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There’s a lot of metal sitting at the bottom of the ocean. A single swath of seabed in the eastern Pacific holds enough nickel, cobalt and manganese to electrify America’s passenger vehicle fleet several times over. But whether to mine this trove for the energy transition is an open question — one that’s sparked many an internecine feud among environmentalists.
Most of the seabed in question falls beyond the jurisdiction of any one country. This area, the High Seas, covers a whopping 43% of Earth’s surface. And one group decides whether (and how) to mine it: the International Seabed Authority. Created by the United Nations, the ISA counts 168 nations among its members.
This month, ISA policymakers are meeting in Jamaica to hash out the rules of the road for a future seabed mining industry. They’ll debate everything from environmental protection to financial regulation of mining companies.
ISA members include every major economy with an ocean coastline — except the United States.
The U.S. has yet to ratify the global treaty that chartered the ISA back in 1982. That leaves America sidelined as ISA member countries decide on such matters as the fate of the global ocean and the pace of the energy transition. You know, small stuff.
Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, has been leading a lonely, decade-long quest to convince Senate Republicans to abandon their long-held skepticism of the ISA. “Our hands are tied behind our backs,” Murkowski told me. She argues the U.S. has lost the reins on some of the biggest questions surrounding critical minerals sourcing. “When it comes to the ISA, it’s China that is determining the rules. That’s not a good place for us to be.”
A new, bipartisan resolution in the Senate could finally give the U.S. a full seat at the global table in seabed mining negotiations. The legislation faces an uphill climb but, if passed, could allow the Biden administration to take victory laps on two of its ostensible priorities: ocean conservation and decoupling from China-controlled supply chains of critical minerals.
Marine experts affectionately dub the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea the constitution for the oceans. The treaty sets ground rules for all manner of seafaring activity on the High Seas, including transit, fishing, and cable laying. And despite that there was no deep seabed mining happening at the time (there still isn’t, yet), UNCLOS was clear about who owns all that metal under the sea.
“It’s everyone’s property,” Andrew Thaler, a deep-sea ecologist and CEO of the marine consultancy Blackbeard Biologic, told me. “It codifies the idea that this is a shared resource among all of humanity,” said Thaler. “And it has to be managed as such.”
Lofty ideals, with practical implications. Under UNCLOS, a country cannot unilaterally decide to plunder seabed resources for its sole benefit. To mine the ocean floor, nations and private companies must receive various permissions from the ISA, where decisions are often made by consensus or supermajority vote among member countries. Mining operations must also pay royalties to every ISA member for the privilege of accessing (and degrading) humankind’s shared resource.
In Thaler’s assessment, it’s all very egalitarian. “UNCLOS is an incredibly progressive piece of international diplomacy,” he said.
Which helps explain why the U.S. never ratified it.
Ronald Reagan occupied the Oval Office in 1982 when the vast majority of nations voted to adopt UNCLOS. He wasn’t keen on the treaty’s “common heritage” principle and didn’t want to have to deal with the rest of the world. As the New York Times reported, “the United States, possessing some of the most advanced technology and the most resources to be developed, was unhappy at the prospect of having to share seabed mining decision-making with smaller, often third-world countries.”
The irony here is that Reagan essentially ceded decision-making to those “often third-world countries” by keeping the U.S. out of the treaty. To this day, the U.S. is relegated to observer status at ISA negotiations, the same standing enjoyed by non-governmental organizations like Greenpeace and the International Cable Protection Committee.
The U.S. sends State Department officials to the ISA to follow along the debate and occasionally make statements. But America’s delegation cannot vote on important matters and, crucially, cannot sit on the ISA Council, a subset of ISA members currently drafting comprehensive regulations to govern the financial and environmental aspects of a prospective seabed mining industry. (That all-important rulebook is known as the Mining Code.)
UNCLOS members updated the treaty in 1994 to “guarantee the U.S. a seat on the ISA Council if it ratifies,” among other things, Pradeep Singh, an ocean governance expert at the Research Institute for Sustainability, told me. The U.S. itself played a “pivotal role” in negotiating such favorable terms, said Singh, “but ultimately they still did not ratify.”
Following Reagan’s lead, Republicans have typically remained skeptical of UNCLOS, while Democrats — including the Biden administration—have supported it.
