Metals company now controls a huge proportion of the reserved sea bed that's been allicated so far. The company 's estimating that it now stands to make something like 30 billion dollars in profit over the next two decades if it can start this industrial scale mining well. It made me wonder, how did this happen? And what i found was that it's all thanks to this little known united nations affiliated agency that was tasked to regulate sea bed mining in the first place.
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.
Background reading:
Mining in the Pacific Ocean was meant to benefit poorer countries, but an international agency gave a Canadian company access to seabed sites.