Hello and welcome to the Elements of a Deep Sea Mining. My name is Eric Young. I do research in the ethics and externalities of mineral supply chains with a particular focus on the question of how we're going to meet the projected mineral demands of the desired shift from a carbon to an electron based energy system. This podcast aims to explore the often polarized conversation around deep sea mining. My goal is to provide a balanced platform where we can hear from all sides to foster a deeper understanding. A lot of podcasts, especially in the sustainability, energy transition space take a bit of an ideological bent. They have a message that they're pushing and they're targeting an audience that knows what message they want to hear. This podcast aims to be a bit different in that I want to explore the deep sea mining conversation from a more open-minded or undecided standpoint where I hope to have conversations with the experts involved in deep sea mining industry, in deep sea mining advocacy, anti deep sea mining advocacy, deep sea mining journalism and related research. At this point I don’t have a deep expertise in deep sea mining and I don’t have a strongly held opinion about what the right answer is. So I'm hoping to use this platform as an opportunity to educate myself to ask the interesting questions that I want to know the answers to and to make that available for others who share similar questions to learn along with me. So if you are interested in hearing the kind of central issues, the central arguments from both sides, from all sides of the deep sea mining sort of question, then I hope that you will subscribe, follow, and get something out of these conversations. if you are the kind of person who wants to not only hear conversations that you agree with, but also hear the best arguments from the most challenging opposing perspectives, then I hope that you'll find this podcast helpful. Each episode will feature interviews with experts, involved actors, researchers, and philosophers. And we're going to take a kind of a very broad approach to deep sea mining. We're going to look at the industry, the technical and regulatory aspects and developments , the state of the environmental research, the questions very much related to deep sea mining, but we're also going to look at the broader questions around the deep sea mining question. questions about critical mineral demands, recycling, questions about growth, green growth, degrowth questions about the role of science of money of government and private actors in multifaceted questions about the environment and the economy. We are going to discuss how to model a sediment plume to understand it’s effects and we are going to discuss how trust gets built and broken in a society and how we should act in situatoins of great uncertainty. All of these issues are intrinsically related to the deep sea mining question. They come up in any conversation about how we can make decisions around deep sea mining. I was attracted to the deep sea mining debate is kind of a quintessential test case for a lot of the sustainability questions that we are faced with. In philosophical discussions people often reach for extreme examples to test out principles. What would you do if there were a runaway street car threatening the lives of several people and you could stop it by pushing a fat man off an overpass. These extreme examples are crafted to isolate individual principles. Deep sea mining sometimes feels like a philosophical thought experiment for the sustainability debate. Humanity is racing toward an environmental disaster and minerals are needed to divert global warming and just then we get access to a whole new part of the planet – which happens to be covered with just the sort of minerals we think we need. Do we risk the newly encountered ecosystems in order to save the beleaguered race? Only it isn’t a philosophical thought experiment. Or maybe it suffers from the same drawbacks of though experiments which is that they set us up to make complicated decisions as if they were simple. They leave out the nuance. As David Roberts pointed out in the first episode of the Volts podcast, the problem with the so called trolly problem is that it doesn’t give you any of the information that you would actually use if you were forced to make the decision in real life. Who are the people that the streetcar is heading toward, who is the fat man. How did you end up in this situation and what actual alternatives are there. We are going to find that the deep sea mining question also has much more nuance than we are often presented with. There isn’t a right and a wrong answer but there are a lot of trade-offs. So if you are interested like I am in using the deep sea mining question as a test case for thinking about sustainability, only that you want to try to think it through while being covered in all of the uncomfortable nuance that ...
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Feb 14 20255 mins