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Why Deep Sea Mining Threatens An End To Our Oceans -- And Us

Why Deep Sea Mining Threatens An End To Our Oceans -- And Us

The privilege of beholding the corals of Belize, the second largest reef system on earth, is a complete marvel that can never be taken for granted. The school of nine squid in perfect alignment that stared at us like transparent sentinels ,the green barracuda that floated as if in suspended animation, looking for prey. Those moments of utter awe were soul transformative not only for a child, but also for parents nurturing a young human to the ultimate reason to exist on this earth, to care for life.

Over the next few years, a battle was waged between environmentalists and those who saw dollars in the form of oil extraction in the reef. Thankfully on December 1, 2015, right after the Cop21 Paris Climate Accord, Belize made the tremendous decision to ban drilling outright -- and is working hard to restore coral. The same cannot be said for many other fragile parts of the world particularly the warming Arctic, where Russia has a near stranglehold of more than half the Arctic Ocean.

Sea weed from the Great Sargassum Atlantic Belt has started to wreak havoc on many of the beaches of the Caribbean, including Florida, over the last decade, often to the great annoyance of visitors. Christopher Columbus observed them over 500 years ago, Vast mats of these brown macroalgae growths, sometimes six feet tall, first starting polluting its waters in 2011 and have not only affected tourists but also turtles who could not lay their eggs in the sand. Stripping oxygen from the water and killing fish, these blooms of seaweed have been exacerbated by nitrogen pollution from industrial runoff from as far away as the Amazon, and even dust particles that contain phosphorus, iron, and nitrogen from the Sahara that have helped fertilize plankton growth.

While humanity has been pouring pollutants and plastic into the overheated oceans for decades, the newest industrial craze of undersea mining is the last human activity the oceans need if they are going to survive.

Is there really such as thing as sustainable seabed mining? The Deep Sea Mining Summit that just occurred in London may not question the manic rush for deep sea gold mining and other such operations. Under discussion is not the present health of the oceans, or their future .There will be assurances and promises and arguments that the technicians have a plan to make doubly sure little will be harmed. Those assurances have never worked. We are at an inflection point in time, where our civilization either does an about face in terms of pollution and the subjugation of the oceans -- or they die. By 2060, the fisheries of the world will have collapsed. It is perhaps no coincidence that England, the very country that started the Industrial Revolution, hosted The Deep Sea Mining Summit.

Scientists who have seen what has happened to the Barrier Reef, are crying. The bleaching events there have been devastating. The Chinese fishing fleets, of which there are 400 vessels, have been sent to the waters near the Galapagos and have pillaged the seas near the mythic islands. A true Darwinian nightmare.The list of horrors we have unleashed on the oceans is endless. Witness the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Witness Fukushima and what radioactive elements have done to sea life in the Pacific .

As of 2021 there had been no commercial deep sea mining. But deep sea extraction of polymetallic nodules is considered by some to be the salvation of the electric car industry and other industries that run civilization. Some proclaim these resources could mitigate global warming . The chief executive of Florida’s Ocean Minerals says,” We desperately need substantial amounts of manganese, nickel, cobalt, and copper to build electric cars and power plants.” Is mining the ocean floor and potentially ravaging it the answer to our overheated planet? Helen Scales ,a marine biologist, sees the mining of the oceans as devastating : “ Mining means destruction and in this case it means the destruction of an ecosystem about which we know pathetically little.”

The HMS Challenger in 1872 was the first to discover these metal nodules in its round the world voyage.The nodules form around an object like a rock at the rate of one centimeter every million years. One zone of salvation or destruction -- however one looks at the argument -- is located between Mexico and Hawaii. Known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, it is four million square kilometers of seabed that will be explored, extracted, and very possibly exploited beyond recognition . At stake are six time more cobalt and three times more nickel than found anywhere on land. The question is what will be left of the remarkable sea floor and its life forms, most of which we know so very little about.

Twenty contracts have already been awarded to the International Seabed Authority by the UN, which is quite ironic considering the UN is supposed to be helping humanity avoid conflict . Some vessels will be able to collect 400 tons of nodules per hour, 100,000 tons in two weeks. Sediment plumes will disrupt and pollute ecosystems many miles away. Acidification of the sea bed from toxic metals will be largely unavoidable. Most pernicious of all, the biological pump which draws carbon from the atmosphere will also be adversely affected.

