren't that far off currently).
You make a valid point but if the last century has shown us anything it's that our global civilisation hates the ocean (all large bodies of water really, above or below ground) and we want them gone or poisoned and dead. So if this cost even 5% more I don't see it happening.
I used to think this way. I guess it is possible, in the long-term, that we might see some kind of social collapse due to a tragedy-of-the-commons driven depletion of some critical resource.
But I see no evidence this is close. Humans are flourishing more than ever before. And in the places that humans aren't flourishing, this is more due to social issues (inequality, deaths of despair) than to resource depletion. Moreover, stalling birthrates obviate any kind of Malthusian concerns for at least a generation or so.
People have been predicting resource-driven collapses for a long time now, since the Club of Rome and Donella Meadow’s Limits to Growth in the 70s. I haven't read Geoffrey West but it looks like he is in the same camp. A lot of very smart modelers and game theoreticians have come up with models predicting collapse. But they've been wrong so far when pressed to make falsifiable predictions (see the Simon-Erlich wager). And beyond falsifiable predictions, more empirical and less theoretical work also seems to show that models of resource-depletion and collapse are too simple to map on to what actually happens. See for example, Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons, about how societies around the world and through history have successfully managed common-pool resources.
So Im not worried about resource-depletion-driven collapse.
I think the thing that people miscalculate is that resource-depletion-driven collapse happens once. Everything the happens prior to the collapse is largely irrelevant, irrespective of how nice life was prior to the collapse.
Ultimately we live in a world of physical limits. Current society is predicated upon exponential growth, it is literally unsustainable by definition.
You're conflating two separate things. Yes, society can collapse multiple times. Yes, there can be innumerable resource-driven collapses. These are given.
What I'm referring to is the literal running out of the necessary resources to progress modern society in the same way that we have up until now. This is also a given. Take oil for example, and think of the vast amounts of plastic we rely on, which we currently have no equivalent alternative.
Of course, this is only relevant to modern society. This is not to say that humans cannot exist in a pre-modern society. It just won't be pleasant.
>Current society is predicated upon exponential growth
Is it though? There is no law in economics that I’m aware of that bars steady state. Exponential growth seems to be nothing more that a (possibly shortsighted) preference
Economic growth doesn't necessarily mean increased resource consumption, especially when you take into account services. For example, Having more doctors and fewer unemployed people improves your GDP, but doesn't require more food to feed more people
Your response is resource blind, and is part of the problem why we're in the predicament we're in. Think of the amount of resources that a doctor consumes in the services they provide, from all the medical equipment to the medicines and other devices that they administer to their patients.
There is an important distinction between using resources more efficiently and requiring more resources.
My point is that we may not be using resources to efficiently raise quality of life. Just adding more resources to that problem seems to ironically be blind to the process and goal.
I don't think you even need to make an efficiency argument.
More doctors can provide more benefit even if you gave them no medical devices and medicine. They can answer questions, diagnose, triage, ect.
There is a whole class of knowledge services in the economy that can scale without consuming more resources. Therapists, musicians, architects, educators, home-decoration consultants, ect.
I think that is an efficiency argument. Whether time or knowledge, the resource doesn’t go away. It just gets placed into a more useful direction. The distinction is how the utility is measured. They later point is that sometimes that definition of utility function can sometimes maximize economic measures while turning a blind eye to societal ones. I’d argue the former puts the cart before the horse, I.e., the economy should serve society and not ur other way around
Oh, I certainly agree there is an efficiency opportunity as well, I was just saying that it isn't strictly necessary to improve resource efficiency to have growth.
How do you think that having two doctors instead of one, where the 2nd has no access to tools is still a resource efficiency solution? It could be even better by having them share fixed resources, but that isn't strictly necessary to see benefit and economic growth (medical advice still adds value).
I don't have much to say about your second point, except that you can prioritize any measures you want. Growth of those measures, economic or social, are not bound by resource consumption.
I think most reasonable people would agree that economic growth for its own sake isn't important. Its value is simply as an imperfect approximation of other things that society does value.
>How do you think that having two doctors instead of one, where the 2nd has no access to tools is still a resource efficiency solution?
Because you are still more efficiently using that 2nd doctors time. Time is the resource in that case.
And I agree with your last point. The mail issue I’m bringing up is that economic growth, as traditionally defined, is a blunt tool at best to measure what we really care about: quality of life. I think there is a good argument that there is marginal utility past a certain point, if not outright negative impacts. We confuse the measure for the target.
>Because you are still more efficiently using that 2nd doctors time. Time is the resource in that case.
Yes, it is a more productive use of human human capital and time.
I think that time is a different resource than the parent poster was talking about when they spoke of resource-depletion-driven collapse, physical limits, and unsustainable growth.
I take that to mean they think physical material consumption must always go up if we want economic growth. This is why I tried to point out that economic growth can include many things that don't need raw materials.
Besides the fact that people like Robert Solow say the same thing, I feel like this comment misses the point. It’s begging the question.
It’s like pointing to people who are constantly trying to increase their salary as evidence that increasing your salary is necessary. When the measure becomes the target it ceases to be a good measure.
To answer your question directly, Japan has had roughly the same GDP for nearly 30 years.
The issue is not resource depletion, but more how we f* the planet by producing / consuming too much (heating it and killing biodiversity in miscellaneous other ways).
> this is more due to social issues (inequality, deaths of despair) than to resource depletion
You've missed the point if you think this is about resource depletion. There is an abundance of resources. It's the process of extracting them and refining them that is killing life on this planet (it's not just about humans).
Population, Kardashev scale, literacy rates, child mortality rates, sexual equality, the very definition of poverty, per-capita frequency of violent death, great-power war frequency, vaccine and medical sophistication, education rates, patent filings…
It takes a cantankerous set of blinders to see us as being in anything but a golden age. Much of the hand wringing arises precisely from the fact that we don’t want to lose what we have.
Projected to stop growing this decade and go down, with many fist world countries staring the barrel of socioeconomic collapse due to lack of new births to grow into the workforce to sustain the outsized outgoing aging population, while developing nations are seeing population booms that they cannot sustain as a result of many of the easily extracted resources already being plundered or polluted (Fish, Clean water).
So many of the countries that are losing are projected to soon start losing population (To name some big ones, Japan, South Korea, China countries and if US immigration faulters, USA as well) and face a demographic retirement crisis, while many of the countries that are projected to (keep) gain(ing) are doing so without the access to resources to acquire them.
You need blinders to look at the current population demographic and think "Yeah, this everybody is flourishing, this is going to work out great"
> Kardashev Scale
Not taking this seriously I see as we don't even rank, We're over 5 orders of magnitude from the first threshold, so it's not even like it's close. So a meaningless suggestion.
> literacy rates
No argument there, but if basic human literacy is "flourishing" to you I see the bar you've set and I've set for "Flourishing" are as stark as "Alive" and "Dead".
> sexual equality
Those rose tinted glasses are polarized as fuck
> the very definition of poverty
The goalposts they keep moving so that less people than ever qualify so as to appear as poverty rates have largely remained stable instead of ballooning 3 fold in the US as they slowly squeeze the middle class out? Yeah. Real Flourishing.
> per-capita frequency of violent death
Fair point here too, Has been on a general decline in the 2000's, and too soon to say anything about the 2020's. The first thing you've listed I'd agree as actually "Flourishing".
> great-power war frequency
You mean the continuous Great Power Proxy struggles that have killed millions with regularity across the world, forcing non-great powers to suffer the evils of war while those great powers sit back in comfort and throw shit at each other on twitter/TV/Newspapers? Yeah. Really flourishing. That MAD policy was a reaaaal step forward for life on Earth.
> vaccine and medical sophistication
Hey, another one you slam dunked.
> education rates
You seem to keep repeating the mistake at looking at averages of people that are just "educated" and not looking at the level of education. More people recieve AN Education today than ever before, even as a percentage of population, true, on a global scale. However, general performance across the board has been on the decline, as have academic and journalistic standards and integrity. From China to the US, the education systems are doing a worse and worse job of educating people, despite churning out more white papers and degrees than ever.
