They’re calling deep sea mining a climate solution.

The science tells another story.

The Metals Company wants to strip-mine the deep ocean before we understand it. Add your name to stop it.

One of the last pristine ecosystems on Earth is being targeted for industrial mining. The Metals Company wants to send giant machines across the deep floor — and sell the destruction as a climate solution.  Now its CEO, Gerard Barron, is taking that pitch to the New York Times’ Climate Forward. 

Here’s the problem

We need urgent action on the interconnected crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. But we cannot solve one crisis by creating another. Moving beyond fossil fuels cannot come at the cost of sacrificing the deep ocean.

TMC has long promoted deep sea mining as a low impact way to source minerals for the clean energy transition. Now it is also pitching the industry to Washington as essential to national security. 

Neither case stands up to scrutiny.

Tell leaders:
stop deep sea mining

Stop deep sea mining

What’s actually at stake

Deep sea mining would send heavy machinery to rake the ocean floor for nodules that took millions of years to form. It would generate sediment plumes and introduce light and noise into ecosystems that have never experienced either. Scientists warn the damage could be irreversible on any meaningful human timescale.

The deep sea stores carbon. It sustains extraordinary biodiversity that scientists are still discovering. It helps regulate the climate we all depend on. Gambling all of that on an unproven industry is not leadership.

It isn’t even a climate solution

TMC has not shown that deep sea mining would replace land-based mining or cut processing pollution. Without policies or market incentives to close existing mines and smelters, it would add to extraction, not substitute for it.

It doesn’t deliver the U.S. mineral independence TMC promises either. The company plans to process nodules in Japan and Indonesia, while its proposed U.S. facilities remain unbuilt and unpermitted.

Deep sea mining is economically unviable, socially unacceptable, and incompatible with a sustainable future.

The world is already calling for a pause

More than 50 years ago, the United Nations recognized the international seabed as the “common heritage of mankind.” A shared inheritance that belongs to no single country. The Metals Company is now seeking U.S. authorization to mine part of that commons through a process that bypasses the International Seabed Authority, the UN body that actually governs it. That Authority has not approved any commercial mining anywhere.

46 countries, 75+ business and financial institutions, and over 1,000 marine scientists and policy experts have called for a moratorium or precautionary pause. This industry is trying to win social license before anyone can stop it. You can help make sure it doesn’t.

Add your name and tell decision-makers to protect the ocean before mining starts. The more of us who speak up now, the harder it is for TMC to claim the public is on its side.

Add your name: tell leaders to stop deep sea mining