Marine biologists are sounding the alarm and with very good reason.Species of all kinds from sponges, to corals and worms and tiny creatures called tartigrades will be inevitably sacrificed, though many are new to science. Scales warns in her book The Brilliant Abyss that many creatures will quite simply be obliterated and lost forever before they are even known to science. The scale of the operations and size of the extractive machines used may well overwhelm near pristine environments for all time.

Pippa Howard, director at Fauna & Flora International warns, “The conclusions we have come to after extensive study could hardly be more troubling. From methane release to disruption of the ocean’s life-support systems and the destruction of unstudied ecosystems, the risks of deep sea mining are numerous and potentially disastrous.”

The oceans have already been stressed beyond recognition and denuded of so many species. The immune system of Earth's oceans is on life support . By 2100, half of all marine species may disappear. Some of the priceless eco-systems like the Barrier Reef are scarcely holding on to dear life. We may well be beyond our depths with respect to deep sea mining. We need an international moratorium now while we still have the oceans beating the original life pulse of the world.

The great prophetic writer Loren Eiseley divined truths unmatched in our time, revelations that science is only coming to understand very late in the game. “ Can it be, one inevitably wonders, that man is so linked to a prehensile, grasping hand giving him power over his environment- that he is unable to comprehend the intellectual life of a highly endowed creature from another domain such as the sea? “ On the eve of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Kunming, China, humanity has to make the right decisions. This is the last decade in which we can come to our senses. The plundering of the seas, cannot be allowed to match what we have done to the land. Or we will drown.

5 Ways ‘Obama Knows Exactly What He’s Doing’

5 Ways ‘Obama Knows Exactly What He’s Doing’

Marco Rubio revealed that his greatest strength is his greatest weakness at Saturday night’s GOP presidential debate in New Hampshire.

When confronted by Chris Christie with the less-than-creative observation that the Senator’s entire campaign revolves around him regurgitating carefully poll-tested “25-second speeches,” Marco Rubio regurgitated the same talking point again and again on Sunday.

The line “Obama knows exactly what he’s doing” is a telltale example of the mini-Trump, hyper-pessimistic belligerence that has defined Rubio’s campaign, which has begun to drown in an undertow of anti-Muslim bigotry. Rubio’s sinister suggestion about the president arises from the fevered swamps of the Republican right , where Dinesh D’Souza gets rich and gets jailed while suggesting that Obama has a secret anti-colonialist plan to ruin America. Newt Gingrich picked up this strain of conspiratorial nonsense in 2012, although since then it has largely dissipated into the wingnut-o-sphere as the nation experienced the best two years of job creation since the late 1990s.

To say “Obama knows exactly what he’s doing” sounds like a scary proposition in the GOP primary, where voters believe he is about to seize their guns and replace them with health insurance. But it’s actually a great election talking point. And if a Democratic candidate is elected in November, it will largely be the result of Barack Obama’s continued popularity.

The president’s approval rating is flirting with 50 percent, giving him the highest favorable rating of any active national political figure by far. When Gallup asked Americans last month whether they’re better off now than eight years ago, 50 percent said, “Yes.” In this ultra-partisan atmosphere that is the closest thing you’re going to get to a consensus.

Marco Rubio, on the other hand, is forced to flee his immigration bill, which is the closest thing to an accomplishment in his Senate career. Whenever he has been faced with a major challenge — in his State of the Union response, when House Republicans refused to even vote on his bill, during Saturday’s debate — he has crumbled.

Still, the press loves his face and GOP donors love his pliability. What plutocrat wouldn’t love a guy who wants to cut the richest Americans’ tax rate to zero?

But Rubio is right about Barack Obama. He clearly knows exactly what he’s doing Because despite inevitable imperfections and failings, especially in Syria and the Veterans Administration, and amidst multifarious disasters that he inherited, Obama’s successes far outshine his limitations. Today, our first African-American president heads towards his home stretch as the first president since Eisenhower to conclude a second term without being personally implicated in scandal.

Here are five examples of Barack Obama knowing exactly what he’s doing.

