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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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The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.
The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.
The numbers don’t quite line up with what the agency has said publicly. The EPA published three press releases between Trump’s inauguration and March 7, announcing that it had canceled a total of 42 grants and “saved” Americans roughly $227 million. In its first such announcement on February 14, the agency said it was canceling a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, but the only grant to that organization on the FOIA spreadsheet is listed at $12 million. To make matters more confusing, there are only $185 million worth of EPA grant cuts listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website from the same time period. (Zeldin later announced more than 400 additional grant terminations on March 10.)
Nonetheless, the document gives a clearer picture of which grants Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives, which is not surprising, given the Trump administration’s directives to root out these types of programs. But nearly as many were funding research into lower-carbon construction materials and better product labeling to prevent greenwashing.
Here’s the full list of grants, by program:
A few more details and observations from this list:
In the original FOIA request, Sierra Club had asked for a lot more information, including communications between EPA and the grant recipients, and explanations for why the grants — which in many cases involved binding contracts between the government and recipients — were being terminated. In its response, EPA said it was still working on the rest of the request and expected to issue a complete response by April 12.
Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.