Out of sight out of mind. As part of my master's studies I looked at innovation in recycling. We're getting very good at extracting the rare resources from our waste. So much so we're now mining old landfill. That is where we should be spending our time and money instead of strip mining the sea bed. 😢

@rbaars4791

25 күн бұрын

That won't be enough by far if you wan't an energy transition.

@RWBHere

25 күн бұрын

'Out of sight, out of mind' can be translated loosely as, 'Invisible, idiot.' I prefer that version when thinking about devastating industries.

@DemPilafian

21 күн бұрын

You make a very good emotional argument. Sadly, the argument is just counter-productive virtue signaling unless you also want to eliminate all other resource extraction on earth.

There is every indication in the data we already have that the resources identified on land are more than adequate to meet our needs, do we really need to trash yet another environment in the pursuit of profit?

@jamespaul2587

26 күн бұрын

The question is whether mining on land will be more harmful than mining underwater

@kkollsga

26 күн бұрын

If you really want to trash a place landmining is the way to go

@toyotaprius79

26 күн бұрын

​@@jamespaul2587c'mon

@---nt5mb

25 күн бұрын

@@jamespaul2587the problem is we can see what happens on land, the sea has be trashed for decades with everything from nuclear waste, plastic and sea trawlers destroying habitats on the sea floor and we have no way to monitor any of it. This is likely to be another pandoras box.

@rbaars4791

25 күн бұрын

@@jamespaul2587 Exaclty, there's is much more biodiversity in Indonesia and DRC's tropical zones where land mining of Cobalt and Nickel currently take place.

Good to see this take on the nodule mining. The last time Robert made a video on this subject it was so one-sided (from the perspective of a company wanting to mine the stuff) that I think there was a huge number of comments decrying the suggestion. I agree with Helen, leave it alone; we don't know what the impact will be on the natural environment down there (although we can safely guess it will be a negative one) and we're not sure we need it.

You always know when a Helen video drops, it's going to be a good one 🍿

I've listened to quite a few podcasts over the last few years about this subject, but this video was by far the most informative about what's there, the nodule growth mechanism and the legal situation. Excellent work Helen.

Yeah, we see how hard it is to keep mining companies accountable for the damage they cause in plain sight, much harder for damage caused by underground mining, and now imagine a situation like massive surface mining, but completely and utterly out of sight, unregulated by any one state, within an ecosystem where everything (other than mining) works and grows much much slower - everything about this spells disaster even without years of concrete experience

Hi Helen Welcome back! That was a clear exposition of the issues with excellent production to enhance the talking heads. 👏👏

It is so refreshing to be informed like this in an unbiased and truly informative manner, through talking points about relative impacts and the broader picture instead of retreating to meaningless hyperbole from under a looking glass. Thank you!

Great episode and great presenting from Helen who makes complex issues easier to understand. And I totally agree with Helen’s view that there isn’t enough understanding and when we destroy wildernesses, we always regret it. 😢

Helen’s analysis and questions is easily the best on the team.

I agree totally with Helen, deep sea mining is dramatically less accountable than land mining.😮

Imagine polluting oceans and killing ecosystems

@iainamurray

27 күн бұрын

Yes, the oil and fishing industries have caused untold damage, not to mention climate change.

@xxwookey

27 күн бұрын

This process doesn't really generate any pollution. Just physical disturbance.

@howard6433

27 күн бұрын

There's very little marine life down that deep. Sunlight doesn't penetrate more than 200 meters or so.

@xxwookey

27 күн бұрын

@@howard6433 But the video explained that there is quite a lot of biodiversity. with thousands of species. I'm not convined that counts as 'very little life'.

@crd7876

27 күн бұрын

@@howard6433 how many times do we have to 'wait and see' on our guesses before we realize that we don't understand the effects of ecology until they're disrupted. We say now 'There's not much down there' then in 20 years they'll be like 'it destroyed this rare system of algae growth beneath the first layer of sediment that fed the bottom feeders which feed the X and X and Z and so on.

Yeah. I love the Helen episodes. So much to explain about the underlining effects of the energy transition.

Thank you. Fascinating. Fully Charged tests of vehicles are becoming too middle-of-the-road (pickup trucks, SUVs) but all other reports of advances in all facets of sustainable energy, new ways to make dwellings more efficient, etc., are better and better - that's where FCShow shines IMHO.

@patreekotime4578

27 күн бұрын

Ummm... we NEED middle of the road vehicles to meet the demand of the vast majority... middle of the road people.