  1. We have the best economy in the world.
    Republicans have been clear that president is only responsible for jobs created or stock market conditions when the news is bad. America’s economy isn’t great — unless you compare it to the rest of this century and the rest of the world. While our economy still needs tons of improvement to repair the hollowing out of decades of conservative policies, we’ve experienced more than six years of unfettered private sector job growth,  an undisputed record. Best of all, job creation picked up dramatically since taxes went up on the rich and Obamacare went into full effect, disproving conservative economic nostrums yet again.
  2. Our uninsured rate is at a historic low.
    About nine out of ten Americans now have health insurance. Seventeen million Americans gaining coverage doesn’t mean health care in America is perfect. It just means Obama knows what he’s doing. At the very least he has a lot better sense of what he’s doing than the last president, who numbly watched about 8 million Americans lose their insurance.
  3. He’s gotten the rest of the world, including China, to commit to fighting climate change.
    Marco Rubio lives in a state that’s literally sinking into the the horrors of global warming. But the only evidence he needs to assure us that climate change doesn’t exist are checks from his donors. Obama, however, accepts climate science and has done more than all other presidents combined to fight it. His greatest accomplishment on this front — even greater than building a clean energy industry that could save the world via the Stimulus — is taking away the right’s favorite excuse for doing nothing about this looming disaster. He “pushed publicly and privately for China to commit to serious, meaningful reductions in emissions. The result was a landmark bilateral agreement where, for the first time, China agreed to concrete targets for emissions reductions. That, in turn, helped pave the way for the COP21 agreement reached in Paris,” explained Brandon Fureigh of the Truman National Security Project.
  4. Iran has given up 99 percent of its uranium peacefully.
    As we continue to deal with the endless consequences of a war we launched to remove weapons of mass destruction that didn’t actually exist, Obama has led the global effort to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons. Thus far the government in Tehran has complied fully with the agreement and willingly avoided any path that could lead to it gaining such a weapon. “And even if the Iranians were to attempt to produce enough nuclear fuel for a bomb, it will now take them more than a year to do so,” the New York Times editorial board noted. “Before the agreement, that breakout time was two to three months.”
  5. Under Obama, abortions and teen pregnancies have fallen to new lows.
    If you actually care about preventing abortions, you should be a huge fan of Barack Obama. Rubio said that he’d be willing to lose an election to defend his view that abortion should become illegal, even in cases of rape and incest. But the biggest difference between Rubio and Obama is that Obama prevents abortions. The abortion rate today is about half of what it was in 1976. Teen pregnancies are at an all-time low. Here is the greatest irony of the so-called life debate: Abortion is more common where it’s illegal. And if you want to prevent abortions, you do the opposite of what Republicans did in Texas by defunding Planned Parenthood and denying poor women access to health care. Instead, you do what Barack Obama did, with the greatest expansion of contraception coverage in American history via the Affordable Care Act, which may have been the one thing the U.S. government has done that will prevent the most abortions. Of course, Marco Rubio wants to repeal it.
With Climate At ‘Breaking Point’, Leaders Urge Breakthrough In Paris

With Climate At ‘Breaking Point’, Leaders Urge Breakthrough In Paris

By Bruce Wallace and Alister Doyle

PARIS (Reuters) – World leaders launched an ambitious attempt on Monday to hold back rising temperatures, with the United States and China leading calls for the climate summit in Paris to mark a decisive turn in the fight against global warming.

In a series of opening addresses to the U.N. talks, heads of state and government exhorted each other to find common cause in two weeks of bargaining to steer the global economy away from its dependence on fossil fuels. French President Francois Hollande said the world was at a “breaking point”.

The leaders arrived in Paris with high expectations and armed with promises to act. After decades of struggling negotiations and the failure of a summit in Copenhagen six years ago, some form of agreement – likely to be the strongest global climate pact yet – appears all but assured by mid-December.

“What should give us hope that this is a turning point, that this is the moment we finally determined we would save our planet, is the fact that our nations share a sense of urgency about this challenge and a growing realization that it is within our power to do something about it,” said U.S. President Barack Obama, one of the first leaders to speak at the summit.

The leaders gathered in a vast conference center at Le Bourget airfield. In all, 195 countries are part of the unwieldy negotiating process, with a variety of leadership styles and ideologies that has made consensus elusive in the past.

Key issues, notably how to divide the global bill to pay for a shift to renewable energy, are still contentious.

