China’s foreign ministry said on Friday that an executive order President Trump signed a day earlier to accelerate the permitting process for seabed mining in international waters “violates international law and harms the overall interests of the international community.”
The BBC earlier reported the remarks by a foreign ministry spokesman, Guo Jiakun. The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
With the notable exception of the United States, nearly every country in the world is party to a treaty on marine and maritime activities that went into force in 1994, called the Law of the Sea Convention. That the United States has never ratified the treaty is in part what allowed Mr. Trump to unilaterally decide that the government could issue permits for mining the seabed in areas beyond American territorial jurisdiction.
The White House has argued that extracting critical minerals such as cobalt and nickel from nodules on the ocean floor is crucial to its supply of metals that go into a plethora of advanced technologies. On Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency that will be tasked with issuing seabed mining permits, said the Trump administration had unlocked “the next gold rush.”
Dozens of countries have called for a moratorium on seabed mining, and even those, like China, who have been keen to see seabed mining take place, have urged restraint until the International Seabed Authority, an agency created under the treaty, agrees on rules for how companies can go about extracting minerals from the deep sea.
Many scientists see deep-sea mining as environmentally risky. It has never been done at commercial scale before, and the deep sea is one of the planet’s least understood ecosystems.
Many countries rebuked the Trump administration’s embrace of seabed mining several weeks ago, when a Canadian mining outfit, the Metals Company, announced that its American subsidiary would apply directly to the U.S. government for a permit for deep-sea mining in international waters.
Environmental groups expressed outrage over the executive order.
“Trump is trying to open one of Earth’s most fragile and least understood ecosystems to reckless industrial exploitation,” said Emily Jeffers, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The deep ocean belongs to everyone and protecting it is humanity’s global duty. The sea floor environment is not a platform for ‘America First’ extraction.”
Companies have been exploring the seabed for minerals for more than a decade. The richest zone they have found is in the Eastern Pacific, in an area called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which occupies a vast span under the ocean between Mexico and Hawaii.
Permitting in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone would be handled by the Commerce Department, through NOAA, which has been hit by large scale cuts to its funding and work force since Mr. Trump took office.
“NOAA provides Americans with accessible and accurate weather forecasts; it tracks hurricanes and tsunamis; it responds to oil spills; it keeps seafood on the table; and so much more,” said Jeff Watters at the nonprofit group Ocean Conservancy. “Forcing the agency to carry out deep-sea mining permitting while these essential services are slashed will only harm our ocean and our country.”