> patent filings
lol no. This is like measuring a mobile phone platforms app stores success by how many apps it has. If it has 100,000 shitty flappy bird clones, but no weather, social media, entertainment, finance, or other very common tools, that doesn't mean it's good or flourishing. People flooding the Patent office with bullshit just to compete on "Patents filed" is Cold War era childish oneupsmanship. Quantity is Not Quality.
> Much of the hand wringing arises precisely from the fact that we don’t want to lose what we have
Yes, and their wringing their hands because they're losing it. It takes a cantankerous set of blinders to look at everything they HAVE and assume it'll just continue being that way.
Yep, it is great in theory but reality is messy and expensive. I will probably eventually happen to some degree but a lot of groups that try to get into the space bite off more than they can chew.
Its like getting uranium and gold from sea water, technically fine but economically a nightmare.
Wired did an article on this earlier this year. It talks about the ecological concerns and the international politics surrounding these deep sea mining efforts.
One problem is the ore deposits contain radioactive elements, so it would need specialist processing otherwise the workers would all have radioactive dust in their lungs
Great. So, all those disposable vapes with rechargeable batteries that are stewn across the streets of most cities... I should stop wanting to kill the assholes that make/sell/use them?
This and other recent similar articles honestly sounds like someone paid a big bag of money to a very high profile PR agency, the one used by the Middle east dictators and BP, to rehabilitate ocean mining's image and lobby the public zeitgeist.
I wonder what else comes with the Platinum knife through our morality's heart package other than nudging multiple article mills and ai wranglers to massage out their press kits.
Hence it is extremely important to lay down regulations and compliance requirements for ocean mining from the get-go.
It has been established that this has the potential to be destructive towards the biosphere, but it can be reduced through due diligence and NGO oversight.
I wonder if the Regulatory bodies and the NGOs can sufficiently express the necessity and severity of these new regulations to the high levels of radioactivity in the metal nodules. There is also the concern that mining companies may not be able to relay their concerns about the proper handling of such metals to the Governmental and Regulatory bodies in a timely and above the board manner. Over dinner at the local Social Club. This might create some consternation.
hi, i’m the writer. this article, like all my articles, originated from my own curiosity. at no point was i pitched on this. the only PR pitches i’ve received about the subject over the last few years have been from environmental groups
I read your article this morning before coming across this post. I really enjoy the economist and thought your article was well-written. I think many folks, including myself, have become very cynical about content that isn’t overtly anti-industry.
I appreciate that you’ve come to this post to respond, especially in light of the mixed reviews your article seems to be receiving here. I also appreciate that you linked your sources here upon request.
That’s kind of you to say, thanks. I get the cynicism, and I worry about it. Humans aren’t getting out of climate change without all the tools we have in the box, including “big industry” imo
In the Economist's own words: "a very rough comparison is possible" which they then turn into a speculative headline ("may") and a bold statement that the comparison is correct "taking nickel from rainforests destroys 30 times more..." after the article specifically states it is incomplete.
What a bunch of tools. We shouldn't be listening to management consultant speak when it comes to underwater ecosystems. Not a single scientist quoted in the article. Disclosures from the company taken as truth and "very transparent". To think I used to look to this magazine for journalism.
Again: the whole article is premised on "deforestation bad, destroying marine ecosystems okay or less bad" based on... what? The mining company's assessment? Absolute rubbish. How much was this writer paid by the company?
Hi, I’m the writer. I was, obviously, paid nothing by TMC or any other company. If you’re interested I can link all the peer reviewed publications on which I based the calculations. The Economist's style is not to show our workings on things like this in copy, but I’m happy to do so myself
I don’t mind at all. The honest answer is I don’t really know. Broadly speaking it helps our voice sound authoritative and readable to not be breaking the flow of a piece up with lots of quotes and citations. But I can assure you I spoke to many people, and read many papers, in reporting the article
I'm aware. Please point to the part where I specified a 1 hour (or any) deadline. They're free to do whatever the damn well please quite frankly, but as they've made multiple assurances that said sources do exists, I was just explicitly stating that we would like those citations. EDIT: And while typing this, they delivered.
Incorrect. They were waiting for someone to explicitly ask. And I Did. See their comment. You're the one that's reading far too into this and need to chill.
The author was clearly making a point to make us ask explicitly even after we expressed concerns about their and their publications sources. Yes, I was annoyed by this. You however grossly misinterpreted as me being upset and demanding sources IMMEDIATELY, which wasn't the case. I made a single request to follow up on what the initial commenter in this thread said to reinforce that there are multiple of us in the comments that are highly skeptical of the claims in the paper, especially in light of a lack of byline or citations by the publisher.
The author then happily obliged in a timely and respectful manner and addressed my concerns. You, however, are the one that took issue with it.
I spoke to Kris van Nijen, Gerard Barron, Nathan Eastwood, Adrian Glover, François Mosnier, Pia Heidak, Peter Tom Jones, Mervyn Stevens, Alex Laugharne
Much appreciated. This goes a long way in alleviating concerns about this being a paid piece by TMC and gives some insightful credence into the claims about deep water sea life and potential impacts.
As I've apparently upset someone else in the comments by asking for citations, I just want to clarify that I didn't intend that as an attack. I'm just a bit incredulous that an organization with as much "prestige" and alleged journalistic integrity as The Economist doesn't - as a rule - cite their sources or byline their authors.
Perhaps it's just a different way of doing things, but that really doesn't sit right with me for a number of reasons, and as a result, I have a hard time taking anything it says without a spoonfull of salt/sources.
I see. So you’re positing, essentially, two reasons: 1) stylistically it’s annoying to read broken sentences, and 2) The Economist is, ostensibly, an authoritative source and the reader is assumed to, more or less, just trust that they’re doing their homework - and you are here assuring us that your homework was, in fact, done.
I’m not sure where you’re at, though I suppose it’s not unreasonable to assume the U.K., so this might be my US bias showing … but when I read something and the primary source is missing or there is insufficient citation (especially on a technical topic) I am immediately skeptical of the argument and my null hypothesis becomes that the piece is pushing a narrative. Perhaps that’s just cynical, but I’ve seen this phenomenon so many times where an article says X and doesn’t actually link the law (or court ruling or whatever) and when I go check it on my own it’s almost comically absurd for one to draw the article’s conclusion from the actual primary source.
Of course, I’m not accusing you of doing this at all. Thanks for being a good sport.
yeah you’ve got it. i’m based in London. i am fairly confident that our style can come across as arrogant. i don’t always ageee with it, though i can see its advantages. you’ll see i put a bunch of my sources below for you to check out if you like
I wouldn't say arrogant, really. The Economist definitely has an audience, which is in my view an educated urban professional who works in financial service, or maybe tech or tech-adjacent, or something on the periphery of government. So the tone is spot on, in my estimation. I'm probably just a cynical American and am too used to my news media intentionally lying to me, so don't take it personal if my question and/or explanation came off as rude. I did check out the links, thanks for providing them.
no worries at all, did not take it as such. and yeah, i guess i think just cos something has worked well for us for a long time, doesn’t mean it’s not worth thinking about how well it works today
Just chiming in, I think while your approach may have worked fine in the past, in today's world of half-truths and believable lies it's more important than ever to at least add your sources below like you did now. Because a reputation once lost, even if only by somebody misinterpreting an article, can be a struggle to regain.
I think about this a lot, and I think you may be right, but I am also not sure anyone ever had their mind changed by having sources cited. My main thought is that in an age of cheap machine generated text, we may need to be more transparent about the sourcing we offer, even at cost of style
I think the style could be preserved if the sourcing is done in the style you did here: an aside by the author separate from the main article.