@miketrebert7788

26 күн бұрын

@@patreekotime4578 You and Climate Change deserve better.

@patreekotime4578

26 күн бұрын

@@miketrebert7788 The mass market folks arnt going to go for anything hyper efficient or space age. Beyond any logic they love their terrifyingly dumb SUVs. The EV Range Rover may just do more for the electrification push than any high concept vehicle ever will.

@miketrebert7788

26 күн бұрын

@@patreekotime4578 The French govt. recently started a scheme granting leases to applicants with "low income" for smallish EVs for EU100 per month. I think the allotted number (25,000) was fully subscribed in a few weeks. The whole thing was paused and a second round will (maybe) go ahead when heads stop spinning. Creative thinking, locally made EVs, more EVs on the road and visible. Everybody wins. BUT, they don't have a Tory govt.

@t1n4444

26 күн бұрын

What "tests"? I refer to stuff we have in UK. Battery EVs are falling out of favour in UK and even US. Elon has started shedding staff what with lack of interest in battery EVs. I might have mentioned this a while ago.

I'm absolutely horrified by the prospect of deep sea mining. We are custodians of the planet and have no right to irreversibly plunder it for short term profit. We now know that all life is interdependent and we have no right to destroy that ecosystem, one which we clearly don't yet understand.

@michaeljames5936

24 күн бұрын

I agree with you on the mining, but I'm not sure that thinking of ourselves as custodians is the most helpful image. We are a part, a small, very, very, very temporarily, destructive part of the great web of life, but the danger we represent, is not to the planet, but to ourselves. I think it really needs to be brought home to people that - the reason we're worried about losing bees, is not primarily because we love bees, but because without them, we lose a lot of our food production. WE are at risk of extinction, or at least, being reduced to, medieval-minus, levels of civilisation and population levels. Sure, we'll take maybe 50 - 60% of the large species with us, but within a million years, assuming we don't survive, the planet will have shrugged us off, as a blip, on the order of a nasty period of vulcanism, or a medium-large asteroid impact. What is really sad, apart from the slow dying of billions of human beings, and the fascists we will elect in response to the climate crisis, is that, in less than two centuries from now, if we could get our sh*t together and halt global warming, we really could become custodians, deflecting asteroids, increasing, or decreasing the temperature by manipulating the atmosphere and amount of solar radiation, no more awful ice-ages (I know, we are in an 'ice-age'), like during the last glacial maximum, or slush-ball Earths. Taming vulcanism is possible, but might take us a while yet.* We will have no food-production need for 75% of the land currently being farmed within 35-50years. Imagine all that rainforest being restored, every Scottish and Irish, now bare, hillside, covered in native woodlands, patrolled by native apex predators. We can have a paradisical Earth, if enough of us want it. * Read a great article about taming Yellowstone's super-volcano; it involved extracting the heat from the surface rock, through some form of heat exchange mechanism, similar to geo-thermal energy set-ups, until that rock was cold and solid, then go a bit deeper, and deeper and so on, cooling and hardening, metres, then kilometres deep, of rock over centuries and millennia, effectively 'capping' or sealing the magma safely below. I'm sure you would have to keep at it, that magma isn't going to take this lying down.

What this renaissance *_does not_* need, is greed, but that's in, and *out, of control*

@michaelsmithers4900

26 күн бұрын

Greed is always a danger but is immaterial to the discussion. The question is should we mine the resources given the historical environmental destruction of mining.

@kristoffer3000

25 күн бұрын

@@michaelsmithers4900 Greed is literally the entire discussion, it's the reason we're in this mess to begin with and it's not profitable enough to make changes so we're still in this mess with no real light at the end of the tunnel.

@michaelsmithers4900

24 күн бұрын

@@kristoffer3000That’s reductionist and shifts the blame from the many that profit from technology (you and I included) to the few the get rich. There are many motivations greed is only one.

@kristoffer3000

24 күн бұрын

@@michaelsmithers4900 It's not reductionist at all, it's just the uncomfortable truth. You think we'd be standing still if capitalism didn't exist? The socialists in China are currently the most innovative people on the planet in just about every sector whilst being far more ecologically friendly than the West. The rich are the problem, we didn't have to be in this mess to begin with, we knew about the dangers of climate change before it was a problem but nobody listened because there was money to be made. That you think greed is only a part of the discussion just means you're ignorant.

