I “laid an egg” (intentionally) by stating that 40% of the ships at sea are transporting fossil fuel, so the most direct way of accomplishing the stated goal would be to use less fossil fuel.
When Barrack Obama was elected in 2008, and seated in 2009, he appointed Ken Salazar as Secretary of the Department of Interior (DOI). This brought an end to eight years of the DOI being run at the convenience of the extraction industries.
Aside from the continuation of our dependence on fossil fuel, the “Macondo Deepwater Horizon” blowout was probably the worst fossil-fueled environmental disaster ever.
We have not yet seen how the current administration has synthesized any of the EIS comments we submitted this year, but given their proclivity to pushing the envelope to see what they can get away with, my suspicions are that they will ignore all public input and just see what we’ll do about it.
If BOEM grants Impossible Metals a permit to harvest the nodules, it may serve as an invitation to other nations to open the gates to mining operations in the international Clarion-Clipperton Zone, where the ISA is managing the seabed deliberations.
By way of this semantic legerdemain they would open up the floodgates for extractive and construction industries to run roughshod over their operation areas without regulatory oversight or legal consequences.
A whole raft of regulations were signed into law after a litany of environmental disasters pissed the public off to the point that we were done giving industry free license to destroy our living habitat.
Standard metrics and vocabulary assures us that scientific and technical research is clearly understood, and repeatable. But it also can confer commercial advantages if the “Standard” conforms to already-developed, proprietary technologies.