It doesn't have to be paper style in the middle of the article, but it's good if it's present on the page (perhaps behind a button labeled "source disclosure" or similar)
I also think this increases the value I get from pieces like this, in more ways than whether or not my mind was changed. Sourcing might not influence mind changing in particular, but it'll help me if I want to dive deeper in the topic. Just yesterday I had trouble figuring out which paper was referred to by an economist piece by using google scholar queries- if there was a sources section, I'd have known instantly.
Does The Economist still have a statistics page at the back of the print magazine? It's been a while since I picked up the physical edition, but suppose we had a digital version of the magazine and you could footnote primary sources like you did in this thread and stash them at the end, after the stats summary.
it has one page of indicators in the back, yes. it would defo be too many sources to fit in print, but clearly digital makes this possible as a little clickable footnote at the bottom or similar. part of the issue is that one can't help but feel that you are competing with "attention apps", and so there's this deep incentive not to link out. my own view is that you can't succumb to this, and have to trust the reader with their own attention, but it is hard, still to push readers out of the site/app in any way
Well hold on a minute mate, this is an opportunity.
The draw of The Economist is that they are not the attention apps. The Economist could implement the most severe of editorial standards on select issues, wherein you do as I said upthread and bang the citation to a footnote at the bottom (or the last page in the print edition). The only readers who will "link out" are the people like me who you are talking to right now. Everyone else is going to see that the claim is footnoted and think "ah, of course The Economist footnoted this. It's The Economist".
I agree with you, and I hope we will go that way; free range organic high quality etc etc. but the lure of metrics affects our thinking too, in ways one cannot avoid wrestling with
Thanks for getting in touch! While (of course) you're not being directly paid by the company, it remains puzzling how the article comes off so glossy for TMC and seabed mining. This positive tone is present throughout the article and seems to deliberately highlight the case for mining while diminishing the drawbacks and risks. Taken in aggregate, a reader could be left with the impression this is a miracle technology with nearly no problems. A few selections:
"With the coming expiration, on July 9th, of an international bureaucratic deadline, that prospect looks more likely than ever." -- oh, those pesky bureaucrats! You've decided to present this as a "get going" or "next step" signal, but the reality may be the provisional approval comes with many more provisions that create further delays.
"That date marks two years since the island nation of Nauru..." -- this paragraph omits that there are Draft Regulations that exist and studiously avoids comment on the issues considered and potential ramifications for TMC. It also generously leaves out that Nauru decided to trigger a 2-year timed condition during the pandemic. As a commercially interested party they have a vested interest in weaker regulation. Basic readings from the Journal of Maritime and Coastal Law (fun!) suggest the ISA is concerned about the enterprise.
"(The firm itself says it hopes to wait until rules can be agreed)" -- Are you familiar with the phrase "talk is cheap"? This feels like a thumb on the scales for TMC as it exists with no assessment of TMC's trustworthiness on the topic.
"tmc’s plan is about as straightforward as underwater mining can be." -- translation: "this is simple stuff" but it's actually not. Even the literature you've cited is replete with caution after caution that this is relatively unknown territory and requires more research to understand. Another thumb on TMC's side -- straightforward is good, right? What are these scientists and bureaucrats going on about?
"a second ship which will ferry them back to shore for processing" -- You've picked "ferry" instead of "vessel/ship" which can imply small scale. It appears the destination is not known.
"will be released back into the sea at a depth of around 1,500 metres, far below most ocean life" -- that we know of, and, of course, that pesky life on the bottom is way below 1,500 metres.
"Three Chinese firms—Beijing Pioneer, China Merchants and China Minmetals--are circling too" -- So we're using TMC's numbers, but do we expect these other firms to have the same level of performance?
"It will also kick up plumes of sediment, some of which will drift onto nearby organisms and kill them (though research from mit shows these plumes tend not to rise more than two metres above the seabed)." -- What about the impacts from that sediment release at 1,500 metres? Further, who sponsored that MIT study (hint: quite a few people interested in deep sea mining)? There are multiple studies illustrating the problem of having science focused by sponsors with vested interests. You choose to present the results as-is without tempering them (e.g. "the first study", "an individual study") leaving it to the reader to think about how well developed this knowledge actually is.
"companies like tmc can be encouraged to choose locations where energy comes with low emissions. Indonesian nickel ore, in contrast, is uneconomic unless it is processed near the mines from which it was extracted" -- so TMC heeds this encouragement and is presumed to pick an environmentally responsible outcome at the cost of profits, but Indonesia does not have the same opportunity? A few years back Indonesia's polluting smelters didn't even exist. If this is a concern, could they not also be made clean? The article gives the benefit again to TMC and at this point one of th...
Hi there, my blood is fine! appreciate the cut and thrust, even if no one is watching. I would have preferred if you had started in good faith and critiqued the facts etc rather than jumping to "who is paying you"
I think I said it in another post, but my only inspiration for writing about this is that I have been following DSM for years (I first wrote about it here https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2018/03/19/si...), reading papers and talking to people. Based on what I knew when I started reporting this several weeks ago, I thought it worthwhile to try and compare the impacts of land vs seabed mining. I found a rough comparison was possible, and that's the heart of the piece
Might respond more fully later, but am clocking off for now. The final thing I'd say for now is that all the hype and narrative I see runs in the other direction, against DSM. Those who are against it are chock full of nonsense claims like this will disrupt the global carbon cycle or destroy fisheries, when basic science shows that it won't (or, if you don't like the casual use of certainty, that it is very very unlikley)
and having read through your comment in more detail, I will defo reply later. lots of interesting points. my email is halhodson at economist dot come if you'd like to ping me there just so that we don't loose the thread
Cheers, I'll check back tomorrow as I needed to get back to work. Glad you found the commentary interesting, if perhaps not overly useful. I've got a thesis paper coming up and this might have given me some research as well. I'm glad the discussion is beneficial rather than just another internet forum argument.
After another re-read some additional concepts popped up:
1) If Indonesian suppliers are presumably lower on the cost curve, deep sea mining will tend to displace (or prevent scale) from terrestrial suppliers outside Indonesia. Another poster ironically called this out: "why not do both [deep sea and deforestation damage]" -- this is almost precisely what would be expected to occur. The ecological footprint of an underground nickel mine is vanishingly small compared to the Indonesian method.
2) The word "may" is used in the title, but it's not present in the sub-title. The article boldly claims 30x life destruction as fact, but I remain curious if this is more than an invented ratio of convenience/novelty. To attempt a direct comparison, protect species legislation does not factor in the mass of the animals being protected. I concede in advance that humanity is historically terrible at caring about damage to life that does not directly inconvenience us, but our understanding of linked systems and the relevance of panarchy is slowly shifting that.
3) Dr. Glover is asked about the diversity of life on the ocean floor, but not about what they and their peers thought about the benefits / risks of deep sea mining. This feels convenient, particularly given Dr. Glover's research found that numerous organisms live on the nodules themselves. The article talks about dust plumes, but neglects to mention the more direct destruction of habitat. Likewise, no mention is made of the potential use of the zone as a feeding ground for whales being researched by Dr. Glover's peers.
Unfortunately I can't share my own details as mining is a very small industry -- I'm probably identifiable from even what I've shared. Having said that, I might reach out in a professional context down the line!
1) this underestimates the scale of increase in nickel supply we're gonna see in the next five years. last year 3.3m tonnes. by 2025 it's gonna be 5m tonnes, by 2030 11m. on current trends, the vast majority of that comes from Indonesia (today it does 54% of global up from 17% in 2018). if TMC can't compete on price, there's no alternative. small hard rock mines don't make any difference. it's CCZ vs Indo to first order. TMC says its floor price is $6000, meaning there's significant room to undercut. and that's before things like battery passporting and carbon pricing come into play, which drive up indo costs.
bear in mind that my view in face of relative enviro and emissions footprints is that car companies and countries should be supporting CCZ nickel and calling for moratoria on Indo nickel, though I don't expect this to happen any time soon
2) 30X is the absolute minimum, as it only accounts for plant biomass in Indo rainforest. the real number is probably closer to 150x. here are my sources for the calculation so you can rerun it yourself
- Sulawesi nickel per hectare from this investigative reporting https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/illegal-nickel-laundering (note: this leads to an estimate that is much too high. There is research going though peer review which shows there is much less nickel per hectare, which makes the biomass destruction numbers far worse for Indo nickel
3) I did ask him what he and his peers thought about DSM. I didn't quote him on it due to aforementioned space constraints. I would describe his position as broadly open, contingent on strict controls. He described deep sea mining as having been amazing for science, creating the incentive to do science in the CCZ that would never have happened otherwise.
