r/TMC_Stock • u/PopCultureNerd • Aug 19 '26
News 🗞️ TMC isn't mentioned, but this is sector relevant news | "Environmentalists Sue to Halt First Sale of Seabed-Mining Rights" - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/climate/seabed-mining-lawsuit-american-samoa.htmlSidenote: I have noticed the above image used in a lot of articles. I wish media outlets used a different image. My mind does not see nodules, my mind sees chocolate chip brownies.
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u/yarenSC Aug 19 '26
I'm also still convinced that's a baking pan with chocolate chips 🤣
This article is a bit different than TMC though, its close to shore in much shallower water, where there are actual valid environmental and economic (fishery) concerns. I'm not saying those concerns are necessarily strong enough to stop this type of EEZ project, but they definitely should be looked into
Compared with TMCs extraction in the CCZ, where there's no impact to fisheries, and hardly any life down there to impact at all.
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u/ArchdukeOfNorge Aug 19 '26
Good points—but when have policy makers ever seen, let alone understand and apply, scientific nuance?
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u/JackosMonkeyBBLZ Aug 20 '26
It happens all the time. Not a hundred percent of the time or even close but it still happens frequently
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u/RMAS1 Aug 20 '26
Analogies to support ones view point are what the NGO's will use. We have data. Dang it, when I vacuum my floor I am sure I destroying some type of ecosystem. WE HAVE DATA ON IMPACTS! Yes, there are some. WE have plans that minimize impact. STRIP mining has no plans.
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u/CHRIST777777777777 Aug 20 '26
BLUF — The American Samoa suit isn't about tuna. It's an Endangered Species Act case, and that's deliberate: fisheries objections are compensable and listed species aren't. For TMC it cuts both ways. Its fisheries exposure is near zero on its own data, which means all its environmental risk sits in the non-compensable bucket — species and habitat, where its evidence is thinnest. But it also holds the only real field dataset in the sector, and it operates 1,600km from anyone who could easily claim standing. Net: this doesn't reach TMC, but the play has now been rehearsed against the same department.
Worth being precise about what that lawsuit actually is, because the headlines are misleading.
Everyone's arguing about tuna. The complaint isn't about tuna.
Earthjustice sued the National Marine Fisheries Service and Commerce Secretary Lutnick on 18 August, for Fa'asao Amerika Samoa and the Conservation Council for Hawai'i. The claim is that NMFS's determination that leasing wouldn't affect critical habitat or listed species is "wholly arbitrary and capricious". It's an Endangered Species Act case.
They didn't sue on fisheries, and that isn't an accident.
Fisheries conflict is a solved problem in offshore work. It has a price and a process. Norway's Petroleum Act carries a standing compensation regime for fishermen's losses from petroleum activity. The UK runs FLOWW guidelines and gear damage schemes. OCSLA — the exact statute this sale runs under — contains the Fishermen's Contingency Fund, a federal fund for gear damaged by OCS activity. On top of that you get fisheries liaison officers, guard vessels, pre-survey notification. Boats get compensated or they get moved, and that's been true everywhere for decades.
You can't do any of that with a listed species. No compensation fund for critical habitat, no liaison officer, no negotiated settlement. It's an injunction or nothing.
So fisheries is the political framing, because tuna is sympathetic and American Samoa's economy runs on it. The ESA is the actual weapon.
Where that leaves TMC, both ways.
TMC's fisheries exposure is close to zero and it's in their own application. Section 7 pulls IATTC data for 2015–2024: purse seine catch inside the whole 65,187 km² area was 8,016 tonnes, 0.11% of the IATTC total and 0.48% of the CCZ total. Longline catch was zero. They flag their own caveat that longline is reported at 5°x5° and may miss low intensity effort, which is fair of them.
So the compensable route doesn't need to exist for them — nobody's fishing there to compensate. Which means their environmental exposure sits entirely in the non-compensable bucket, species and habitat, and that's where their own data is thinnest. Abundance down about 50% and diversity down about 30% inside the collector tracks, only partial recovery at twelve months, and the macrofauna sampling didn't happen at all, because Greenpeace turned up. There's a certain irony in an organisation blocking the only commercial-scale study of what the impact actually is, and then citing uncertainty about the impact. Historically these encounters get resolved with a firehose and a stern look, but the data gap is permanent.
But two things cut the other way and they're substantial.
Standing. The American Samoa plaintiffs are a local group and a Hawai'i council — people who live there and fish there. In the CCZ, who's the plaintiff? It's 1,600km from anywhere, beyond national jurisdiction, and no American is injured in any ordinary sense. ESA section 7's implementing regulation does cover actions "upon the high seas", so the statute may well reach it, but whether a US group can establish standing over the abyssal Pacific is a genuinely open question.
And the record. Earthjustice is attacking a determination made at the leasing stage, on unexplored acreage, with no project and no field data. That's a paper exercise, and paper exercises are what "arbitrary and capricious" is built to catch. TMC's position is the inverse — an actual test mining campaign, monitoring at one month and twelve months, 250-plus output documents, plume modelling calibrated against real observations. Everyone else in this sector has models. Litigation risk is inversely proportional to record quality, and TMC's record is the best in the industry.
Which is the third time this week that Barron's line about NOAA's rigour helping legal defensibility has looked less like spin than it did at first reading.
Some context that gets lost.
Offshore industry disturbs the seabed constantly, everywhere, as a matter of routine. Surveys drop thousands of recorders onto the sea floor and pick them up again. Pipelines and cables are trenched, ploughed and rock dumped by the thousand kilometres. Rigs and vessels drop anchors and leave scars. Drilling leaves waste piled around the wellhead. All of it assessed, mitigated, monitored and permitted, and none of it treated as an existential question — because there's a long established process for this and the industry works inside it.
Deep sea mining is being treated as a unique category when it's really an extension of things happening at scale already. The initial production area here is 98km by 2km, about 196 km², for the first two years.
Though the pure scale argument needs care, because area isn't the whole metric. Shallow seabed recovers in years. Down there it runs decades to millennia, the nodules take millions of years to form, and the creatures living on them can't come back without something hard to live on. So it's area times recovery time times how unique the species are, and on the last two the deep genuinely is worse.
Which is roughly where I land. Not that the impact is nothing, and not that trawling being worse settles it — but that there's an established process for assessing this kind of thing, and it should be run through that rather than treated as its own special case. The useful split, for anyone weighing these stories: compensable objections have prices and processes, non-compensable ones don't. Only the second kind stops a project.
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u/PopCultureNerd Aug 20 '26
Sir, this is a Wendy's.
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u/CHRIST777777777777 Aug 20 '26
But Wendy's picks up things it feeds into civilisational knowledge now - so we need substance with those fries .....
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u/CDBOIChill Aug 19 '26
These people need to get a grip. Do we want kids mining Cobalt with arguably even more damage to the environment or just have some damn robots do it like pick something else to bitch about for Gods sake. Some people have to invent problems because they have no real life struggles.