The deep, deep fruit of unfinished business
Unsigned treaties, bad assumptions, and a somnambulant Congress have led to this
Mine, baby, mine! President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing NOAA to issue expedited permits to a company ready to mine the ocean floor in international waters. The story was reported that Trump “circumvented” an existing treaty preventing such actions, but that’s not really true. To avoid or get around something that is an obstacle requires an actual obstacle, and the United States never ratified the treaty creating the International Seabed Authority, known as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Not only has the Senate never ratified the treaty, President Ronald Reagan, at the time the treaty was prepared, refused to sign it over objections to the part about international seabed mining.
Despite pressure from groups like the Atlantic Council, no U.S. president has signed UNCLOS, the Senate never ratified it, and each administration of both parties has maintained the same attitude regarding the ISA’s authority, which is that the U.S. doesn’t accept it.
Federal law delegates the issuance of international seabed mining permits to NOAA, and therefore Trump is well within the law, and his authority as president, to order NOAA to expedite a permit to The Metals Company to collect nodules that could possibly contain more rare-earth elements than the combined reserves of the whole world, from what’s called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a 1.7 million square mile (nearly as large as the United States east of the Mississippi River) area in the deep Pacific Ocean stretching east of Hawaii halfway to Baja.
ISA says it has the exclusive right to issue mining permits in the CSZ, but that only applies to countries which are signatories of UNCLOS, and the United States isn’t. So why make this is a big deal? Because in the context of unfinished business and rotten fruit, this is just one of the examples of things Trump has done, which could have been done by any administration, but were not simply due to the fallout in international relations.
There are easier ways to get rare earth elements, manganese, cobalt, and nickel (nickel is pretty common anyways) than to mine them from the seabed. But the Trump administration has chosen the hard way, because of its isolationist, “America First” positions. Also, the ISA does not exist in a vacuum; it is looking at the environmental impact of mining in the pelagic zones of the ocean, where species exist in inaccessible places and may make up the bedrock of aquatic food chains.
But it’s perfectly legal for the U.S. to assert a right that every president has supported for 43 years. That, plus The Metals Company has been telling ISA that it can deal with the environmental impact and meet or exceed the requirements to leave the areas where it mines undisturbed. Of course there’s room for disagreement there, but that’s not considered by the Trump team, which is also just fine with burning coal.
I don’t necessarily even have a problem with deep sea mining, or that America should do it. It’s just the way we’re doing it.
Unfinished business is also the key to many things the Trump administration has done in its quest to transform government into a monolithic autocracy. Congress yielding tariff authority to the president under a variety of emergency economic measures has led to “Liberation Day,” which has sent the markets reeling, the dollar plunging, and future interest rates that determine the cost of our gargantuan federal debt in question.
Congress, since the last major overhaul of immigration law, also under Reagan, has done nothing to address various administrations pursuit of enforcement, or even encouragement of illegal immigration across our southern border. Actions by President Barack Obama, who signed DACA as an executive order after Congress punted on the DREAMer Act, and then by the first Trump administration trying to undo DACA, has led to an executive stalemate and congressional rubbernecking.
It’s as if people in Congress would rather use their elected positions, and the stage of Congress, as a platform for their own celebrity and political influence, than actually, you know, legislating.
If there is to be anything positive at all coming out of the Trump administration, it won’t be through the courts striking down all the things Trump and his team are doing. So far, Trump has not been completely incautious in thumbing his nose at the courts. For example, the Department of Justice has rolled back cancellation of thousands of student visas, because a judge ordered that done. But the answer is not in the courts, or in the executive branch.
The Constitution gives primary power to make laws in the United States to Congress. There are three branches of government, but they are not “co-equal.” Congress has primacy in just about everything, including the president ordering troops to fight—hence things like “Authorization for Use of Military Force” instead of a straightforward declaration of war. Yes, presidents can start wars, but Congress can end them. Presidents can foul up foreign policy, but Congress can clip the wings of any administration pretty violently if it decides, as a body, do to it.
But Congress is becoming more, not less, polarized. Republicans are bunkered down under the Trump banner, and Democrats are like ants when the ant hill has been disturbed, running too and fro. In some dystopian political prediction made 30 or 40 years ago, I suppose it could have been foreseen that this could happen today (seen Back to the Future Part II lately?). But not enough people took such things seriously, and the ones who did were too short-sighted to act on it.
So we have the fruit of unfinished business, some of it rotting on the vine, some dropped to the ground to ferment, and some sitting on the bottom of the ocean, where when you hear that giant sucking sound, you will know from whence it comes.
SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS: You can follow us on social media at several different locations. Official Racket News pages include:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewsRacket
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/NewsRacket
Mastodon: https://federated.press/@RacketNews
Threads: https://www.threads.net/@theracketnews
David: https://www.threads.net/@captainkudzu71
Steve: https://www.threads.net/@stevengberman
Our personal accounts on the platform formerly known as Twitter:
David: https://twitter.com/captainkudzu
Steve: https://twitter.com/stevengberman
Jay: https://twitter.com/curmudgeon_NH
Thanks again for subscribing! Don’t forget to share us with your friends!
I'm #TeamCthulhu on this one.