And as for the idea that the piece doesn't mention direct destruction of habitat...that is the central idea of the piece
No mention is made of the potential use of the CCZ for whale feeding as it is incredibly speculative. see the original paper https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.180286. it explains why feeding is unlikely: there is almost no food down there
Thanks for getting in touch! While (of course) you're not being directly paid by the company, it remains puzzling how the article comes off so glossy for TMC and seabed mining. This positive tone is present throughout the article and seems to deliberately highlight the case for mining while diminishing the drawbacks and risks. Taken in aggregate, a reader could be left with the impression this is a miracle technology with nearly no problems. A few selections:
>>>> I would say that it comes off glossy because I have completed the reporting process and believe that the evidence I have collected points clearly to the sensibleness of DSM. again, TE style matters here, we are argumentative and analytical, not inverted pyramid news stories
"With the coming expiration, on July 9th, of an international bureaucratic deadline, that prospect looks more likely than ever." -- oh, those pesky bureaucrats! You've decided to present this as a "get going" or "next step" signal, but the reality may be the provisional approval comes with many more provisions that create further delays.
>>>> I used the word bureaucratic because that is literally what ISA is and I was tight on space, so had to find a short way to describe what is happening July 9th
"That date marks two years since the island nation of Nauru..." -- this paragraph omits that there are Draft Regulations that exist and studiously avoids comment on the issues considered and potential ramifications for TMC. It also generously leaves out that Nauru decided to trigger a 2-year timed condition during the pandemic. As a commercially interested party they have a vested interest in weaker regulation. Basic readings from the Journal of Maritime and Coastal Law (fun!) suggest the ISA is concerned about the enterprise.
>>>> draft regs which have existed for 12 years. I go into this in the forthcoming opinion article. Again, the reason I didn't go into it here is space. even though the piece went "online first" it still has to fit into its print slot this week
"(The firm itself says it hopes to wait until rules can be agreed)" -- Are you familiar with the phrase "talk is cheap"? This feels like a thumb on the scales for TMC as it exists with no assessment of TMC's trustworthiness on the topic.
>>>> I am familiar with the term. I spoke with Barron for quite some time about why they would like to wait (more legitimacy and buy in from broad church is good for them). but it is clear to me that if regs are not forthcoming they file an application. i felt this was summed up reasonably by "hopes to wait"
"tmc’s plan is about as straightforward as underwater mining can be." -- translation: "this is simple stuff" but it's actually not. Even the literature you've cited is replete with caution after caution that this is relatively unknown territory and requires more research to understand. Another thumb on TMC's side -- straightforward is good, right? What are these scientists and bureaucrats going on about?
>>> the technical act of collecting the nodules is relatively simple. it is the EIS and the comparison with alternatives that is complex
"a second ship which will ferry them back to shore for processing" -- You've picked "ferry" instead of "vessel/ship" which can imply small scale. It appears the destination is not known.
Sorry, I ended up reading too much today and left myself with no time to post before boarding a plane. I've bookmarked the page and will revisit it when I'm back home in a few weeks.
A quick one, though:
Ferry is indeed a verb. Oxford Dictionary provides a bit of colour, though, stating "a boat or ship for conveying passengers and goods, especially over a relatively short distance and as a regular service." We have a global shipping industry, not a global ferrying industry.
I'm not saying you're wrong in its use, but I am saying you're selectively styling your narrative in a convenient direction. I suggest you've done the same with "bureaucratic" -- while correct, is this word more commonly associated neutrally or negatively?
I've downloaded a few articles to read on the road, but for some of your queries regarding the case for holding off are reasonably described in the 2021 Economist article (https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/11/27/riches-lie-below...). Admittedly volcanic vents are sexier than boring abyssal plains, but the central theme remains: low understanding, decades to assess, experts are concerned.
Thanks for taking the effort to respond. While my own thumbing through notes hasn't helped my employer at all it's at least been an interesting refresher on the topic.
One last question, although I fully understand if you'd prefer not to answer. Do you own shares of TMC (or related ventures), and if not, why not? I've bought mining stocks on far less positive vibes than what you've described your own interest to be.
lol, hilarious question that betrays utter lack of understanding of how the economist or any serious news org works. of course i own no shares in TMC or any other DSM related company (unless they're somehow in the Vanguard world index). no one is allowed to hold shares in companies they write about. doing so secretly (we have to declare holdings) a firing offence i'd imagine
one of the big issues is conflation of CCZ with other parts of the ocean. we don't do that with land ("you can't log in Siberia cos there are rare creatures in the Amazon") so why do it in the sea? what's safe in the CCZ may be dangerous elsewhere. but the CCZ is singular. the bits marked for mining are amoung the most surveyed patch of deep seabed on planet. you think anything like this https://obis.org/dataset/bb0b9375-c875-4cb6-8889-6f783e1015b... happens in Indo rainforest?
"will be released back into the sea at a depth of around 1,500 metres, far below most ocean life" -- that we know of, and, of course, that pesky life on the bottom is way below 1,500 metres.
>>>> no, far below most ocean life is accurate. there is certainly life we don't know of below 1500m, but most ocean life, known and unknown, is above that mark. I know you already decried this research as "bought", but try explaining why the plume-destruction-by-turbidity findings do not matter https://news.mit.edu/2021/deep-sea-mining-sediment-plumes-07...
"Three Chinese firms—Beijing Pioneer, China Merchants and China Minmetals--are circling too" -- So we're using TMC's numbers, but do we expect these other firms to have the same level of performance?
>>> I do not say this, so know. very little is known about the Chinese firms
"It will also kick up plumes of sediment, some of which will drift onto nearby organisms and kill them (though research from mit shows these plumes tend not to rise more than two metres above the seabed)." -- What about the impacts from that sediment release at 1,500 metres? Further, who sponsored that MIT study (hint: quite a few people interested in deep sea mining)? There are multiple studies illustrating the problem of having science focused by sponsors with vested interests. You choose to present the results as-is without tempering them (e.g. "the first study", "an individual study") leaving it to the reader to think about how well developed this knowledge actually is.
>>> I suggest you actually engage with the data presented and explain what is wrong with it, rather than playing the man as you do here. what is erroneous or inaccurate about the MIT study?
"companies like tmc can be encouraged to choose locations where energy comes with low emissions. Indonesian nickel ore, in contrast, is uneconomic unless it is processed near the mines from which it was extracted" -- so TMC heeds this encouragement and is presumed to pick an environmentally responsible outcome at the cost of profits, but Indonesia does not have the same opportunity? A few years back Indonesia's polluting smelters didn't even exist. If this is a concern, could they not also be made clean? The article gives the benefit again to TMC and at this point one of the scales is moving through the table.
>>> yes, exactly, Indonesia does not have the same opportunity. shipping 1% nickel ore to renewable energy sources for processing would make the whole thing uneconomic, as I say in the piece. TMC's ore is already on a boat and has to go somewhere anyway. and, yes, you could attempt to make Indo's grid clean, but a) that doesn't help with the 30-90x biomass loss compared to CCZ nickel and b) it's really hard and no one thinks it will happen soon
Finally, and most amazingly, we get this gem two-thirds of the way in:
"The diversity of life is “very high”, says Dr Glover.
Yet in several respects, mining the seabed is more environmentally friendly than mining in Indonesia." -- what a pivot! Every paper cited repeats the same themes: "there's a lot of life down there", "we don't know enough about how important it is, or how to assess it", "more study is needed to understand this" and the article zooms right past to go: "Don't worry folks, we can go by weight per hectare!" No regulatory body in the world does this. Do you have any scientific backing for this ratio in environmental impact assessments?