@michaelsmithers4900

23 күн бұрын

I think you sugested it was all about greed.

They take millions of years to make and I'll bet only a decade to use up. What a great idea !

Good to see Helen covering this subject. Interesting and balanced introduction to the subject

Brilliantly informative and interesting. Really covered all of the considerations well. Hopefully we’ll leave the nodules and biology where it is untouched. We are trashing so much of the shallow sea with aggressive fishing techniques and really don’t understand the implications of deep sea mining. Well done Helen

Nice to hear from you Helen.

Thanks Helen, for yet another one of your wonderfully balanced informative discussions into this vexing issue. My optimistic self considers that we should rethink the energy transition issues as an opportunity to change from a pure consumption and waste economic paradigm to a more circular economy. In this case the need for extraction and waste should tailor off over time making this expensive sea mining experiment superfluous. South parks wonderful BP drill parody comes instantly to mind. My issue is as a species we constantly underestimate the complexity of the ecosystem we inhabit due to exceptionalism fostering hubris and a genetically driven competitiveness meaning we are automatically programmed for lack of empathy for other life forms “if you keep shitting the bed you’ll run out of places to sleep” in the common vernacular so no I think we can sort this without buggering up the deep ocean 😁👍

I am really not convinced we NEED these resources. Especially now that Sodium Ion batteries are coming online that lack all of these metals, and recycling scemes are really ramping up. I think we should view demand for this with extreme septicism and ask what people pushing it have to gain... metals market speculators etc. I will add that there is a move to independantly study the life in the abysal plains and all of the reports are the scientists basically telling us that these companiee have been lying. There is a ton of life down there, easily visible on camera and the researchers are all screaming that more studies need to be done because almost every other species they are encountering is new to science. These are unique habitats and the myth that they are devoid of life is one that has been perpetuated by companies with billions at stake who have been mistakenly allowed to regulate themselves.

REALLY GOOD show. Provocative. Philosophy, it seems to me if we dig more for more resources. We will end up, simply just digging more. Best we demand less of Mother Nature, She has already given us so much. And there is only so much to give. Charge on!

oh yes, let's explore and fiddle with an entire environment that we know almost nothing about for our little precious rocks to use on our precious gadgets. And when we are done with it just yeet ourselves into space and press the Recycle button on our former home. After 200 years on space we get back and start it all over again.

Love your work, Helen 👍

So much for the deep oceans. Knowing there is money to be made, any life in the way will be wiped out. And there are even fewer environmental controls in the ocean than on land.

Isn't it strange to view the earth as a treasure trove only there for humankind to exploit to our own gain with no regard what-so-ever for every other life form we share the earth with? I am totally with you, Helen - let's not destroy more habitats if we can recycle our materials instead...

@t1n4444

27 күн бұрын

Quite so. How many communities across the planet were considered a nuisance and therefore expendable by us Euros. In fact Britain was world leader at fffkin over people "not like us". You can make your own list.

@kristoffer3000

25 күн бұрын

Capitalism goes brrrr

A fascinating and nuanced exploration of deep sea mining. It will be interesting to see which this will go and the impact. I wonder if this much debate was put into deep sea oil drilling? 🤔 Doubt it.

We brought so many creatures on the brink of extinction(and we caused extinction of countless more) when we discovered them to satisfy our needs without thinking about long term impact of that, that we should not make this mistake one more time. Let it stay there.

Helen is a fantastic presenter and this was a good explanation of the nodules and the reasons why they could be mined. But I certainly agree with her concluding comments. Do we really need to risk buggering up yet another pristine environment?

LFP is safer than NCM battery chemistry, and with public concerns over EV fires, it makes little sense to undertake this effort to be able to build more NCM batteries. Even Sodium-Ion battery tech is coming to the mainstream, removing the need of lithium. Battery tech should be as cheap and 'green' as possible to ensure we transition away from fossil fuels asap.

Love Helen, very credible

Accountability is an aspect I had not even considered on this issue. Thanks for the video.

There are still issues in the Gulf from the deep water horizon incident. There are ROV's that go down and record the environmental impact. On the South part of the Florida escapement. There's a huge Coral. Hopefully this Coral will not be impacted but it doesn't look good.

Nickel and cobalt aren't necessary for LFP batteries. So you're mostly getting iron. Recycling iron (and steel) is easier and better.

Norwegian here who does not support his country disturbing the deep sea ecosystems. A very interesting perspective mentioned in this video is "do we actually need it?" Tesla showing the way trying to create a different battery chemistry is a good example!

