Seafloor Mining Will Make Rich Countries Richer

Greetings, all! Thank you as always for continuing to read along, even when I ramble on about moon mining. I thought this would be a great opportunity to dive deeper into the more likely scenario we are facing, one of seafloor mining. So, let’s dive!

            I had never heard of the International Seabed Authority prior to this year. It is an intergovernmental organization, established in 1994, intended to oversee the equitable division of natural resources in international waters. On the surface it’s a worthwhile mission statement that blends environmental responsibility and social justice. But in practice, it appears as though environmental safeguards will be ignored while rich, exploitative countries continue to oppress, marginalize, and disadvantage poor, exploited countries. We’ll get to that shortly.

            First, a quick rundown of the science. There are four known major manganese nodule deposits in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, totaling more than 14.5 million square kilometers (roughly 1.5 times the surface area of Europe) (https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-3/mineral-resources/manganese-nodules/). These nodules range in size from a baseball to a soccer ball and contain manganese, iron, nickel, titanium, copper, and cobalt.

Manganese nodules can form through chemical precipitation and diagenetic growth. Similar to cloud formation where water vapor condenses upon a nucleus (a bit of dust, dirt, smoke, or salt), metals can precipitate out of sea water and condense around a nucleus (such as a bit of shell, tooth, or bone), growing into a metal-rich nodule. Limestone is another example of chemical precipitation, but calcium carbonate, rather than metal, is the resulting precipitate. In contrast, diagenetic growth occurs when metals dissolved in the pore spaces between sediment clasts condense around a nucleus on the ocean floor, rather than precipitating out of the water column.

There are billions of tonnes of ore contained in these deposits. The fact that these nodules lie in international waters complicates mining and production. Power has always been distributed unevenly geographically and throughout time. As we shift away from oil—a source of economic, political, and energetic power that has historically been sought by the U.S., Europe, and other countries wealthy enough to wage war for the fossil fuel—we will now see that future power lies in metals. If the world is going to run on electricity, the countries that mine the most metal and produce the most batteries will continuing dominating the global arena.

Enter the International Seabed Authority. As it turns out, the Metals Company, a private organization out of Australia, has already been granted permission to begin exploratory mining and data collection, without clearly building a pathway for smaller, poorer island countries to economically benefit from the extraction (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-15/deepsea-mining-pacific-ocean-nauru-metals/101438478). It is possible that Nauru, Kiribati, the Cook Islands, and other interested developing nations may come to benefit from a partnership with the Metals Company, but it seems likely that yet again, colonialism will win. The remnants of the British Empire will probably continue to disproportionally rake in the dough as they rake the ocean floor free of nodules and sea life simultaneously.

And we will gladly give them our dollars. Or mine the ocean ourselves! Americans will always choose cars over marine life. I am 100% in support of the electric buses and electric chargers in Weaverville, and I applaud the Office of Education, Chamber of Commerce, and all partners who made it possible. But everything comes at a cost.

In this county, it takes more than a year to get a CEQA license for a 10,000 square foot cannabis garden. The quantity of environmental analyses required to get a truly accurate picture of potential impacts to the ocean and the creatures therein would take upwards of five years, minimum. Seafloor dwelling organisms like worms, clams, and sea cucumbers will get killed in the direct area of extraction. Sediment clouds could bury benthic organisms further away, or worse yet, shade out plankton closer to the surface. Once the base of the food chain is gone, the ocean will die.

But of course, everyone who understands the climate crisis knows the ocean is getting hotter and more acidic. Moon mining or seafloor nodule extraction, all for the luxury of private vehicles.

What a wild ride.

Environmental Economics Part 1: The Tragedy of the Commons?

            Welcome back! Summer is sweet in California.

            The flowers are blooming—a fragrant perfume of red bud, poppy, lupine, orchid, paintbrush. The rich aroma of petrichor followed the rain. These priceless scents are precious to me like water. There are infinite fantastic natural wonders freely available to us.

            Environmental Economics is a relatively new branch of study, originating with our growing awareness of depleting natural resources and environmental services (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_economics). Basically, it seeks to give an estimated price to goods (like clean air and water) or bads (like pollution and contamination) that do not have a market value as they are not sold. Functioning within a capitalist framework requires that everything be translated to currency, quantified in dollar amounts. This allows decision-makers and stakeholders to weigh costs and benefits, compare options, and plan strategies and contingencies.

            A brief overview of a key economic concept: The Tragedy of the Commons partly explains our current climate catastrophe. Every individual shepherd is free to graze their flock in the grassy commons. No one is excluded. But as every individual’s flock consumes more grass, no grass remains. The individual gain comes at great cost to all others. The same concept holds true for overfishing.

            In climate collapse, the atmosphere is “the commons” because anyone is free to pollute it but we all reap the damage sewn. I am very much in support of the Polluter Pays Principle: the companies polluting must pay the cost of remediation, clean-up, abatement, prevention, etc. Regarding CO2 emissions, fossil fuel companies are largely responsible for selling a damaging product and lying about it, but we do nothing to hold them accountable. In my opinion, all fossil fuel companies should be financing our transition to renewable energy, whether through taxes or fines.

I believe unfettered, unmitigated, unbridled greed is the only reason why U.S. oil companies, knowing full well 40 years ago that climate change was worsening over time (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/), didn’t just reform themselves as solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal companies, phasing steadily over the last four decades. Fearing future loss of profit, they launched massive misinformation campaigns, well-funded by deep pockets, hiring the same consultants as the tobacco industry. If we burn, ExxonMobil won’t help us. We must demand they shoulder the financial burden of the problems they created and exacerbated with their deception.