>>>> unknowability and biodiversity are not the only metrics for environmental friendliness. I don't see what is wrong with quoting Glover on one metric, then pointing out that there are others. And, yes, we don't know much about what is down there. ...
My central concern is that the article you've written is by itself relatively benign. It uses an interesting ratio (biomass disturbed) and a bit of fluff from TMC's public disclosures and the nickel market in general. Where it can cause damage is that people will read it and draw conclusions:
1. Sea mining is less harmful (30x!!!) than terrestrial mining. This is not true. The simple answer is that we don't know yet. Trying to model environmental impacts in a marine environment is orders of magnitude more difficult than terrestrial activity. On the surface we can see, instrument, and to some poor extent predict. Underwater it's a whole different ball game. We don't know the receptors. We don't know the transport mechanisms. Unknown after unknown.
>>> I don't make that claim. I say it's 30x less destructive of biomass. and that is a massive underestimate as a) it only counts plants in the rainforest and b) the actual mass of nickel per hectare is lower than the estimate I used from investigative reporting in Indonesia. The real multiple is likely worse than 90x more biomass destruction on land. You say there is unknown after unknown, but this is a fact. here are the papers for you to verify for yourself
>>> it is also not true that it's harder to model impacts in the marine environment. it is far easier to survey, and there is far more EIS data about NORI-D than there has ever been about any Indonesian mine. Here's the NORI-D data https://obis.org/dataset/bb0b9375-c875-4cb6-8889-6f783e1015b.... you find me an equivalent dataset for a prospective nickel mine in Sulawesi. I'll tell you now that it simply does not exist
2. We need sea mining now! Our back is up against the wall climate-wise and sea mining is what will get us the batteries we need. We don't, we really don't. There's a reason Indonesia is now the dominant supplier (and current temporary reserve leader) -- their government is quite happy to strip their country down for metals and sell them. Market dynamics in isolation often mean that if there is contestable supply and a market participant has a clearly lower cost of participation new supply will not come on. The world is moving in the right direction in so many areas: pricing in externalities like carbon and deforestation, changing to alternate materials (iron based batteries, sand/physical batteries), increased recycling. We don't need to go trash a sea bed because some company says it's a great idea (and look at that NPV).
>>> I don't think we need to mine the CCZ because TMC says so. I think we need to do it because the enviro and carbon impacts are much lower per unit of metal. with battery passports and carbon pricing, CCZ nickel will just become more attractive. i hope that LFP etc goes as fast and deep as possible, obviously, but even if IEA is off by 2x the world still needs 175m tonnes of nickel to be mined by 2040. oh btw TMC says its floor price is $6000 per tonne. current price is about $20000
3. I (the reader) am educated, I know there are risks and unknowns, but for a short while the CCZ seems like an ideal solution to our problems. Maybe, we don't know. What we do know is that once this door is open it's not going to shut. It won't be confined to nickel. It won't stay in the CCZ. Mining as an industry has already learned this lesson -- strong regulation based on well developed science is in the public interest to ensure minerals are fairly priced for the long terms costs they incur.
>>> "What we do know is that once this door is open it's not going to shut" how on earth do you know this? and where in the piece do you see me arguing against regulation. I want ISA to finish the regulations it has been working on for 12 years so that mining can, cautious...
For country level power usage where space and weight are less of a premium lithium ion and lithium phosphate batteries aren't really the right fit. Pumped hydro, molten salt,redox or even just the new sodium ion all make more sense as they are much cheaper per KW/h. Also a lot of second hand car batteries are now appearing and getting racked for grid storage uses now. I am hopefully in the next few years we won't have nearly the explosion in demand for lithium, nickel and cobalt expected as alternates are released.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadSo why not doing both at the same time !
(Assuming the numbers are correct; Gell-Mann Amnesia says that sadly it's reasonable cynicism to suggest we live in a world of misleading newspaper reports).
There is a bit of "until next time" in all of this: nickel only covers a small part of the ocean floor, and humanity is not normally interested in exploitation down there, meaning that the vast majority of the seabed will remain intact. But we have to be aware as a society that the first time we extract a resource somewhere is almost never the last.
I guess the thinking is the ocean approach is "see no evil or the outcomes" .... especially since large amounts of the ocean are empty enough?
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=deep+sea+nodule...
We need to set up independent monitoring and enforcement before the Pulitzer-winning expose of mining trawlers blisfully wrecking through vents.
What effect does it have to disturb/stir up all that silt? Isn‘t that going to create huge plumes that might take ages to settle? Could that be using up the little oxygen left at these depths?
We'll wreck everything, carelessly, like we've always done.
Sure, I'm all for trying, but I don't hold out a ton of hope. I'd love to be wrong.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn1219
At the current rate I suppose? But if we keep the current “growth” rate, we would consume 60 times more ressources by the end of the century… (I used 5% increase a year as an approximation, and we aren't that far off currently).
I recommend you read Geoffrey West's book "Scale". Or at least watch his talk [0]
[0]: https://youtu.be/nxgHyPCCqaw
But I see no evidence this is close. Humans are flourishing more than ever before. And in the places that humans aren't flourishing, this is more due to social issues (inequality, deaths of despair) than to resource depletion. Moreover, stalling birthrates obviate any kind of Malthusian concerns for at least a generation or so.
People have been predicting resource-driven collapses for a long time now, since the Club of Rome and Donella Meadow’s Limits to Growth in the 70s. I haven't read Geoffrey West but it looks like he is in the same camp. A lot of very smart modelers and game theoreticians have come up with models predicting collapse. But they've been wrong so far when pressed to make falsifiable predictions (see the Simon-Erlich wager). And beyond falsifiable predictions, more empirical and less theoretical work also seems to show that models of resource-depletion and collapse are too simple to map on to what actually happens. See for example, Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons, about how societies around the world and through history have successfully managed common-pool resources.
So Im not worried about resource-depletion-driven collapse.
Ultimately we live in a world of physical limits. Current society is predicated upon exponential growth, it is literally unsustainable by definition.
What is conjectures in this thread is that it hasn't happened yet (debatable) but that doesn't mean it can only happen one more time.
What I'm referring to is the literal running out of the necessary resources to progress modern society in the same way that we have up until now. This is also a given. Take oil for example, and think of the vast amounts of plastic we rely on, which we currently have no equivalent alternative.
Of course, this is only relevant to modern society. This is not to say that humans cannot exist in a pre-modern society. It just won't be pleasant.
Is it though? There is no law in economics that I’m aware of that bars steady state. Exponential growth seems to be nothing more that a (possibly shortsighted) preference
My point is that we may not be using resources to efficiently raise quality of life. Just adding more resources to that problem seems to ironically be blind to the process and goal.
More doctors can provide more benefit even if you gave them no medical devices and medicine. They can answer questions, diagnose, triage, ect.
There is a whole class of knowledge services in the economy that can scale without consuming more resources. Therapists, musicians, architects, educators, home-decoration consultants, ect.
How do you think that having two doctors instead of one, where the 2nd has no access to tools is still a resource efficiency solution? It could be even better by having them share fixed resources, but that isn't strictly necessary to see benefit and economic growth (medical advice still adds value).
I don't have much to say about your second point, except that you can prioritize any measures you want. Growth of those measures, economic or social, are not bound by resource consumption.
I think most reasonable people would agree that economic growth for its own sake isn't important. Its value is simply as an imperfect approximation of other things that society does value.
Because you are still more efficiently using that 2nd doctors time. Time is the resource in that case.
And I agree with your last point. The mail issue I’m bringing up is that economic growth, as traditionally defined, is a blunt tool at best to measure what we really care about: quality of life. I think there is a good argument that there is marginal utility past a certain point, if not outright negative impacts. We confuse the measure for the target.
Yes, it is a more productive use of human human capital and time.