Thank you, Helen. Nothing good ever came from scraping the seafloor dead. Without Humans, life flourishes.

If only we had put this much thought and consideration to oil and gas extraction and industrial fishing methods.

This topic is central to a novel called "Venomous Lumpsucker" by Ned Beaumain. Which gives an interesting view on this, and on green credits.

15:34 this is a great point!

Businessmen, they drink my wine Plowmen dig my earth None of them along the line Know what any of it is worth

Very interesting!

Thank you.

Interesting episode, and well balanced. I worry that there might be some as-yet not understood dependency between the creatures of the abyssal plain and life further up the food chain ... so any damage done on the sea floor could have knock-on consequences.

I find this to be well-balanced and well presented. My comment is be careful when you mess with Mother's. Mother Earth.😊

We need to focus on recycling and garbage mining we have so many resources already dug out and in the landfills. But still another great video Fully Charged team 😊❤

@glazedbeachbro3926

17 күн бұрын

I dare you to look into the recycling industry. Sometimes religion doesn't meet reality...

I tend to think that it won’t come down to whether we should or shouldn’t, it’ll come down to whether it’s profitable or not. I personally can’t see how it would be profitable when you compare it to the cost of extracting minerals on land. The sea is an incredibly harsh environment that is very difficult to create any profitable venture in, just look at the cost of onshore vs offshore wind energy.

Interesting that the polymetallic nodules grow at 1 - 2 mm every million years! How important are the sea cucumbers, sponges and other fauna in eating down the levels of organic marine snow to create the sweet spot conditions for the nodules to form? Do the sponges growing on the nodules help keep them above ground and not become buried? How can we ensure extracting these nodules don't destroy these wonderful creatures?

Interesting take but when I look at those video's of the seabed compared to natural area's in Indonesia and DRC where Cobalt and Nickel are mined it seems the biodiversity is MUCH higher in these tropical zones than on the seabed. Since the Clarion-Clipperton zone is huge, won't the ecosystems be affected less? Helen said that seabed mining does not reduce land mining but it definitely can if the profitibality of land mining (in high biodversity areas) plummets due to seabed mining in combination of replacing these materials in battery chemistries.

Thanks

Dr Glover is very pragmatic about it all.

Helen!!!

since mining always produced clean stuff I'm sure it will produce clean results again... not

I really hope we nevee mine these. If on land where everybody can see whats going on we still wreak havoc, how much worse would that be under 5km of water...

Having sailed across the Pacific and seen the huge number of (mainly Chinese) fishing vessels, many of which are poorly regulated and do not have their transponders on, especially around the Galapagos, I have concerns over humanity's ability to properly manage the resource and avoid over-exploitation. But with the right political pressure we perhaps can do it, and we should certainly try. The oceans have so many issues from coral reef death, overfishing, plastic pollution and acidification. Life on this planet depends on their health. Let's do whatever we can to protect them.

If much of our land has been under the ocean at some point in its development, then surely there should be the remnants of those nodules in most of those regions underground?

Clarion clipperton zone is located where El Nino and La Nina take place. Would these minerals have an effect on water temperature or oxidation or something that affects our climate. Maybe these nodules have nothing to do with the environment impact we get from this area.

Very insightful. It doesn't feel right to just get those because they are there.

Need means different things to different people and compromise is almost never not doing something. Our "need" or sense of entitlement for more stuff like bigger houses and cars is increasingly greedy. If mining is inevitable on the sea floor there must be third party monitoring and we must offset by protecting genuinely at risk places on land, although this will be problematic due to soveriegnty issues

Silly question, perhaps, but if the nodules are mostly iron, is it possible to use magnets to collect them?

Why not have a machine with arms/grabbers that uses vision to pick up the nodules instead of something on tank tracks scouring everything on the surface of the sea bed?

@Smidge204

27 күн бұрын

Vision becomes problematic when you start dealing with the sediment getting disturbed. There's also a matter of efficiency; a dredge that just sorta scrapes the sea floor with a basket and scoops up the lumps is going to produce a lot of resources very quickly, and be very reliable. A robotic arm that picks up each individual lump will take much, much longer to get the same output.

@Dominic_Bolton

27 күн бұрын

I had exactly the same thought. Machine learning should be able to identify the nodules efficiently, pick it up, pop it in the hopper behind. Certainly vacuuming up the entire bed is going to cause enormous damage to those creatures and their environment

@LongDarkTeatimeOfTheSoul

27 күн бұрын

And reduce profit???? Are you mad???

