Deep-Sea Mining: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

John Oliver discusses deep-sea mining, whether or not it’s worth doing, and which undersea creature he most wants to eat.

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our main story tonight concerns the ocean the only place where you can pee in full view of a family of four without it being a sex crime the ocean is a gigantic Place absolutely chock full of weirdos they are simply otherworldly floating in the dark in what’s known as the oxygen minimum Zone about 3,000 ft below the surface in these depths the researchers have found this vampire squid rare bright colored jellyfish and also this a barrel ey fish with a transparent domed head revealing upward-facing eyes it’s been seen by humans less than 10 times yeah to be honest good I’m glad that fish hasn’t been seen much it’s a butter face I I don’t mean that in the horribly offensive way I just mean it has a body I’d like to if it wasn’t for its fugly face I’d say that fish was beautiful on the inside but we can all see in there and it isn’t when you see creatures like those you begin to understand why one Marine scientists has said it’s like Dr Seuss down there which is true it’s just like his famous book One Fish Two Fish holy is at a seethrough fish there’s also wonders like the flapjack octopus which can get flat like a pancake this transparent thing called a unicum a Dumbo octopus named for its stupid little ears whatever the this is whatever the this is and the carnivorous harp sponge and you thinking hold on one of those tiny balls on the end good question they’re basically testicles my friends apparently the swollen balls at the tip of the sponges upright branches produce packets of sperm nature is incredible and it is disgusting but we’re going to talk about a specific part of the Pacific Ocean tonight called the claran clipperton zone or the ccz it’s an area between Mexico and Hawaii that’s nearly the size of Europe it’s also the deep ocean where water temperatures can reach 0 de C and there is virtually no light and yet for such a seemingly inhospitable place there is still an incredible amount of life down there as this oceanographer will tell you when we go out and collect a sample on the sea Flor we collect hundreds of new species things that you’ve never seen before sure oh yeah yeah he told us he was surprised at how much life could survive 3 mil deep his expeditions to the ccz have turned up Fantastical creatures like this squidworm or a fluorescent sea cucumber dubbed a gummy squirrel oh I like that a lot in fact I love that gummy squirrel so much I want cover it in sour dust and either bag of them were watching Nicole Kidman talk about the magic of the movies a study last year found there may be more than 8,000 species living in the ccz and of the 5,500 so far detected only 438 have been identified but this story is going to be less about marine life in the deep ocean more about what else is down there with them specifically that the ocean floor is full of deposits of critical minerals some are in the crust of underwater mountains or around hydrothermal vents and some the ones will be focusing on tonight take the form of potato-shaped nodules little lumpy spheres formed over millions of years basically a nucleus like a little bit of bone or sand slowly accured a buildup of metals at a rate of around a millimeter every million years or so those nodules now line some parts of the deep ocean floor and contain valuable metals like nickel and Cobalts which can be used for things like batteries for electric cars so obviously people are very interested in getting their hands on them it looks like a cobbled road with all these little nodules packed densely against one another uh across this entire area unique little little uh golden nuggets is this the gold or oil of the 21st century I definitely think that these black nuggets are um going to be an essential part of our ability to transition to what we want to do at the end of the day without these we are not going to be able to achieve our goals and objectives yeah those nodules could be incredibly valuable even though to be honest they look more like what you bring to the vet when your Pomeranian is severely constipated and deep sea mining companies are now scrambling to get their hands on what they love to describe as a battery in a rock and the head of one company leading the charge the metals company has gone on Outlets like 60 Minutes to argue that those nodules could end up saving the planet I love the fact that they’re the way we’re going to get away from fossil fuels I love the fact that in these are all the metals we need to go and build those batteries I mean it’s it’s it’s the most amazing coincidence that I’ve ever encountered Mother Nature Made these nodules they’re just sitting there it’s like okay you guys you’ve messed up planet Earth come and get me I mean that is an appealing pitch I too like the idea of a mother nature who knows we up but who’s also giving us one last chance to make things right and in return all we have to do is go down on her that is very gracious of her that man is named Gerard Baron and he’s an actual person and not as you may have thought chat gpt’s answer to make Shawn pen the most Shawn pen he’s positioned himself at the Forefront of this industry report once hired a marketing firm to portray him as an Australian Elon Musk although he denies that insisting he’d never compare himself to musk as he considers him a once in a generation genius which gives you some hints of where this story is about to go Baron stresses that he’s the real deal his company says it secured access to enough metal to power 280 million electric vehicles equivalent to the entire fleet of cars in the US and he’s projecting they could start commercially exploiting the deep sea as early as 