I think that time is a different resource than the parent poster was talking about when they spoke of resource-depletion-driven collapse, physical limits, and unsustainable growth.
I take that to mean they think physical material consumption must always go up if we want economic growth. This is why I tried to point out that economic growth can include many things that don't need raw materials.
It’s like pointing to people who are constantly trying to increase their salary as evidence that increasing your salary is necessary. When the measure becomes the target it ceases to be a good measure.
To answer your question directly, Japan has had roughly the same GDP for nearly 30 years.
But living in a world with industrial pollution is better than living in a pre-industrial world.
Quantify that (yes, I'm serious).
> this is more due to social issues (inequality, deaths of despair) than to resource depletion
You've missed the point if you think this is about resource depletion. There is an abundance of resources. It's the process of extracting them and refining them that is killing life on this planet (it's not just about humans).
Population, Kardashev scale, literacy rates, child mortality rates, sexual equality, the very definition of poverty, per-capita frequency of violent death, great-power war frequency, vaccine and medical sophistication, education rates, patent filings…
It takes a cantankerous set of blinders to see us as being in anything but a golden age. Much of the hand wringing arises precisely from the fact that we don’t want to lose what we have.
Projected to stop growing this decade and go down, with many fist world countries staring the barrel of socioeconomic collapse due to lack of new births to grow into the workforce to sustain the outsized outgoing aging population, while developing nations are seeing population booms that they cannot sustain as a result of many of the easily extracted resources already being plundered or polluted (Fish, Clean water).
So many of the countries that are losing are projected to soon start losing population (To name some big ones, Japan, South Korea, China countries and if US immigration faulters, USA as well) and face a demographic retirement crisis, while many of the countries that are projected to (keep) gain(ing) are doing so without the access to resources to acquire them.
You need blinders to look at the current population demographic and think "Yeah, this everybody is flourishing, this is going to work out great"
> Kardashev Scale
Not taking this seriously I see as we don't even rank, We're over 5 orders of magnitude from the first threshold, so it's not even like it's close. So a meaningless suggestion.
> literacy rates
No argument there, but if basic human literacy is "flourishing" to you I see the bar you've set and I've set for "Flourishing" are as stark as "Alive" and "Dead".
> sexual equality
Those rose tinted glasses are polarized as fuck
> the very definition of poverty
The goalposts they keep moving so that less people than ever qualify so as to appear as poverty rates have largely remained stable instead of ballooning 3 fold in the US as they slowly squeeze the middle class out? Yeah. Real Flourishing.
> per-capita frequency of violent death
Fair point here too, Has been on a general decline in the 2000's, and too soon to say anything about the 2020's. The first thing you've listed I'd agree as actually "Flourishing".
> great-power war frequency
You mean the continuous Great Power Proxy struggles that have killed millions with regularity across the world, forcing non-great powers to suffer the evils of war while those great powers sit back in comfort and throw shit at each other on twitter/TV/Newspapers? Yeah. Really flourishing. That MAD policy was a reaaaal step forward for life on Earth.
> vaccine and medical sophistication
Hey, another one you slam dunked.
> education rates
You seem to keep repeating the mistake at looking at averages of people that are just "educated" and not looking at the level of education. More people recieve AN Education today than ever before, even as a percentage of population, true, on a global scale. However, general performance across the board has been on the decline, as have academic and journalistic standards and integrity. From China to the US, the education systems are doing a worse and worse job of educating people, despite churning out more white papers and degrees than ever.
> patent filings
lol no. This is like measuring a mobile phone platforms app stores success by how many apps it has. If it has 100,000 shitty flappy bird clones, but no weather, social media, entertainment, finance, or other very common tools, that doesn't mean it's good or flourishing. People flooding the Patent office with bullshit just to compete on "Patents filed" is Cold War era childish oneupsmanship. Quantity is Not Quality.
> Much of the hand wringing arises precisely from the fact that we don’t want to lose what we have
Yes, and their wringing their hands because they're losing it. It takes a cantankerous set of blinders to look at everything they HAVE and assume it'll just continue being that way.
Its like getting uranium and gold from sea water, technically fine but economically a nightmare.
https://www.wired.com/story/deep-sea-mining-electric-vehicle...
https://www.ecowatch.com/deep-sea-mining-ocean-biodiversity-...
I wonder what else comes with the Platinum knife through our morality's heart package other than nudging multiple article mills and ai wranglers to massage out their press kits.
It has been established that this has the potential to be destructive towards the biosphere, but it can be reduced through due diligence and NGO oversight.
I appreciate that you’ve come to this post to respond, especially in light of the mixed reviews your article seems to be receiving here. I also appreciate that you linked your sources here upon request.
What a bunch of tools. We shouldn't be listening to management consultant speak when it comes to underwater ecosystems. Not a single scientist quoted in the article. Disclosures from the company taken as truth and "very transparent". To think I used to look to this magazine for journalism.
Again: the whole article is premised on "deforestation bad, destroying marine ecosystems okay or less bad" based on... what? The mining company's assessment? Absolute rubbish. How much was this writer paid by the company?
You keep saying that and not citing them. Please do.
The author then happily obliged in a timely and respectful manner and addressed my concerns. You, however, are the one that took issue with it.
starting point for abyssal biomass calcs - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2021.6710...
more on abyssal biomass- https://www.nature.com/articles/srep30492
plant biomass per hectare in Sulawesi - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03781...
nickel assessment in nori-d for per hectare numbers https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1798562/000121390021...
I spoke to Kris van Nijen, Gerard Barron, Nathan Eastwood, Adrian Glover, François Mosnier, Pia Heidak, Peter Tom Jones, Mervyn Stevens, Alex Laugharne
As I've apparently upset someone else in the comments by asking for citations, I just want to clarify that I didn't intend that as an attack. I'm just a bit incredulous that an organization with as much "prestige" and alleged journalistic integrity as The Economist doesn't - as a rule - cite their sources or byline their authors.
Perhaps it's just a different way of doing things, but that really doesn't sit right with me for a number of reasons, and as a result, I have a hard time taking anything it says without a spoonfull of salt/sources.
Thanks again.
I’m not sure where you’re at, though I suppose it’s not unreasonable to assume the U.K., so this might be my US bias showing … but when I read something and the primary source is missing or there is insufficient citation (especially on a technical topic) I am immediately skeptical of the argument and my null hypothesis becomes that the piece is pushing a narrative. Perhaps that’s just cynical, but I’ve seen this phenomenon so many times where an article says X and doesn’t actually link the law (or court ruling or whatever) and when I go check it on my own it’s almost comically absurd for one to draw the article’s conclusion from the actual primary source.
Of course, I’m not accusing you of doing this at all. Thanks for being a good sport.
It doesn't have to be paper style in the middle of the article, but it's good if it's present on the page (perhaps behind a button labeled "source disclosure" or similar)
I also think this increases the value I get from pieces like this, in more ways than whether or not my mind was changed. Sourcing might not influence mind changing in particular, but it'll help me if I want to dive deeper in the topic. Just yesterday I had trouble figuring out which paper was referred to by an economist piece by using google scholar queries- if there was a sources section, I'd have known instantly.
The draw of The Economist is that they are not the attention apps. The Economist could implement the most severe of editorial standards on select issues, wherein you do as I said upthread and bang the citation to a footnote at the bottom (or the last page in the print edition). The only readers who will "link out" are the people like me who you are talking to right now. Everyone else is going to see that the claim is footnoted and think "ah, of course The Economist footnoted this. It's The Economist".
I can't be the only one thinking this is pretty phenomenal.
"With the coming expiration, on July 9th, of an international bureaucratic deadline, that prospect looks more likely than ever." -- oh, those pesky bureaucrats! You've decided to present this as a "get going" or "next step" signal, but the reality may be the provisional approval comes with many more provisions that create further delays.
