Last week, Planet Tracker published a report with the eye-catching title “How to Lose Half a Trillion.”
The report states that deep sea mining could damage natural resources (like fish populations), while losing companies a lot of money, in part because it’s so expensive to mine the deep. Ultimately, these losses would add up to an estimated half-trillion USD.
Planet Tracker is a nonprofit think tank, with a focus on sustainability and finances. I’m generally wary of reports from sustainability nonprofits and mining companies alike. The motives of the nonprofits certainly seem more noble than those of the companies: protecting environments versus taking from them. Yet both groups have narratives to promote, and a tendency to distort research to fit those narratives. So both deserve healthy skepticism.
Still, reports like Planet Tracker’s can be important in the deep sea mining discourse, as long as they’re scrutinized adequately.
The report raises some great questions. How do we place value on nature? Is a thriving ecosystem worth more in the long run than the nonrenewable resources we can take from it?
According to Planet Tracker, the answer is yes. As the report says, “preserving the planet’s abyssal plains is worth at the very least ten times more than exploiting them.”
Planet Tracker argues that by pausing deep sea mining now, we can preserve the long-term financial benefits the deep sea provides, such as stable fish populations and climate regulation.
There’s also been some interesting number-crunching over at Southern Fried Science, an ocean science blog written by ocean scientists. Deep sea ecologist Andrew Thaler predicted that successful deep sea mining operations could create mineral surpluses, causing price crashes and rendering further mining wildly unprofitable. The industry may quickly bring about its own demise.
This conclusion, based on things like current mineral supplies and prices, is less speculative than Planet Tracker’s.
Planet Tracker’s measurables include things like climate and cultural benefits from the deep sea, which are obviously hard to tie numbers to, a fact the report acknowledges. It also acknowledges that little is currently known about deep sea environments.
Ultimately, it’s a highly speculative document. But it’s reasonably clear about its metrics and knowledge gaps. Though the numbers may be imperfect, there could well be truth to the claim that short-term deep sea mining profits won’t outweigh the long-term costs of environmental losses. And if Southern Fried Science is right, those profits would be very short-term indeed. (Update: a newer post there showed more reasonable values for manganese, but the
Planet Tracker operates on the idea that money talks: we’ll achieve sustainability by showing that it’s a financially wise choice. Which is an interesting tactic. It asks people to suspend short-term profits for long-term projected returns.
Logical enough. But to me, it seems a tough selling point in modern capitalist societies.
In the US, for example, there’s an alarming permissiveness of anything vaguely profitable, regardless of environmental costs and long-term damages. Things like AI and cryptocurrency mining, which can make money but aren’t essential to life, soak up shocking amounts of freshwater and energy, putting new pressure on already-strained natural resources. (A government report estimates that crypto mining “probably represents from 0.6% to 2.3% of US electricity consumption.” That’s massive, especially for something so new that benefits so few.)
But instead of placing restrictions on AI use and crypto mining, we find ourselves in a bizarre scramble for resources to support these unnecessary activities. Building energy projects that threaten wildlife and cultural heritage. Diverting freshwater to run AI instead of drinking or washing with it.
In short, we’re making huge environmental sacrifices to meet the energy and water demands of the digital world. What we should be doing, of course, is questioning where energy and water demands are coming from, and finding ways to reduce them to the essentials.
(Don’t get me wrong: I think renewable energy is a good and necessary advancement away from fossil fuels. But renewable energy projects require space and resources, so they carry their own environmental costs. Building enough to meet the unchecked energy demands of a tech-focused society will only lead to new and more insidious environmental problems, which we’ll have to pay for later.)
Deep sea mining is part of this equation, since the mined minerals could be used in renewable energy tech and digital devices, among other things.
It’s a rather gnarly feedback loop: we destroy nature to support high-tech modernity, and high-tech modernity further separates us from nature, while demanding ever more resources.
Most of the global population still lives outside this loop. But the world is disproportionately run by societies that function within it (the major powers of North America and Europe, for example). And even if groups like Planet Tracker can show the long-term financial harm of living this way, I’m not convinced that anything’s going to change. A greater, and more nebulous, shift in what the people with power value is what I believe we need. (Or a shift in who holds the power.)
Will such a shift happen before the natural world crashes and burns due to a global minority’s increasingly absurd technological demands? I’ll admit, I’m not super optimistic at this point. But it’s not impossible.