To Save the Deep Ocean, We Should Mine the Moon
It’s a Faustian bargain for the Anthropocene: The greatest source of rare-earth metals are to be found at the bottom of the sea—and so are Earth’s most fragile ecosystems, an undisturbed and largely unexplored world of marvels.
The metals are required for the batteries that could power the clean energy revolution so desperately needed to avert the worst consequences of fossil fuel pollution-induced climate change, not to mention meet consumer demand for electronics. Yet mining them will have devastating consequences.
In an ideal world, mining would proceed slowly, with great caution, attentive to the creatures sacrificed for our appetites and to as-yet-unstudied consequences for Earth’s biogeochemical cycles. But the world is not ideal, and plans for deep-sea mining have proceeded at breakneck pace, with nearly 600,000 square miles of exploration permits granted by the International Seabed Authority and commercial mining expected to begin within the next several years.
We have a responsibility to life on the planet and to the diversity of the planet.
Humanity’s demand for metals—and the profits that will accrue from mining them—is on a collision course with deep-sea life. It appears that devastation is imminent—unless, argues Lewis Pinault, we mine the moon instead. “We have this gift of our geological twin, the moon, to provide us with mineral and energy wealth,” says Pinault. The trick is figuring out how.
Trained as an MIT engineer and NASA geophysicist, with an international law degree to boot, Pinault is a partner at Airbus Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on planetary challenges. Though moon mining may seem impossibly difficult at first glance, Pinault sees it as an engineering challenge no more daunting than mining the ocean floor, and certainly far less destructive. “Once we’ve done the hard work of knowing where to mine,” he says, “the next steps are solvable.”
talked to Pinault