"That date marks two years since the island nation of Nauru..." -- this paragraph omits that there are Draft Regulations that exist and studiously avoids comment on the issues considered and potential ramifications for TMC. It also generously leaves out that Nauru decided to trigger a 2-year timed condition during the pandemic. As a commercially interested party they have a vested interest in weaker regulation. Basic readings from the Journal of Maritime and Coastal Law (fun!) suggest the ISA is concerned about the enterprise.
"(The firm itself says it hopes to wait until rules can be agreed)" -- Are you familiar with the phrase "talk is cheap"? This feels like a thumb on the scales for TMC as it exists with no assessment of TMC's trustworthiness on the topic.
"tmc’s plan is about as straightforward as underwater mining can be." -- translation: "this is simple stuff" but it's actually not. Even the literature you've cited is replete with caution after caution that this is relatively unknown territory and requires more research to understand. Another thumb on TMC's side -- straightforward is good, right? What are these scientists and bureaucrats going on about?
"a second ship which will ferry them back to shore for processing" -- You've picked "ferry" instead of "vessel/ship" which can imply small scale. It appears the destination is not known.
"will be released back into the sea at a depth of around 1,500 metres, far below most ocean life" -- that we know of, and, of course, that pesky life on the bottom is way below 1,500 metres.
"Three Chinese firms—Beijing Pioneer, China Merchants and China Minmetals--are circling too" -- So we're using TMC's numbers, but do we expect these other firms to have the same level of performance?
"It will also kick up plumes of sediment, some of which will drift onto nearby organisms and kill them (though research from mit shows these plumes tend not to rise more than two metres above the seabed)." -- What about the impacts from that sediment release at 1,500 metres? Further, who sponsored that MIT study (hint: quite a few people interested in deep sea mining)? There are multiple studies illustrating the problem of having science focused by sponsors with vested interests. You choose to present the results as-is without tempering them (e.g. "the first study", "an individual study") leaving it to the reader to think about how well developed this knowledge actually is.
"companies like tmc can be encouraged to choose locations where energy comes with low emissions. Indonesian nickel ore, in contrast, is uneconomic unless it is processed near the mines from which it was extracted" -- so TMC heeds this encouragement and is presumed to pick an environmentally responsible outcome at the cost of profits, but Indonesia does not have the same opportunity? A few years back Indonesia's polluting smelters didn't even exist. If this is a concern, could they not also be made clean? The article gives the benefit again to TMC and at this point one of th...
I think I said it in another post, but my only inspiration for writing about this is that I have been following DSM for years (I first wrote about it here https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2018/03/19/si...), reading papers and talking to people. Based on what I knew when I started reporting this several weeks ago, I thought it worthwhile to try and compare the impacts of land vs seabed mining. I found a rough comparison was possible, and that's the heart of the piece
Might respond more fully later, but am clocking off for now. The final thing I'd say for now is that all the hype and narrative I see runs in the other direction, against DSM. Those who are against it are chock full of nonsense claims like this will disrupt the global carbon cycle or destroy fisheries, when basic science shows that it won't (or, if you don't like the casual use of certainty, that it is very very unlikley)
After another re-read some additional concepts popped up:
1) If Indonesian suppliers are presumably lower on the cost curve, deep sea mining will tend to displace (or prevent scale) from terrestrial suppliers outside Indonesia. Another poster ironically called this out: "why not do both [deep sea and deforestation damage]" -- this is almost precisely what would be expected to occur. The ecological footprint of an underground nickel mine is vanishingly small compared to the Indonesian method.
2) The word "may" is used in the title, but it's not present in the sub-title. The article boldly claims 30x life destruction as fact, but I remain curious if this is more than an invented ratio of convenience/novelty. To attempt a direct comparison, protect species legislation does not factor in the mass of the animals being protected. I concede in advance that humanity is historically terrible at caring about damage to life that does not directly inconvenience us, but our understanding of linked systems and the relevance of panarchy is slowly shifting that.
3) Dr. Glover is asked about the diversity of life on the ocean floor, but not about what they and their peers thought about the benefits / risks of deep sea mining. This feels convenient, particularly given Dr. Glover's research found that numerous organisms live on the nodules themselves. The article talks about dust plumes, but neglects to mention the more direct destruction of habitat. Likewise, no mention is made of the potential use of the zone as a feeding ground for whales being researched by Dr. Glover's peers.
Unfortunately I can't share my own details as mining is a very small industry -- I'm probably identifiable from even what I've shared. Having said that, I might reach out in a professional context down the line!
bear in mind that my view in face of relative enviro and emissions footprints is that car companies and countries should be supporting CCZ nickel and calling for moratoria on Indo nickel, though I don't expect this to happen any time soon
2) 30X is the absolute minimum, as it only accounts for plant biomass in Indo rainforest. the real number is probably closer to 150x. here are my sources for the calculation so you can rerun it yourself
- 2g/m^2 biomass in CCZ see "Community Dynamics and Diversity" heading https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2018.0000...
- 30kg/m^2 of just plant life in Sulawesi. in the abstract. 303Mg/hectare https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03781...
- NORI-D nickel per hectare from this SEC filing - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1798562/000121390021...
- Sulawesi nickel per hectare from this investigative reporting https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/illegal-nickel-laundering (note: this leads to an estimate that is much too high. There is research going though peer review which shows there is much less nickel per hectare, which makes the biomass destruction numbers far worse for Indo nickel
3) I did ask him what he and his peers thought about DSM. I didn't quote him on it due to aforementioned space constraints. I would describe his position as broadly open, contingent on strict controls. He described deep sea mining as having been amazing for science, creating the incentive to do science in the CCZ that would never have happened otherwise.
And as for the idea that the piece doesn't mention direct destruction of habitat...that is the central idea of the piece
No mention is made of the potential use of the CCZ for whale feeding as it is incredibly speculative. see the original paper https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.180286. it explains why feeding is unlikely: there is almost no food down there
Thanks for getting in touch! While (of course) you're not being directly paid by the company, it remains puzzling how the article comes off so glossy for TMC and seabed mining. This positive tone is present throughout the article and seems to deliberately highlight the case for mining while diminishing the drawbacks and risks. Taken in aggregate, a reader could be left with the impression this is a miracle technology with nearly no problems. A few selections:
>>>> I would say that it comes off glossy because I have completed the reporting process and believe that the evidence I have collected points clearly to the sensibleness of DSM. again, TE style matters here, we are argumentative and analytical, not inverted pyramid news stories
"With the coming expiration, on July 9th, of an international bureaucratic deadline, that prospect looks more likely than ever." -- oh, those pesky bureaucrats! You've decided to present this as a "get going" or "next step" signal, but the reality may be the provisional approval comes with many more provisions that create further delays.
>>>> I used the word bureaucratic because that is literally what ISA is and I was tight on space, so had to find a short way to describe what is happening July 9th
"That date marks two years since the island nation of Nauru..." -- this paragraph omits that there are Draft Regulations that exist and studiously avoids comment on the issues considered and potential ramifications for TMC. It also generously leaves out that Nauru decided to trigger a 2-year timed condition during the pandemic. As a commercially interested party they have a vested interest in weaker regulation. Basic readings from the Journal of Maritime and Coastal Law (fun!) suggest the ISA is concerned about the enterprise.
>>>> draft regs which have existed for 12 years. I go into this in the forthcoming opinion article. Again, the reason I didn't go into it here is space. even though the piece went "online first" it still has to fit into its print slot this week
"(The firm itself says it hopes to wait until rules can be agreed)" -- Are you familiar with the phrase "talk is cheap"? This feels like a thumb on the scales for TMC as it exists with no assessment of TMC's trustworthiness on the topic.
>>>> I am familiar with the term. I spoke with Barron for quite some time about why they would like to wait (more legitimacy and buy in from broad church is good for them). but it is clear to me that if regs are not forthcoming they file an application. i felt this was summed up reasonably by "hopes to wait"
"tmc’s plan is about as straightforward as underwater mining can be." -- translation: "this is simple stuff" but it's actually not. Even the literature you've cited is replete with caution after caution that this is relatively unknown territory and requires more research to understand. Another thumb on TMC's side -- straightforward is good, right? What are these scientists and bureaucrats going on about?