This short article had an optimistic take, suggesting we actually aren’t doomed to tragedy: https://ccs.sciences.ncsu.edu/climate-change-and-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/. Essentially, the author notes that in a true commons, one individual’s choice to not graze their flock allows another shepherd to seize the opportunity, and the grass still continues to degrade. But in climate change, reducing one’s CO2 emissions at any level (personally, locally, regionally, nationally) does not incentivize others to emit more. Reductions always accrue universal benefits. If we go renewable, we won’t incentivize China and India to pollute more. They are seeking to improve air quality as we did. Likely the reduction in U.S. emissions combined with our advancements in technology will inspire (or in certain instances, put geopolitical pressure on) other nations to reduce emissions as well. I’ll gently remind leaders that China generates 3 times more renewable energy than we do.

Sometimes, as I enjoy the bright red brick buildings of historic Main Street, I daydream of the Weaverville of tomorrow. I picture an electric streetcar going up and down the main drag, from Trinity Brew Co. to TAPAC, which will have a multi-level parking garage in the space between the theater and the Redding Rancheria Trinity Health Campus. I envision the multi-use path from TAPAC to Lee Fong Park, lots of bicycles riding safely, with only a few individual vehicles on the road traveling from the coast inland or vice versa. We have electrical vehicle chargers already! Let’s keep it up and pray we don’t reach dead pool.

I don’t mean to end so grimly. It’s just my realism.

Instead, I offer deep gratitude to the many wonderful friends and acquaintances I have met and the opportunities they have graciously provided, to those who have written kind words of encouragement in the paper, and as always, to the Trinity Journal for helping me share these ideas and dreams.

Energy: A Crash Course. Generation and Consumption.

Welcome back, readers! It’s time for a crash course in energy.

For review: 1 kilowatt (kW) = 1,000 watts. 1 megawatt = 1,000,000 (1 million) watts. 1 gigawatt = 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) watts.

Energy is the ability to do work. Humans can perform work, and we do so by metabolizing food for kinetic energy. But we are quite limited in our output, producing only 100 watts at rest, 300-400 watts over sustained periods of time, and up to 2 kW in short bursts, like sprinting (http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph240/labonta1/). For most of our existence on this planet, we were hunter gatherers, chasing game and foraging. When we adopted an agrarian lifestyle roughly 10,000 years ago, we domesticated animals to assist us in performing labor for the purposes of planting and harvesting crops. Draught animals like horses and oxen can sustain 600-1,000 watts of power on average, also with bursts up to 2 kW (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/draught-animal). An improvement upon the limits of human labor, to be sure, but a small improvement.

Then we invented windmills about 3,700 years ago, mostly for crushing and milling grain and pumping water (www.historyofwindmills.com). Capturing wind is ancient technology. Humans have literally sailed the world for millennia, and traditional windmills generated about 14kW of usable power, which allowed for more food production and spurred population growth (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/how-does-the-power-output-of-a-traditional-windmill-compare-to-a-modern-wind-turbine/amp/).

The invention of the (coal-powered) steam engine marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and completely altered the way humans lived and worked. Steam had been used for various purposes in previous centuries, but became a commercially successful technology capable of performing mechanical work in 1712 due to developments made by Thomas Newcomen, and later, improvements made by James Watt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_steam_engine). Suddenly we had engines cranking out up to 1800 kW of power! Steamships appeared, then steam locomotives crisscrossed industrialized nations, and steam-powered machinery became commonplace in factories. Our consumption of coal fueled our growth, and our growth fueled our consumption.

Most electricity in the U.S. (and the world) is produced by turbine generators which use a fluid (air, steam, water, combustion gases) to move a series of blades mounted on a motor shaft (https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/how-electricity-is-generated.php). The generator then converts the kinetic energy of the moving blades into electrical energy. Power plants burn coal or natural gas to generate steam to turn the turbine. Nuclear power plants generate heat and steam through the process of fission (atoms splitting apart), which then turns the turbine. Hydroelectric dams turn the turbine with the power of flowing water. Modern day wind turbines use the energy from air currents. It’s the same design recycled again and again, powered by different fluids and fuels.

Now let’s talk numbers. There are multiple units for energy (watts, joules) but we tend to standardize to “watt-hours”. A kilowatt hour (kWh) is 1 hour of electricity usage at a rate of 1 kW, but this can be scaled up to be megawatt hours or gigawatt hours (https://ourworldindata.org/scale-for-electricity).

A standard coal power plant is about 500 mW in size and can crank out 3.5 billion kWh per year, which is utterly massive in scale and demonstrates just how dependent we are upon fossil fuels for our electricity (https://www.mcginley.co.uk/news/how-much-of-each-energy-source-does-it-take-to-power-your-home/bp254/). In 2020, about 4,007 billion kilowatthours (kWh) (or about 4.01 trillion kWh) of electricity were generated at utility-scale electricity generation facilities in the United States (https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3) and more than half of this total resulted from the combustion of fossil fuels. When one examines the staggering amount of energy we consume, it should be no surprise that atmospheric CO2 has risen, and will continue to rise, exponentially unless we choose to decarbonize our electrical grid.

I won’t bore you with more mind-boggling numbers, but I will leave you with this parting thought: we CANNOT continue to exploit, pollute, pillage and plunder this planet. We will perish if we do. And I don’t mean individuals will perish. I mean the human species and upwards of 90% of life on Earth will go extinct.

We always have a choice. We live in the most technologically advanced age of our existence. We must reduce consumption and we must harvest our energy from renewable sources. We can always choose to be part of the solution.