From grist.org - Maddie Stone, June 17
Building enough wind turbines, solar panels, and power storage for humanity to kick its fossil fuel habit will likely need billions of tons of metals and minerals. One potentially abundant source of nickel, cobalt, rare earth minerals and other key energy minerals — the bottom of the sea.
But “a growing chorus of scientists and environmental advocates” warn that this commercial exploitation
could cause irreversible harm to ecosystems we’ve barely begun to understand. Last month, the NGO MiningWatch Canada, along with the Ocean Foundation’s Deep Sea Mining Campaign, published a report calling for a moratorium on regulations that would permit companies to begin mining the Pacific seafloor until the risks are better understood and until all alternatives have been “fully explored and applied.” The International Seabed Authority — a U.N. body with a mandate to oversee resource extraction on the ocean floor — is scheduled to issue draft regulations later this year.
Mining regulations on land “are tailored to our understanding of how the ecosystem works,” said MiningWatch Canada’s Catherine Coumans, who served on the editorial team for the report, which summarizes the findings of more than 250 peer-reviewed studies. In the deep ocean, Coumans said, “we’re creating regulations for an ecosystem that we don’t understand...”
More at the top link. A very interesting and informative article.