Sediment plumes from seabed mining discharge
(Photo links to a good article on Deep Sea Mining)
Last July we submitted our comments on the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s (BOEM) Request For Information and Interest on Commercial Leasing for Outer Continental Shelf Minerals Offshore American Samoa – along with 76,443 other people. These titrated down to 8,971 original comments (because some misguided eNGOs use these comment opportunities as a proxy for a petition). But of all the nearly 9,000 original comments, only a handful were in support of the mining proposition; most notably from Impossible Metals, Inc., who requested the action in the first place, and a few other industrial actors who stand to profit from their pillaging our planet.
In our newsletter on the proposal, we provide an overview of the problem. The comments we submitted are a lot more detailed. But the gist is that it is a really crappy idea to submit millions of ocean-acres to silt fallout from dredging up polymetallic nodules just so a small handful of people can get really rich.
We’ve submitted comments to eight Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) since this Administration has taken office (the most we’ve ever submitted in this short time frame). The protocol under the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) is that the agencies will submit Draft EIS when proposing a project, policy, or activity that will have impacts on US Assets – assets that essentially “belong” to the American People.
We are given some amount of time review and submit our comments. The Agency is then supposed to synthesize all the public concerns and publish a Final EIS addressing and representing the concerns expressed in our comments. But with this Administration we have seen no evidence of the Final EIS stage. So their issuing a Draft EIS is just window dressing. They are just going to do what their funders want them to do anyway.
This is all bad. But with this Deep Sea Mining, the impacts will be extremely far reaching. And because we know so little about deep pelagic and benthic biota and their habitats, we have no baseline to understand how profoundly this will be changing our planet – until we find out the hard way.