1 day Ago By Max Bearak
Less than a week after President Trump to accelerate seabed mining, the U.S. government received its from the Metals Company, one of the most ardent proponents of the as yet unproven practice.
On Tuesday, the company’s chief executive, Gerard Barron, was also on hand in Washington, D.C., for a in front of Congress’s natural resources committee.
He likened Mr. Trump’s move to a “starting gun” in the race to extract minerals like cobalt and nickel from potato-size nodules lying in the frigid, pitch-black, two-and-a-half-mile-deep sands of the Pacific Ocean floor. Republican and Democratic committee members clashed over how much weight should be given to about the practice.
The Trump administration has said it will consider issuing permits for mining in territorial U.S. waters and also in international waters.
Other countries have for essentially circumventing international law by saying it would permit seabed mining in waters that nearly every other country considers to be governed by the International Seabed Authority, an independent organization. No commercial-scale seabed mining has ever taken place. Representative Jared Huffman of California who is also the committee’s ranking Democrat, said the Metals Company and Mr.
Trump were moving seabed mining forward in a “reckless cowboy manner.” He and other Democrats questioned the business case for mining cobalt and nickel given that electric-vehicle manufacturers, once major buyers of the metals, were moving toward batteries that didn’t use them. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
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