2026 but the place he’s planning to do that is the ccz even though it’s one of the few remaining environments on earth that is close to pristine and extracting those nodules could do irreparable damage so before we stand back and watch this guy’s company throw open the door to commercial scale plunder it might be worth looking at what exactly he’s proposing to do and whether it’s actually worth doing at all so tonight let’s let’s talk about deep sea Mining and to hear Baron tell it mining these nodules is really just a simple matter of scooping them off the floor they literally lie on the ocean floor just like this like golf balls on a driving range our res sits on the seaf Flor like golf balls on a driving range well think of it as a golf driving range that has not much grass it’s just golf balls it’s a little bit like walking onto the golf driving range that’s littered with balls oh so they’re just golf balls that you can pick up that sounds easy until you remember they’re 15,000 ft underwater the difficulty of picking up golf balls really does depend on where they are if they’re on a driving range sure it’s no big deal if they’re resting on a grizzly bear’s dick then you know what maybe take a mulligan and Baron’s Partners also paint a very gentle picture of what the extraction process will look like with renderings of a collector vehicle delicately sucking them up like a vacuum cleaner but that massively undersells the damage this could do starting with the fact the researchers estimate at least 30 to 40% of species down there live directly on the nodules themselves but that’s just the beginning here because while Baron has called the floor of the ccz a desert and likes to talk about how little biomass there is down there just because creatures are small doesn’t mean they’re not important to the ecosystem around them and experts have a very different reaction when holding one of those nodules this is its own little habitat we get millions of different species living on these nodules everything from microbes some of which live nowhere else other than on and in these nodules all the way to much larger animals and that means that if the nodules were to be removed they would certainly impact these species and potentially lead to longlasting if not irreversible impacts to this ecosystem exactly it could have irreversible impacts for everything from microbes to gummy squirrels and I literally only just learn they existed I don’t want them to be destroyed unless I’m absolutely housing a family siiz bag of them and just to be clear it’s not just the impact of removing the nodules themselves it’s the damage the mere Act of mining itself will do because scientists worry that those gigantic Vehicles could do much broader harm it’ll drive around mining the nodules but during this process it will also collect about 5 to 30 cm of sediment from the sea floor and this will all pass through the vehicle the nodules will be retained but the sediment will come out of the back of it and that will create a sediment plume a bit like an underwater Sandstorm the nodules will be loaded onto a transport ship which will then take them back to land for processing but The Unwanted sediment and sea water from the cleaning process will be released back into the ocean and that could either happen close to the sea floor or at much shallower depths closer to the surface and that creates a secondary plume but this time likely containing fragments of metal yeah so it’s two massive clouds of sediment and metal which can do a lot more damage than you might think they have the potential to bury fields of nodules choke the filters of sponges and an enemies even those living outside the mining Zone and obscure bioluminescence that squid and fish used to hunt and mate basically it could everyone’s up think less gently lifting golf balls off the driving range and more are seen from Dune 3 even more sand and what the metals company says research it Commission shows the damage will be minimal vastly more research that it didn’t commission suggests otherwise one long running study sent equipment down to simulate the extraction of nodules in 1989 and returned periodically to see how the ecosystem had changed and even 26 years later it had failed to return to its previous state so even after an entire Kylie Jenner the ecosystem had not recovered and you should know our interest in these creatures isn’t just for ethical or academic reasons ocean organisms can lead to radical advances in medicine in the last 50 years scientists discovered more than 10,000 new chemical compounds from sponges in fact a number of drugs from the world’s first medication to treat HIV to a drug for breast cancer to the covid treatment REM dese owe their Origins to sea sponges and many more including many derived from deep sea creatures are in the works and given that the whole reason for doing this is as Baron insists to protect the planet it’s worth noting that the ocean actually absorbs about a third of all the carbon dioxide we produce in fact a type of bacteria found in the ccz a few years ago was found to be taking up large amounts of carbon dioxide and could be playing an important part of the deep sea carbon cycle so you want to be absolutely sure that that is not jeopardized by Deep Sea Mining and we are not sure about that at all so if deep sea mining could be this risky what rules are in place to mitigate it well unfortunately in most of the ocean none and understand why you need to know a little bit about a tiny un Affiliated agency called the international seabed Authority or the ISA basically it’s in charge of the seabed in international waters an overseason area covering around 54% of the total area of the world’s oceans the ISA calls it the area which is just a wildly lazy placeholder name it’s like calling a man who super Superman or calling a show