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A conversation with Deep Rising filmmaker Matthieu Rytz about the promise and the peril of mining the ocean floor.
“To say, ‘Don’t harm the ocean’ — it is the easiest message in the world, right? You just have to show a photo of a turtle with a straw in its nose,” Michael Lodge, the secretary general of the U.N.’s International Seabed Authority, toldThe New York Times last year. “Everybody in Brooklyn can then say, ‘I don’t want to harm the ocean.’ But they sure want their Teslas.”
Canadian filmmaker Matthieu Rytz apparently didn’t get the memo. Deep Rising, his new documentary narrated by Jason Momoa, aims at one of the great contradictions of the energy transition: that deep-sea mining could provide a wealth of copper, nickel, and cobalt, the battery materials that are critically needed for EVs and clean-energy storage — and could also trigger ecological collapse in the fragile Pacific Ocean abyss.
At the center of this debate is the International Seabed Authority, a Jamaica-based U.N. organization tasked with the conflicting goals of protecting the ocean floor and writing regulations for the extraction of “polymetallic nodules.” The metal-rich nodules are sprinkled across an internationally governed part of the Pacific called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which starts about 500 miles south of Hawaii and by some measurements stretches roughly twice the size of India. By the estimate of The Metals Company, which has a multi-billion-dollar stake in an eventual mining operation, the supply of nodules would be enough to eventually power “280 million electric vehicles.”
At the same time, scientists — including a whistleblower from inside The Metals Company’s own exploratory team — have stressed that we know almost nothing about the deep ocean, least of all how a large-scale mining operation could impact everything from regional biodiversity to the potential extinction of undiscovered animals to ocean carbon sequestration. The nodules alone take millions of years to form.
On Monday, the International Seabed Authority kicked off a two-week-long meeting to discuss potentially issuing the first commercial mining permits. It’s already met staunch opposition: The United Kingdom just came out as the latest nation to demand a moratorium on deep-sea mining, joining calls for a total ban issued by France, Germany, New Zealand, and at least 13 other countries. (The U.S. is not a part of the International Seabed Authority because it was one of only four countries that declined to formally ratify the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1984, thanks to Republican opposition. China, Norway, and Russia are the major proponents pushing for deep-sea mining to open up).
With this as our backdrop, I spoke to Rytz about the making of Deep Rising and the complexities of the deep-sea mining debate. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Tell me a little bit about how you discovered this story. As the narration points out, deep-sea mining is “out of sight and out of mind” for most people.
I discovered it in 2018 when I was finishing my previous film [Anote’s Ark], and working with the president of Kiribati in the middle of the Pacific. Because of the work I was doing, I had privileged access, since the president was the main character of my film. I started hearing the conversation about deep-sea mining when basically nothing was in the media; it was an absolute unknown story. It really intrigued me. I was like, Wow, this is a very interesting, complex story. I jumped on it and went on the long journey till now.
The U.N.’s International Seabed Authority begins a nearly two-week-long meeting this week that will potentially end with the issuing of the first provisional licenses for deep-sea mining. What has it been like to follow these developments while you’re in the final stages of releasing and promoting this film?
Once the mining code — if the mining code — is ratified, it will be extremely hard to change it. It’s not like in government when you have political football between two parties. Once the regulation is in place, it might take the same amount of time just to make an amendment because you need to get a consensus of all the U.N. members. So it’s a critical time now because they’re actually drafting it and if it passes, the text will define how deep-sea mining will go.
There’s still a chance, actually, to block it or to postpone it. There has been a big wave of countries signing a moratorium and there was very big news yesterday, from the U.K., which is supporting the moratorium. We’ve seen some smaller states sign it; France was a big one, but the U.K. is a significant gain in the movement for a moratorium.
But for me — and this is the story of Deep Rising as well — I’m like, well, okay, sure, let’s say deep-sea mining is stopped by a ban or a moratorium or simply because the mining code doesn’t happen. That doesn’t stop the need for nickel. And that, for me, is the biggest conversation, because if deep-sea mining doesn’t go ahead, it will mean way more pristine ecosystems are torn down in tropical rainforests — mainly in Indonesia, but also New Caledonia, the Philippines, Madagascar, a lot of places. In northern Russia, they’re mining nickel in the tundra and they’re releasing massive amounts of methane.
So for me, it’s not one or the other. Deep-sea mining is better because we’re going to save the rainforest is a fundamentally flawed argument. Because we don’t need nickel in the first place; there are solutions that are not based on finite resources. There’s battery chemistry that is based on iron-phosphate batteries. Green hydrogen is another very good example and a very good debate.
And, you know, we don’t need to buy that many private cars; we need to develop and share resources. When you see the climate bill from President Biden subsidizing every citizen to buy an EV, it’s basically subsidizing removing the pristine ecosystem in Indonesia. I don’t call that a climate plan.
