The seabed authority was struggling to get anyone to mine these reserved areas. Teaming up with private contractors was now the new way forward, CNN's Eric Liu says. But is that necessarily a bad thing? "I think time will tell," Liu says.
The adoption of electric cars has been hailed as an important step in curbing the use of fossil fuels and fighting climate change. There is a snag, however: such vehicles require around six times as many metals as their gasoline-powered counterparts.
A giant storehouse of the necessary resources sits at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. But retrieving them may, in turn, badly damage the environment.
Guest: Eric Lipton, an investigative reporter for The New York Times.
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