America Eyes the Sea Floor, Copper Thieves Rob the Dead (and Die), Right to Repair Wins!

Mar 21, 2024

Hello and welcome to the first proper edition (issue? mailing? installment?) of Power Metal, the newsletter about the race for the resources that are shaping the future!

Power Metal is about how the raw materials we need for renewable energy and digital technology are spawning environmental havoc, political upheaval and murder—and how we can do better. It’s a space for updates, insights and analysis about those issues, and for you, me, and anyone else who subscribes to talk about it all.

Here’s the lineup for this week:

US Lawmakers Want to Mine the Seafloor Because They’re Afraid of China

Racing to the bottom. (Photo: The Metals Company)

Here’s a lesson for would-be critical metal miners on how to get the attention of American lawmakers: talk less about electric vehicles and more about weapons systems. Two members of the House of Representatives introduced a bill last week calling for the US to provide “financial, diplomatic, or other forms of support” for deep sea mining—the currently-banned idea of digging up millions of tons of nickel, cobalt and other metals from the bottom of the ocean. “Lobbying efforts seeking governmental approval to mine the seabed for EV battery metals often fell on deaf ears, but backers have found a way to appeal to lawmakers—as a source of cobalt for U.S. weapons makers that avoids Chinese suppliers,” reports Yusuf Khan in the Wall Street Journal.

Now, it is true that China is very interested in deep sea mining, and that Beijing dominates the global supply chains for pretty much all of the minerals which are crucial for both electric vehicles and many military technologies. It’s 100 per cent reasonable for American lawmakers to see China’s control of these metals as a potential threat. At the same time, however, deep sea mining itself poses a huge potential threat to the oceans. The environmental damage unleashed by tearing up millions of tons of metal-bearing rocks from the ocean floor could be catastrophic. Which is why hundreds of ocean scientists, twenty-plus national governments and many major corporations—including some that need critical metals to make their products—have called for a moratorium on sea mining until more research is done. (I wrote about the issue in depth [get it?!] in this cover story for Wired magazine last year.)

At the moment, international law prohibits anyone from mining in international waters. That might change soon, though. The International Seabed Authority, the UN-affiliated body of 168 member states and the European Union which oversees such matters, is convening in Jamaica this week to continue talks on creating regulations to govern ocean mining. The Metals Company, a Canada-incorporated outfit that is the most aggressive of several companies pushing to start mining, says they expect to get the go-ahead to start sending their colossal mining robots to the Pacific seafloor as soon as next year.

Even if deep sea mining were legalized tomorrow, though, American companies would still be shut out. That’s because the US has never ratified the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, the international treaty that established the International Seabed Authority, and as a result is not a member of the ISA. It’s surely no coincidence then that in the same week that the seabed mining bill was introduced in Congress, more than 300 former US government officials and military officers — including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and many other bigwigs— issued a letter urging lawmakers to ratify the Law of the Sea treaty.

“China and Russia have taken advantage of our absence to work actively to undermine critical United States economic and national security interests,” the letter warns, adding that signing the treaty is crucial so that “American businesses can harvest the critical strategic minerals of the deep sea floor.”

One result of all these maneuvers: The Metals Company’s stock price has shot up.

Copper Thieves Target the Dead in America, Get Killed in South Africa

I guess you could call it a grave offense? Two Los Angeles County cemeteries were recently looted by metal thieves who cut through a fence and sledgehammered off hundreds of bronze headstones and nameplates, reports Susan Valot at KCRW. Why? Because bronze is mostly copper, and the price of scrap copper is surging. The value of those stolen grave markers could be as high as $2 million. That’s in large part because copper is one of the most-needed metals to build electric cars and renewable energy systems. That growing demand is juicing a worldwide wave of metal theft, with copper the most prized of targets. Bandits are stealing everything from manhole covers to electric vehicle chargers to entire radio towers. German railways were temporarily paralyzed last month because so much cable had been ripped off.

South Africa has been especially hard hit. Copper thieves there operate on an industrial scale, stealing thousands of miles of cables and other gear from power stations, trains, even hospitals. It’s a black market that often turns deadly. Impoverished South Africans fed up with endless power cuts caused by cable theft are turning to vigilante justice. In February, villagers in Limpopo province caught a man with a load of copper cables in his car and stoned him to death, then burned his body. Not that the police aren’t trying, too. The very next day, another thief allegedly caught hauling copper cables out of a school in Johannesburg was killed in a shootout with cops.

The Fight for the Right to Repair Marches On

Activists and consumer rights groups have for years been pushing electronics manufacturers to make it easier for regular folks to fix their products, from iPhones to Dustbusters. Finally, momentum seems to be shifting in the public’s direction. Last week, Colorado’s House of Representatives became the latest in a rapidly-growing list of legislatures to pass a bill giving consumers a “Right to Repair” their electronics.

Digital gadgets in particular are notoriously difficult to fix. You can’t just open them up to have a look inside, the way you can open the hood of your car. You certainly can’t replace their dead batteries the way you can with your TV remote. That’s the result of long-standing corporate strategy. The electronics industry deliberately makes their products difficult^⁠ to repair. They glue components in place so they can’t be swapped out, use weirdly-shaped screws that require special tools, and refuse to make repair manuals and related software available to the public. The goal is to nudge customers into buying new models rather than repairing their old ones.

But consumers are getting fed up, and legislators are taking notice. The Colorado bill would “require manufacturers to provide … consumers and small businesses with parts, tools, and service materials required to repair everyday household electronics like laptops and smartphones, (and) appliances,” explains Will Sherwood with Public Interest Resource Group. In Oregon, just a week earlier, the legislature sent a similar bill to their governor for signature. Since last summer, New York, California and Minnesota have all passed Right to Repair laws. A fistful of other states and national governments are looking at following suit.

All of this matters not only because repairing rather than replacing broken gadgets can save consumers money, but because those gadgets are full of critical metals, from the nickel in their rechargeable batteries to the copper in their wiring. Each broken Xbox controller or hair dryer contains only small amounts of copper, lithium and other metals, but keeping millions or billions of them in use obviates the need for huge amounts of destructive, energy-intensive mining. Extending the lifetime of all the smartphones in the European Union by just one year would prevent the release of 2.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2030, according to a study by environmental groups. That’s the equivalent of taking more than a million cars off the roads. What’s more, discarded electronic gadgets are rarely recycled; usually, they get thrown out, adding to the mountains of toxic electronic waste growing by the day all over the world. Making repairs easier is a great step toward, um, fixing these problems.

You Should Really See This

Think digging up the sea floor or stealing grave markers are crazy ways to get metals? You haven’t seen crazy til you’ve seen Scrapper, an ultra-gonzo documentary about meth-smoking outlaws who scavenge the metal debris left by freshly-exploded bombs dropped by the US Air Force in a desert training range. Astonishing, appalling, occasionally inspiring, and well worth your time.

Pic of the Week

Granted, they’re not as cute as my dog Roxie, seen in this spot last week, but I was nonetheless charmed by these wild guanacos that crossed my path on a reporting trip with fellow journo Jon Bartlett in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

Thus ends my very first newsletter containing actual news. I’d love to hear what you think, from any angle. Too many words? Not enough? Should I include more links to news items, or more original reporting, or both? Seriously, whatever your comments, I’m all ears.