Pages from the Ocean’s Story Much of what we know about the ocean begins with a signal. A whale’s call moving through dark water. A life form thriving where sunlight never reaches. A legal protection that holds — because people…
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.
It is not a surprise, but rather shocking how the current administration is eviscerating our national regulatory agencies, and doing it in what may appear to lay audiences as “sensible.”
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.
The industry is in their element when prices are around $100/bbl. When it falls to $50/bbl. they close up shop. So having lease sales in a sinking market may not yield the promises of “Drill, Baby, Drill.”
We’ve arrived at an odd inflection point that has arisen now that National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is on the DOGE chopping block.
s I’ve previously indicated, I’ve been sparing my nerves by not reacting seriously until I “see the whites of their eyes,” – and I have to take in with amusement some of the conflicts and narratives that are being revealed.
A “legal coup” has just occurred in the US. If we do not act strongly, July 4 2024 may be the last Independence Day we’ll see in a while.