@bimblinghill

27 күн бұрын

I was thinking the same. There's been a revolution in underwater drone technology - I wonder if there's now the technology to gently pick up selected rocks & pop them in a basket for collection, with a tiny fraction of the environmental damage.

@toronado455

26 күн бұрын

@@bimblinghill You're describing how an environmentally responsible research expedition might be conducted. Not how a greedy corporation would operate.

12:53 mountain top removal is a standard strip mining mode and stated as not viable by a land owner. Maybe quarrying would be a better word to use here? I live in an area that has been extensively quarried and mined without too much issue for either wildlife or humanity, the majority of quarried areas have been returned to parkland? Obvs, marine areas are an unknown for recovery. But, we do know nature finds a way

we need to look at the electro chemical effects of removing the nodules. we have to make sure not to disrupt the energy flow of the planet or the ocean.

@crazyratlady3438

25 күн бұрын

It seems we never thoroughly consider the complexity of natural systems, and the interconnectedness to everything else.. and the fact we don't even fully know or understand those complexities.

This takes me back to the movie Yellow Submarine.

I'm very much in favour of developing everything to do with renewable energy and circular economy. I don't believe that we need to mine the deep sea though. To clarify I have a long history in offshore O&G and worked for one of the prominent companies in this video, developing subsea equipment (not for this type of mining though). I see the potential for them to make lots of money and I doubt that they will knowingly do harm. I think the problem is, nobody knows what harm is being done, and until we do, and until we fully understand the harm that is being done, we can't mine. Because if we do do major harm, there is no way to then put the genie back into the bottle. Let's optimize recycling, optimize land mining (in the best possible manner) and not touch the deep sea, because I don't think we need to. I understand that it is a massive amount that is "easily" available, I'm just too worried it does more harm than good in the long term and we end up regretting it, again.

it's not enough that we pollute the ocean with plastic, now we want to dig up the ocean bed as well. When will we ever learn.

Excellent video. This really troubles me though. We're actively destroying the world around us that we can see, and now we're looking into doing the same to a world we can't. As a human race we will simply never learn.

I am sure the decision makers will not reference this post. Seeing how humankind has already worked against nature and the natural world. I believe it would be a travesty to start ripping apart another ecosystem with no knowledge of the long term effects.

👏👏

So it's not enough that we messed up our land, now we wanna mess up the ocean too? Is there any limits to human greed and stupidity.

was that a question on gcse geography I don't remember and I don't think I learnt that in geography

Cobalt? Cobalt is done. We no longer need Cobalt. Next question.

Someone will have to make a go of it, and if it turns out we don't need the minerals or they are too expensive to extract and the company goes bankrupt then that's that, no one else will try for a long while.

If you can see the damage done on land. Then you know the history of what will happen for mining on the ocean floor.

Why dredge when magnets exist?

If there is money to be made in deep sea mining then it will happen unfortunately. its currently pretty expensive and damaging to dig up stuff from land with all the fuel burned and sifting processes of thousands of tons of dirt to get a few KG of metal, so I can see sooner or later it will happen if you can literally pick these nodules up off the sea bed.

Clean energy? It would destroy the ocean floor ecosystem. Sting said it best; I never saw a miracle of science that didn't go from a blessing to a curse, and I never saw a military solution that didn't end up with something worse.

Why mine the sea bed when there are so many land areas still to destroy?

So up to 6 minutes, we are talking about dredging, or strip mining. Not actual mining The resource seems to have no function, but, is irreplaceable. The resource is poor in value and will need significant input to be worked into it's constituent component s. So why not strip mine say Greenland instead? Cheaper, easier, less wet and becoming warmer, every day?

I don't think we need the stuff. The population is expected to stabilise. People have enough food and should expect enough money to express themselves. I notice that things are getting more durable. People have access to knowledge and local services and resources to make what they need themselves. I just don't see where the growth in demand for minerals is coming from. My battery is made of lithium, iron and phosphate.

Worth the risk? To continue with luxury consumption? How many electrical cars now needs to have 800hp and 120mile range when most of us just needs to get from A to B and a lot of material could be used better.

Will humanity never learn? The carbon neutral future can only be assured by working in harmony with nature, not by destroying it at every opportunity through simple arrogance and greed. This is an ocean world; we screw with it at our peril.

