More on Deep Sea Mining: This is the Economist's editorial, they rarely approve of the current President:
Donald Trump is right to go after metals in the deep sea Environmentalists should push the UN body that governs deep-sea mining to pass regulations to allow it
 Photograph: Tamir Kalifa/New York Times/Redux/Eyevine
May 1st 2025
Almost a league beneath the Pacific Ocean lies a treasure trove: 270m tonnes of nickel and 44m tonnes of cobalt. It got there particle by particle over millions of years, drifting down to form metallic lumps called nodules. These sit in a 4.5m-square-kilometre patch of seabed called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), 800km south-east of Hawaii, and can be collected using a robot that is part combine harvester and part vacuum cleaner. The metals could help meet long-term demand during the energy transition from fossil fuels, while reducing the human suffering and ecological damage that accompanies the mining of cobalt and nickel on land.
In 1994 a UN agency called the International Seabed Authority (ISA) was set up to manage the seabed in international waters for “the benefit of humankind as a whole”. It is a model for regulating other places, including the Moon. The ISA should have helped nodule collection to proceed in an orderly way, but under pressure from conservationists the agency has behaved more like a mechanism to block all exploitation. On April 25th President Donald Trump ordered government agencies to prepare to start issuing “commercial recovery permits” for areas of the seabed outside American jurisdiction, including in the Pacific, simply bypassing the ISA. The Metals Company, which owns a concession in the CCZ through its sponsor nation, Nauru, is at the front of Mr Trump’s deep-sea queue.
Cue outrage from environmentalists keen to protect the unique organisms that live in the CCZ at almost any cost. They observe that the deep sea is one of the last places on the planet not yet directly exploited by humans. Mr Trump is as unlikely to care about all those exotic creatures as he is about ignoring the UN: what matters to him is the security of America’s metal supplies. But even on environmental standards alone, there is a case to think that he is right to go after the nodules.
There is a strong argument that deep-sea collection will be better for the environment than mining on land. It will cause the release of less carbon dioxide and it will do less harm to rare species and precious habitat. Even if you dispute this, the longer the ISA stalls over rules to govern nodule collection for the benefit of all, the higher the risk that countries follow Mr Trump’s lead and go ahead without the agency’s say-so. That could trigger an unregulated rush to exploit the very ecosystem the environmentalists seek to protect.
When the ISA meets at its headquarters in Jamaica in July, members such as France, Norway, Canada and Britain, all of which have an interest in deep-sea mining, should agree on the best version of the mining code they can manage. This will not be perfect, and plenty of environmentalists will object, but it will allow mining to start on better terms than if Mr Trump’s race to the bottom is the only game in town.
Compared with, say, mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, activity on the seabed is straightforward to monitor. Any scientist with a few million dollars can send a camera down to investigate. As deep-sea collection proceeds, it will generate data that let ISA members tweak the rules. If the ISA does publish regulations that allow commercially viable nodule collection, then the United States should abandon Mr Trump’s end-run and come back into the fold.
Leticia Carvalho, a Brazilian oceanographer, is the ISA’s latest boss. She says the ISA retains “sole jurisdiction” over the international seabed. However, if the ISA and its members want to exert any influence, it is time for them to stop behaving like dogs in a manger. ¦
Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence.
Explore more Leaders Opinion
This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “Race to the bottom”
There's more information here: economist.com |