>>> the technical act of collecting the nodules is relatively simple. it is the EIS and the comparison with alternatives that is complex
"a second ship which will ferry them back to shore for processing" -- You've picked "ferry" instead of "vessel/ship" which can imply small scale. It appears the destination is not known.
>>>> ferry is a verb
A quick one, though:
Ferry is indeed a verb. Oxford Dictionary provides a bit of colour, though, stating "a boat or ship for conveying passengers and goods, especially over a relatively short distance and as a regular service." We have a global shipping industry, not a global ferrying industry.
I'm not saying you're wrong in its use, but I am saying you're selectively styling your narrative in a convenient direction. I suggest you've done the same with "bureaucratic" -- while correct, is this word more commonly associated neutrally or negatively?
I've downloaded a few articles to read on the road, but for some of your queries regarding the case for holding off are reasonably described in the 2021 Economist article (https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/11/27/riches-lie-below...). Admittedly volcanic vents are sexier than boring abyssal plains, but the central theme remains: low understanding, decades to assess, experts are concerned.
Thanks for taking the effort to respond. While my own thumbing through notes hasn't helped my employer at all it's at least been an interesting refresher on the topic.
One last question, although I fully understand if you'd prefer not to answer. Do you own shares of TMC (or related ventures), and if not, why not? I've bought mining stocks on far less positive vibes than what you've described your own interest to be.
Best wishes.
one of the big issues is conflation of CCZ with other parts of the ocean. we don't do that with land ("you can't log in Siberia cos there are rare creatures in the Amazon") so why do it in the sea? what's safe in the CCZ may be dangerous elsewhere. but the CCZ is singular. the bits marked for mining are amoung the most surveyed patch of deep seabed on planet. you think anything like this https://obis.org/dataset/bb0b9375-c875-4cb6-8889-6f783e1015b... happens in Indo rainforest?
>>>> no, far below most ocean life is accurate. there is certainly life we don't know of below 1500m, but most ocean life, known and unknown, is above that mark. I know you already decried this research as "bought", but try explaining why the plume-destruction-by-turbidity findings do not matter https://news.mit.edu/2021/deep-sea-mining-sediment-plumes-07...
"Three Chinese firms—Beijing Pioneer, China Merchants and China Minmetals--are circling too" -- So we're using TMC's numbers, but do we expect these other firms to have the same level of performance?
>>> I do not say this, so know. very little is known about the Chinese firms
"It will also kick up plumes of sediment, some of which will drift onto nearby organisms and kill them (though research from mit shows these plumes tend not to rise more than two metres above the seabed)." -- What about the impacts from that sediment release at 1,500 metres? Further, who sponsored that MIT study (hint: quite a few people interested in deep sea mining)? There are multiple studies illustrating the problem of having science focused by sponsors with vested interests. You choose to present the results as-is without tempering them (e.g. "the first study", "an individual study") leaving it to the reader to think about how well developed this knowledge actually is.
>>> I suggest you actually engage with the data presented and explain what is wrong with it, rather than playing the man as you do here. what is erroneous or inaccurate about the MIT study?
"companies like tmc can be encouraged to choose locations where energy comes with low emissions. Indonesian nickel ore, in contrast, is uneconomic unless it is processed near the mines from which it was extracted" -- so TMC heeds this encouragement and is presumed to pick an environmentally responsible outcome at the cost of profits, but Indonesia does not have the same opportunity? A few years back Indonesia's polluting smelters didn't even exist. If this is a concern, could they not also be made clean? The article gives the benefit again to TMC and at this point one of the scales is moving through the table.
>>> yes, exactly, Indonesia does not have the same opportunity. shipping 1% nickel ore to renewable energy sources for processing would make the whole thing uneconomic, as I say in the piece. TMC's ore is already on a boat and has to go somewhere anyway. and, yes, you could attempt to make Indo's grid clean, but a) that doesn't help with the 30-90x biomass loss compared to CCZ nickel and b) it's really hard and no one thinks it will happen soon
Finally, and most amazingly, we get this gem two-thirds of the way in:
"The diversity of life is “very high”, says Dr Glover.
Yet in several respects, mining the seabed is more environmentally friendly than mining in Indonesia." -- what a pivot! Every paper cited repeats the same themes: "there's a lot of life down there", "we don't know enough about how important it is, or how to assess it", "more study is needed to understand this" and the article zooms right past to go: "Don't worry folks, we can go by weight per hectare!" No regulatory body in the world does this. Do you have any scientific backing for this ratio in environmental impact assessments?
>>>> unknowability and biodiversity are not the only metrics for environmental friendliness. I don't see what is wrong with quoting Glover on one metric, then pointing out that there are others. And, yes, we don't know much about what is down there. ...
-- deep breath --
My central concern is that the article you've written is by itself relatively benign. It uses an interesting ratio (biomass disturbed) and a bit of fluff from TMC's public disclosures and the nickel market in general. Where it can cause damage is that people will read it and draw conclusions:
1. Sea mining is less harmful (30x!!!) than terrestrial mining. This is not true. The simple answer is that we don't know yet. Trying to model environmental impacts in a marine environment is orders of magnitude more difficult than terrestrial activity. On the surface we can see, instrument, and to some poor extent predict. Underwater it's a whole different ball game. We don't know the receptors. We don't know the transport mechanisms. Unknown after unknown.
>>> I don't make that claim. I say it's 30x less destructive of biomass. and that is a massive underestimate as a) it only counts plants in the rainforest and b) the actual mass of nickel per hectare is lower than the estimate I used from investigative reporting in Indonesia. The real multiple is likely worse than 90x more biomass destruction on land. You say there is unknown after unknown, but this is a fact. here are the papers for you to verify for yourself
>>> it is also not true that it's harder to model impacts in the marine environment. it is far easier to survey, and there is far more EIS data about NORI-D than there has ever been about any Indonesian mine. Here's the NORI-D data https://obis.org/dataset/bb0b9375-c875-4cb6-8889-6f783e1015b.... you find me an equivalent dataset for a prospective nickel mine in Sulawesi. I'll tell you now that it simply does not exist
2. We need sea mining now! Our back is up against the wall climate-wise and sea mining is what will get us the batteries we need. We don't, we really don't. There's a reason Indonesia is now the dominant supplier (and current temporary reserve leader) -- their government is quite happy to strip their country down for metals and sell them. Market dynamics in isolation often mean that if there is contestable supply and a market participant has a clearly lower cost of participation new supply will not come on. The world is moving in the right direction in so many areas: pricing in externalities like carbon and deforestation, changing to alternate materials (iron based batteries, sand/physical batteries), increased recycling. We don't need to go trash a sea bed because some company says it's a great idea (and look at that NPV).
>>> I don't think we need to mine the CCZ because TMC says so. I think we need to do it because the enviro and carbon impacts are much lower per unit of metal. with battery passports and carbon pricing, CCZ nickel will just become more attractive. i hope that LFP etc goes as fast and deep as possible, obviously, but even if IEA is off by 2x the world still needs 175m tonnes of nickel to be mined by 2040. oh btw TMC says its floor price is $6000 per tonne. current price is about $20000
3. I (the reader) am educated, I know there are risks and unknowns, but for a short while the CCZ seems like an ideal solution to our problems. Maybe, we don't know. What we do know is that once this door is open it's not going to shut. It won't be confined to nickel. It won't stay in the CCZ. Mining as an industry has already learned this lesson -- strong regulation based on well developed science is in the public interest to ensure minerals are fairly priced for the long terms costs they incur.
>>> "What we do know is that once this door is open it's not going to shut" how on earth do you know this? and where in the piece do you see me arguing against regulation. I want ISA to finish the regulations it has been working on for 12 years so that mining can, cautious...
From fix, to accelerate.
Now if there were a plug about the titan/titanic the story would be complete.
No biggie.