@kristoffer3000

25 күн бұрын

Capitalism goes BRRRRR

@t1n4444

25 күн бұрын

Good point. It looks as if we have helped to modify the climate so that the ocean has decided to inundate our dry bit. Hmm, we didn't see that coming did we ... or rather we decided to ignore the climatologists with the usual, "Scaremongers! WTF do they know?" Quite a bit it appears.

You can’t in good faith put “mining” and “clean” in the same title.

If the rocks are sitting right on top of the seabed, why can’t we just have smart equipment that just grabs te rocks without spoiling mud layer?

hundreds of tonnes? OK, we solved Albania. But on second thought I wonder if this amount will be enough for this diminutive country.

There is no good way to know what material future batteries will require. I think when recycling reaches the 90% we have achieved with lead acid batteries very little virgin material will be needed.

Title idea: "Will deep sea mining mess up the basis of the world's ecosystem?"

I'm fine with it. When you look at the damage that global warming is going to bring, and compare the damage this particular mining will do, the damage from the deep sea mining is in insignificant. You might do less damage if you change the machine, after all you're mining metal, it must be possible to invent a vertical maglev machine which can just use magnets to pick up the metals and carry those metals to the surface.

You talk about cobalt but I thought it was about lithium really. The sea is huge compared to the land ...

As long as the submarine isn't controlled by a Logitech controller, we should be good.

@harrygroundwater2590

26 күн бұрын

😂

I'm still on the fence with this one... I think anything that speeds up the energy transition and climate change mitigation is critically important. The fact that climate change is a very well understood existential threat that definitively will decimate the habitable planet unless the rate of transition is increased, perhaps makes it more important than the threat of deep sea mining which could be bad, but might not be as terrible as the climate change threat. For me a big question is - will this abundance of new resources benefit new green tech a lot more than legacy fossil fuel based tech? If it's equally useful then I'd say there's little point in it. But if more of these metals equals much cheaper green tech compared to legacy high carbon tech, which equals faster uptake and faster energy transition, which equals less global warming - then I'd argue that's the single most important thing. It's tricky!

@crazyratlady3438

25 күн бұрын

We got in this mess w climate change by this same attitude..we justify these reckless actions by claiming it's necessary. We really need to learn from our many mistakes. Tampering w natural systems always has consequences. There's still so much we don't know about the ocean. Yes, climate change is a problem but it's only a piece of a much bigger issue..the imbalance of natural systems causing a domino effect. We've assaulted these systems on so many levels, our energy production being just one of many. Biodiversity loss will be equally or more devastating than climate change. We've started a destabilization process..we must attempt to stabilize the whole system, not solely focus on climate. Most importantly, we need to be very, very cautious. We may tip things in a way that might not be recoverable.

I remember taking an environmental studies course about 30 years ago. Even then people knew deep sea mining was an incredibly stupid idea from the environmental aspect.

mining sea floor is already going on now, mostly tests

I have reservations about this. But I do wonder if there’s a low impact way to do this. Could there be a rule that the sea bed can’t be touched, only the nodules. Automated robots plucking the nodules from above, floating a few feet above the bottom… maybe I’m dreaming but if no one tries to develop a right way we may end up with the worst, dredges killing everything in their path…

@markthomasson5077

27 күн бұрын

My thoughts. Surely actually more efficient

deep sea mining is like massive bottom trawling and look what this method do to fish population or environment that sustain it, almost gone, then humanity last resort is to farm fish near shore with plethora impact that come with it

So no mining because some sand fleas might die? Seems less impactful small compared to the child labor camps for cobalt and destroying rain forest papyua new guinea in the png mine. Green energy comes with impact no matter how you slice it.

Should we?… Absolutely not… will money seeking multi conglomerate corporations?…. Most likely… No one can stop them (in international waters)

I don't agree with a ban on deep-sea mining. That goes too far. However, I completely support the 10-year moratorium. I also support more accountability within the International Seabed Authority. We need mining of all types. Sure. We're not going to need cobalt from the deep sea. But, we'll need other things from the deep sea. I don't agree with outright bans on deep-sea mining because I view them as being rash commitments from quixotic purists on the fringe left who don't put a lot of thought into the consequences of their actions, much like climate change-denying neoconservatives and libertarians.

You don’t need to mine Lithium from the land under the sea, it can be extracted straight from sea water.

These nodules are often quite radioactive and would be difficult to handle and process. No thanks, keep the bottom of the sea intact.