“We ought to join the Law of the Sea,” Jose Fernandez, President Biden’s Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, told me. “We are the only major economy that’s not a member. It hurts our interests.”
Fernandez noted that the Biden administration has neither endorsed nor condemned seabed mining as a source of minerals for the energy transition (“Let’s just say we’re taking a precautionary approach”), but that ratifying UNCLOS would allow the U.S. to better advocate for strong environmental protections and other provisions in the ISA’s mining code.
Inevitably, seabed mining will impact deep-sea ecosystems that scientists are just beginning to map and explore. Research indicates that mining could also interfere with seabed carbon storage and fish migration — and that land-based mineral reserves are sufficient to meet the needs of the energy transition.
Supporters of seabed mining counter that relying on terrestrial minerals alone could perpetuate the environmental and social harms long associated with mining on land, including deforestation, tainted water supplies, forced relocation of mine-adjacent communities, and child labor. They also say it could reduce the cost of acquiring minerals and thus speed the deployment of low-carbon energy systems, although the overall cost of extracting metal has not yet been demonstrated as, again, no one is currently doing it.
Ratifying UNCLOS would require a two- thirds majority vote in the Senate — a towering hurdle in the polarized chamber. But new momentum is building, thanks to a rare unifying force lurking across the Pacific Ocean.
China holds five separate ISA licenses to explore for seabed minerals. That’s more than any other country. (The U.S. cannot obtain such licenses because it is not an ISA member.) Beijing is also pouring R&D money into deep-sea technology.
This is all of concern to U.S. lawmakers looking to friendshore America’s mineral supply chains, which China already dominates. House Republicans introduced a bill earlier this month to develop a U.S.-based seabed mining industry. The brief seven-page document mentions China on four separate occasions.
Among the concerned lawmakers in the Senate is Murkowski. She’s long pushed for UNCLOS ratification over the isolationist objections of her fellow Republicans. But Murkowski sees opposition dissolving amid worries over China’s maritime activity.
“I’ve been working on this issue for a decade plus, and I’ve never been in a Congress where there are more that are engaged on this issue from both sides of the aisle,” said Murkowski.
Mining firms aiming to process their seabed haul on U.S. soil are hyping the China concern, too.
Also earlier this month, a group of more than 300 former U.S. political and military leaders sent a letter to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations urging UNCLOS ratification. Signatories included former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and three former U.S. Secretaries of Defense.
Murkowski hopes to line up enough support for UNCLOS ratification in the Senate to bring the issue to a vote next year, and the resolution currently sits with the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. “I feel very confident about the momentum we have right now,” Murkowski said.
As UNCLOS gains political traction in the U.S., calls for a cautionary approach to seabed mining have grown louder the world over.
More than 800 marine experts have urged a pause on the controversial industry, citing uncertain environmental impacts and risks to ocean biodiversity. At least 25 national governments have echoed those calls at the ISA. Some manufacturers—including BMW, Volvo, Volkswagen, Rivian, Renault, Google and Samsung—have pledged to forgo ocean-mined minerals in their products.
A shift in electric vehicle technology adds another wrinkle to the debate. A growing share of EV batteries sold globally don’t include any nickel or cobalt — two metals found in abundance on the ocean floor — which complicates the business case for seabed mining.
Compared to traditional nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries, these increasingly popular lithium-iron-phosphate batteries are cheaper but provide lower energy density (i.e. range). Consumers in China, the world’s largest EV market, seem willing to accept that tradeoff. But even with a slipping market share, nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries and their constituent elements could see absolute demand grow as the global EV industry booms.
In the name of the energy transition, some countries such as Norway and the Cook Islands have gone ahead and greenlit mineral exploration in the Exclusive Economic Zones off their own coastlines,.
The debate reached a fever pitch over the summer when The Metals Company, a Canadian firm, announced plans to apply for the world’s first ever commercial mining license on the High Seas; it’s partnering with the government of Nauru on the application.
Meanwhile, the ISA is unlikely to adopt a final mining code before The Metals Company submits its application, which is expected as soon as August — a timing mismatch that could throw the seabed mining debate into chaos. (The ISA Council has signaled it would not support the approval of a mining application until regulations are finalized.)
All the while, the U.S. will be watching. And unless the Senate ratifies UNCLOS, it won’t be doing much else.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.