“Climate justice demands that the little carbon space we still have, developing countries should have enough room to grow,” said India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a key player because of his country’s size and its heavy dependence on coal.

One difference this time may be the partnership between the United States and China, the two biggest carbon emitters, who between them account for almost 40 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the World Resources Institute think-tank.

Once far apart on climate issues, they agreed in 2014 to jointly kick-start a transition away from fossil fuels, each at its own speed and in its own way.

The United States and China “have both determined that it is our responsibility to take action,” Obama said after meeting his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the summit.

“Tackling climate change is a shared mission for mankind,” Xi responded in his own remarks.

Obama said the two countries would work together at the summit to achieve an agreement that moves toward a low-carbon global economy this century and “robust” financial support for developing countries adapting to climate change.

Flying home to Rome on the papal plane after a visit to Africa, Pope Francis told journalists: “Every year the problems are getting worse. We are at the limits. If I may use a strong word I would say that we are at the limits of suicide.”

Most scientists say failure to agree on strong measures in Paris would doom the world to ever-hotter average temperatures, deadlier storms, more frequent droughts and rising sea levels as polar ice caps melt.

SMOG OVER CHINA AND INDIA

Facing such alarming projections, the leaders of nations responsible for about 90 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions have come bearing pledges to reduce their national carbon output, through different measures at different rates.

As the summit opened in Paris, the capitals of the world’s two most populous nations, China and India, were blanketed in hazardous, choking smog, with Beijing on an “orange” pollution alert, the second-highest level.

The deal will mark a momentous step in the often frustrating quest for global agreement, albeit one that on its own is not believed to be enough to prevent the earth’s temperatures from rising past a damaging threshold. How and when nations should review their goals – and then set higher, more ambitious ones – is another issue to be resolved at the talks.

“The Paris conference is not the finishing line but a new starting point,” Xi said.

The gathering is being held in a somber city. Security has been tightened after Islamist militants killed 130 people on Nov. 13, and Hollande said he could not separate “the fight with terrorism from the fight against global warming”. Leaders must face both challenges, leaving their children “a world freed of terror” as well as one “protected from catastrophes”, he said.

On the eve of the summit, an estimated 785,000 people around the world joined the biggest day of climate change activism in history, telling world leaders there was “No Planet B” in the fight against global warming.

Signaling their determination to resolve the most intractable points, senior negotiators sat down on Sunday, a day earlier than planned, to begin their work.

The last attempt to get a global deal collapsed in chaos and acrimony in Copenhagen in 2009.

Anxious to avoid a re-run of the Copenhagen disaster, major powers have tried this time to smooth some of the bumps in the way of an agreement before they arrive.

The presidents, prime ministers and princes were making their cameo appearances at the outset of the conference rather than swooping in at the end.

The old goal of seeking a legally binding international treaty, certain to be dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress, has been replaced by a system of national pledges to reduce emissions.

Some are presented as best intentions, others as measures legally enforced by domestic laws and regulations.

WHO WILL PAY?

If a signed deal now appears likely, so too is the prospect that it will not be enough to prevent the world’s average temperature from rising beyond 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. That is widely viewed as a threshold for dangerous and potentially catastrophic changes in the planet’s climate system.

Obama called for an “enduring framework for human progress”, one that would compel countries to steadily ramp up their carbon-cutting goals and openly track progress against them.

The U.S.-China agreement has been a balm for the main source of tension that characterized previous talks, in which the developing world argued that countries which had grown rich by industrializing on fossil fuels should pay the cost of shifting all economies to a renewable energy future.

The question of how richer nations can help cover the cost of switching to cleaner energy sources and offset climate-related damage must still be resolved,

A handful of the world’s richest entrepreneurs, including Bill Gates, have pledged to double the $10 billion they collectively spend on clean energy research and development in the next five years.

“The climate bill has finally come due. Who will pay?” said Baron Waqa, president of the Pacific island nation Nauru.

(Additional reporting by Jeff Mason, John Irish and Roberta Rampton; Editing by Jennifer Lawrence and Andrew Roche)

Protester Amy Walburn holds a butterfly-shaped placard in front of the Sydney Opera House during a rally held ahead of the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference, known as the COP21 summit, in Sydney’s central business district, Australia November 29, 2015. REUTERS/Jason Reed