President Donald Trump’s move on Thursday to kickstart deep-sea mining could be a lifeline for the Canadian company that is pushing to be the first to supply strategic minerals from the ocean floor.
The firm signalled its intention weeks ago to seek permits from the US administration for the activity in a challenge to UN governance, but whether the gambit pays off remains to be seen. The plan faces strong opposition from many countries and scientists who fear the industry could have catastrophic effects on the ocean ecosystem.
Years of deadlock in global efforts to agree rules for commercial mining of the ocean floor had been straining the finances and patience of the Vancouver-based The Metals Company (TMC) – one of the most prominent among a clutch of aspiring deep-sea mining companies.
Then, in an abrupt shift in company policy, TMC Chief Executive Gerard Barron said in a statement at the end of March that it was time to bypass the International Seabed Authority (ISA) – the little-known UN body created by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
“What we need is a fair hearing and a regulator willing to engage,” said Barron, going on to accuse various actors at the ISA of acting in “bad faith” by obstructing the completion of a mining code.
“Looking back at our 16-year experience of the ISA brand of multilateralism, we believe the United States made the right decision when they chose not to ratify UNCLOS,” Barron said.
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The company’s share price – which has struggled since it listed in 2021 – jumped this week after Trump signed an executive order calling for deep-sea mining, including beyond US territorial waters, in a bid to secure critical minerals like nickel, cobalt and copper and counter China’s dominance in the sector.
“Vast offshore seabed areas hold critical minerals and energy resources,” Trump said in the order. “These resources are key to strengthening our economy, securing our energy future, and reducing dependence on foreign suppliers for critical minerals.”
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He directed his administration to expedite the issue of mining permits under the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resource Act (DSHMRA), a piece of largely untested legislation dating back to 1980 before UNCLOS existed.
Following Trump’s announcement, TMC’s Barron said that “with a stable, transparent, and enforceable regulatory pathway available under existing US law, we look forward to delivering the world’s first commercial nodule project – responsibly and economically”.
Financial lifeline
Crucially, the step could give TMC some financial breathing space.
“They have had very little money, and a lot of debt, for a long time,” Bobbi-Jo Dobush, a US.-based environmental attorney, told Climate Home before Trump’s order was signed on Thursday.
TMC made a net loss of over $81 million last year, with a total deficit of $631 million piled up since it began operating. According to its latest annual accounts, the company had only $3.5 million in the bank at the end of 2024 and access to a potential $41.5 million loan offered by its main investors, Silicon Valley financier Andrei Karkar and Gerard Barron himself.
A company spokesperson declined to comment on its financial position.
The wider deep-sea mining industry has been in choppy financial waters due to persistent uncertainty over its viability. Norwegian company Loke Marine Minerals filed for bankruptcy earlier this month after a long search for additional capital from investors proved unsuccessful, its CEO Walter Sognnes was quoted as telling Norwegian newspaper DN.
International backlash
The ISA has under its supervision huge swathes of the Pacific Ocean beyond national jurisdictions that hold the world’s largest reserves of polymetallic nodules – potato-sized rocks packed with minerals that have a multitude of industrial uses – from weapons to clean energy technology.
For years, diplomats at the ISA have been trying to hash out deep-sea mining standards but deep divisions persist and much work remains to be done. Thirty-two countries, including France, Germany and Canada, have also called for either a full ban or a precautionary pause in deep-sea mining activities.
That means Trump’s unilateral decision to expedite licences in both US and international waters is likely to spark a backlash from the international community.
“Any unilateral action would constitute a violation of international law and directly undermine the fundamental principles of multilateralism, the peaceful use of the oceans and the collective governance framework,” said Leticia Carvalho, the secretary general of the ISA, when TMC unveiled its plans in March. Dozens of nations, both in the Global North and South, echoed her opposition.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakan said on Friday the US move “violates international law and harms the collective interests of the international community”. China holds the largest number of exploration permits in the Pacific Ocean under the ISA, but it has been waiting for the mining rulebook’s completion before conducting any commercial extraction activity.
‘Rip up the deep sea for profit’
Trump’s executive order also drew immediate condemnation from environmentalists who say deep-sea mining would cause irreversible damage to the ocean ecosystem while being financially prohibitive and unnecessary because land-based mineral resources and recycling could cover demand.
“Authorizing deep-sea mining outside international law is like lighting a match in a room full of dynamite – it threatens ecosystems, global cooperation, and US credibility all at once,” said Arlo Hemphill of Greenpeace.
“The United States government has no right to unilaterally allow an industry to destroy the common heritage of humankind, and rip up the deep sea for the profit of a few corporations,” he added.
TMC is one of the companies with the most to potentially gain.
In a call with analysts in late March, an executive from the Vancouver-based firm indicated that the US backing could be a much-needed spur to attract external investment.
“If we get to the point where regulatory uncertainty is no longer there and, you know, things are moving along at a very fast clip, let’s say through the US process, well that may put us in a different financial position,” said Craig Shesky, the company’s CFO.
TMC’s rapid pivot
As recently as a few months ago, the company was still lobbying US lawmakers to get behind new legislation calling on the US government to support international governance of seafloor resource exploration.
TMC spent $312,000 on US lobbying activities in 2024, according to lobbying disclosure records.
It is unclear why TMC’s longstanding policy position changed, but during a presentation with analysts, company executives name-checked Steven Groves, a former White House staffer during Trump’s first term.
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Groves is a policy director at the Heritage Foundation, a fossil-fuel funded think-tank that routinely opposes climate policies and casts doubts on universally accepted climate science. He also co-edited ‘Project 2025’, the controversial 900-page conservative policy blueprint for reshaping the federal government.
TMC’s Shesky said Groves agreed that applying for a mining licence under DSHMRA would be “a viable path based on robust and well thought out regulations”.
Choppy waters ahead
But other experts vehemently disagree. Dobush told Climate Home it is “very ironic and highly likely untrue” that going through the United States provides regulatory certainty when the national legislation has never been used for exploitation.
In 2022, weapons maker Lockheed Martin – the only existing holder of DSHMRA exploration permits – said that activities had been delayed as a result of a lack of international recognition of the US licences.
Duncan Currie, legal advisor at the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, said he expected plenty of potential legal issues down the line for TMC before any mining takes place.
For instance, countries like Canada, Switzerland and the Netherlands – where TMC and its partner Allseas are respectively based – could risk breaching the terms of the UNCLOS if they fail to prevent the companies from acting unilaterally, he said.
Nations that rely on the UNCLOS to protect their freedom of navigation or fisheries rights may also be motivated to prevent the US government from setting a precedent in sidestepping international governance.
“Island states and seafaring nations place a great deal of importance on UNCLOS,” added Currie. “I would imagine that those countries will be working to ensure that this doesn’t happen.”
The post Trump throws lifeline to Canadian deep-sea miner, setting scene for international clash appeared first on Climate Home News.
Trump throws lifeline to Canadian deep-sea miner, setting scene for international clash
The governor’s office said the city’s two main reservoirs could dry up by May, much sooner than previous timelines. But authorities still offer no plan for curtailment of water use.
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Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.
As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.
The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.
With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.
Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile
On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.
At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia.
We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.
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Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.
Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.
Agroecology as an alternative
There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency.
In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.
In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.
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Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.
These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.
Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products
We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.
As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.
This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.
The post Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems appeared first on Climate Home News.
Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems
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