where you talk about last week that night Last Week Tonight It’s just completely devoid imagination the ISA was established in 1982 as part of the un’s law of the sea treaty and you should know while 168 countries signed on to that treaty the US recognized it but never ratified it partly because of pressure from conservatives in the US like philis Schlafly who spent years ranting about what the treaty would do it is global socialism it is World Government it is worse than the United Nations we would have one vote the same vote as Cuba but we wouldn’t even have the V to this International seabed Authority would have the power over uh uh 9/10 of the world’s surface it would have Sovereign control over all the riches at the bottom of the oceans you know what she seems fun and and she pretty much checked all the boxes of a deranged conservative take there fear-mongering about global socialism shitalking the UN and shoehorning Cuba in for good measure but it wasn’t just her Reagan refused to sign the treaty while he was President because of his objections to its limits on future seabed Mining and I know I talk a lot on this show about the bad stuff Ronald Reagan did so to balance that out I do want to mention something positive he did for the planet in 2004 and this is true he died but the truth is the ISA is far from the all powerful world’s government Schlafly warned about it’s actually struggled to agree to a regulatory framework to govern deep sea Mining and on one hand that kind of makes sense it’s a complex issue EX by the fact that more than 80% of the world’s oceans remain unexplored and unmapped and there is still so much that we don’t know about how mining could affect it but many of the ay’s critics are also concerned that it’s beholden two mining interests with one of its top rulemaking bodies having members who also work for mining contractors now it hasn’t given out any exploitation licenses to actually commercially mine the ocean floor yet but it’s given out dozens of so-called exploratory licenses which are the first step toward doing that and just watch as this reporter asked the head of the ISA Michael Lodge a pretty revealing question the isa’s job is to decide which parts of the sea floor in international waters can be mined by which country but some have asked whether it’s paying enough attention to the environmental consequences have you ever in the isa’s history rejected a license application uh no so far uh no license application has uh been rejected wow a 0% rejection rate it’s not ideal that a body responsible for something as important as protecting the deep sea has lower standards than the University of Phoenix so that is not great nor is it great that Lodge who remember heads the agency tasked with regulating seabed mining not only appeared in a promo video for Baron’s company but has also said I think that deep seabed mining is an essential component of the global vision for a sustainable World I’d say Lodge is a cheerleader for mining interests except that when Radio New Zealand referred to him as a cheerleader for mining interests he threatened a defamation lawsuit so I’ll just say this he’s a cheerleader for mining interests I’m I’m just kidding I’m just kidding uh though he is he is though he um he definitely is and lodge and L who by the way isn’t a scientist but a lawyer has made it clear in interviews that he is irritated by environmentalists who want clean energy but who also oppose deep sea mining arguing to say don’t harm the ocean it is the easiest message in the world right you just have to show a photo of a turtle with a straw in its nose and yeah no Michael because that’s a disturbing image if you see a turtle with a straw in its nose it’s either in distress or you’re watching a special episode of Ninja Turtles about drug abuse even those who’ve worked for the ISA have reservations about its priorities one marine geologist who served as its top environmental official has said the ISA is not fit to regulate any activity in international waters it is like to ask the wolf to take care of the sheep and I really don’t want to be a fact checky about this but the thing is a sheep dog is actually a domesticated wolf so the descendants of wolves literally do care for sheep every day it’s a hard job and they do it well I’m so sorry to correct you but I can’t help it it’s who I am as a person and I do not like it either and the thing is right now Baron’s Metals company seems set up to use the weakness of the regulatory agency to Barrel into the ccz potentially sending a president for far more deep sea mining throughout the ocean and the way the company’s doing it is actually pretty clever because the ISA is set up in a way that is theoretically meant to protect the interests of small developing countries the way it works is when larger countries find worthy locations to mining they have to hand over half that territory to the ISA which then sets them aside as reserved areas for developing countries to start their own projects those countries can then sponsor a mining company to develop that area for them that is what happened with Baron’s company which has been sponsored by a few tiny Pacific island nations among them Tonga and Naru on what appear to be very favorable terms one Tonga Community leader has said it’s accepting a fee that amounts to less than half of 1% of the firm’s total estimated value of the mined material and baron seems very aware of how much leverage his company has saying if you look at a nation like NAU and if you ask them well what are your other Economic Development opportunities there’s not a long list although there is a reason for that and it has to do with the fact that Naru has been repeatedly exploited by Outsiders it spent years being plundered for its main natural resource phosphate the mining of which was so destructive narrow has been called the most environmentally ravaged Nation on Earth since then they’ve grasped for financial lifelines from allowing themselves to be used as a money laundering Haven to letting Australia effectively remake the island into its own Detention Center to the fact it even got talked into becoming the chief backer of a London musical based on the life of D Vin called Leonardo the musical a portrait of love about an affair between Da Vinci and the Mona Lisa which is today considered one of the biggest disasters in the history of London theater it closed within a month and the naron government lost what would today be $7 million you might think come on how bad could that musical really be well here is an extract of a song sung by Leonardo’s male lover about his jealousy of the Mona Lisa your life was a portrait of love and I was a part but she was the heart of your life look I’m no sometime but even I know a song about the Mona Lisa that uses the word portrait while sounding like lay Miz on quut has got historic bomb written all over it and now Naru has partnered with Baron’s Metals company and while he insists Naru is no one’s puppet I can assure you there is a clear power disparity between an international mining firm hoping to make billions of dollars and an environmentally ravaged island with a population of just 12,000 people and Naro is now clearing a path for the metals company to start mining very basically it triggered a mechanism whereby the ISA must start accepting deep sea mining applications even if mining regulations aren’t set and later this year Baron’s company plans to submit an application to be the first to actually commercially mine and he seems pretty confident that is going to be approv telling investors he expects to commence production at the end of the first quarter of 2026 and with the way that he’s talking it can feel like deep sea mining is a done deal and he seems aware of how bad the Optics here are but he also doesn’t seem to be that troubled by it I mean it is quite sci-fi and if there this were a film you know I’m sorry to say you you probably be the bad guy in this you”ll be the one that’s exploiting it because there is this sort of gut feeling that we are exploiting something that we should be leaving alone do you kind of understand that I think it depends if you’re a glass half full or a glass half empty person personally I’m a glass half full and I think this is the solution to the climate crisis but how is that a reassuring answer if someone says you remind me of the bad guys from movies not just one movie but all of them I’d hope an actual good guy would have a more robust response and oh I don’t know six of one half a dozen of the other I’m an optimist but is all of this even worth it Baron will say that it is arguing that it is better than the alternative mining on land which can indeed do incredible damage though it is worth noting history shown that once we start mining in a new area we tend not to stop everywhere else we just end up doing both but setting aside the potential harm here what is the potential benefit because if these nodules really could provide unlimited energy for billions of people i’ say maybe it’s worth thinking about but the truth is they may not be as critical for our Clean Energy Future as Baron insists because while it is true that the metals inside them are a key component of batteries now lithium ion batteries are fast being replaced by new battery chemistries that don’t require Cobalt or nickel and we’re even starting to see Innovation like this lithium batteries need precious materials like Cobalt and nickel to work but sodium doesn’t it’s found everywhere it’s simply salt the world’s largest battery manufacturer Chinese catl already went big on sodium ion technology in 2021 just 2 years later it was supplying Chinese car maker Sherry with salt batteries it’s true they’re starting to make car batteries out of salt so move over cocaine you’re no longer the most valuable white powder in town it’s also worth noting that many Tech and car companies including these have already pledged not to use Metals extracted from Deep Sea mining until they understand the environmental impact which as you’ve seen could be significant meanwhile more and more countries are calling for a precautionary pause or moratorium on deep sea Mining and I would argue that the US should join them although our argument would frankly have a lot more Force if we finally ratified that law of the sea treaty and I’m far from the first person to say this lots of organizations want the us to have a seat at the table from environmental groups who want to use it to protect the ocean to mining groups who want to use it to do the exact opposite of that but pretty much everyone agrees that we should sign it to the point that in 2012 there was a Wall Street Journal oped titled time to join the law of the sea treaty written by five secretaries of State including Henry Kissinger meaning Kissinger and I finally have one thing in common well two things that and our skincare routine I’m assuming given the results but that really is it but ultimately it’s going to take us having the patience to wait for the science on this and the disci to actually listen to what it has to say and I know that that’s hard to do because it is so much easier to just pull out a rock and call it the savior of humanity watch even even I can do it here Mother Nature Made these nodules and said come and get me see it’s easy but that doesn’t make it true especially because this is actually a chocolate truffle the point is it is beyond time that we stop treating the deep ocean as something to exploit and start treating it for what it really is a mind-blowingly vast virtually unknown world within our world one filled with beauty wonder and of course unfuckable uggos that I wouldn’t touch with an octopus’s dick