I wanted to ask you about that. The script of Deep Rising can be pretty critical of the energy transition, calling it the “so-called green revolution.” Can you tell me a little about the use of that term, “so-called”?
This is exactly what I mean. You take the narrative of the “green revolution” from the official perspective — the president’s perspective or the industry’s perspective, from President Biden or Elon Musk. Let’s say they have the same narrative: Buy a Tesla and you’re going to save the planet. Because Tesla would not exist without subsidies; every taxpayer in the U.S. has spent massive amounts of money to make it happen. And I’m not against EVs, but it’s important to understand the climate has no boundaries. If you remove the ecosystem in Indonesia, you’re increasing the climate crisis in the U.S., and so on. You’re putting your citizens at risk. Every country is similar.
There’s no reason to go after finite resources like nickel. Again, if there was no solution, it’d maybe be like, “Oh, there’s a trade-off.” But the point is, at a very large, industrial scale, there are solutions to produce energy without extracting finite resources.
In the film, the narration states that “critical metals are not the solution; they are the new oil.” I’m convinced that there could be grave ecological consequences to deep-sea mining, but how do you reconcile that against the grave ecological consequences of the fossil fuels we’re extracting and burning now?
Again, it’s a matter of changing the chemistry of the batteries. If you take the composition of the Earth’s crust, nickel is 0.009%. Iron is 5%. Iron is everywhere. A company like BYD in China, they’ve been very successfully building for like five years now EVs that are as good as Tesla’s with no gram of nickel, no gram of cobalt. Iron and phosphate are widely available. Rivian, in the U.S., they’re also shifting. And that can happen — anytime soon, GM or Ford or Toyota could change their battery chemistry.
Wait — if this is something we have the technology for now, and it’s scaleable, why are mining companies spending all this time and money building deep-sea vacuum cleaners to suck up nodules to power batteries that we don’t even need to be using?
Because there’s a whole supply chain that’s already been built. And when you’re investing billions of dollars to build battery factories, you need to sell enough batteries to recoup your investment. The problem is we made the investment in the wrong direction.
The second problem is political. The EU could ban nickel in the battery and that’d be it. Then Volkswagen and Volvo and BMW and Renault, all the German and French carmakers, would have no choice. I don’t think it’s as easy in the U.S. but in the EU, that’s a move they could do. It’s happening: The U.K. did a moratorium [on deep-sea mining]. France did a total ban. And, of course, some will lose a lot of money, but it’s the right thing to do.
And the Chinese, by the way — most of the domestic market doesn’t use cobalt and nickel. They’re very advanced; the Blade technology from BYD is years ahead. But they’re not exporting that much because of the commercial war, basically.
On your website, you have a manifesto, which states that your aim as a filmmaker is to “ask uncomfortable questions instead of providing reassuring answers.” Can you talk a little about how that philosophy guided your approach to this film in particular?
My background is not in filmmaking; it’s in anthropology. I think because of my upbringing as an intellectual, I can see a system’s complexity. Filmmakers can sometimes cut straight to a conclusion and for me, it’s very challenging because I needed to simplify when making a film. I think I’ve oversimplified already; I see the film and I think “Oh, this is so oversimplified!” even when it’s a very complex film for most of the viewers.
I could have done a film that was just bashing the mining industry, showing how bad they are and how bad capitalists are destroying the planet. The problem with this is, you preach to the choir. The people you actually need to talk to, they will not listen.
Instead, I got invited to speak to the finance sector, the mining sector, a few weeks ago at a big conference in Geneva. Some of the biggest hedge funds and banks — a Swiss bank, a European bank, a Singaporean bank — they were all in the room. They were asking me for advice about if they should have deep-sea mining in their portfolio. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars. And I was like, “I can explain to you why you shouldn’t.”
The change is massive when you can tap into the higher side, the financial system, basically. For me, it’s a really interesting goal, because I take this approach so it’s like, “Oh, you’re not just bashing us and saying how bad we are. Let’s set aside our differences and sit down for coffee.”
I wanted to ask about the disagreement within the Pacific Islands communities. On the one hand, you show grassroots resistance to deep-sea mining in Papua New Guinea; on the other, you also show a delegate from Nauru (which sponsors a subsidiary of The Metals Company) pressuring the International Seabed Authority to make a quick decision on commercial licensing. Is the jury still out on deep-sea mining when it comes to regional community support?
There are two forces here. One is that no corporation can apply for a deep-sea mining license. The Metal Company cannot go to Jamaica and say, “I want to mine the deep ocean.” You need to find a country that will sponsor you. So the Metal Company can fly into Nauru, the smallest country in the world, and promise them the moon. Nauru is a very specific story with a long history of extraction with the Commonwealth, with Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. They’ve been mining phosphate since the Second World War. So this is a very specific case.
When it comes to other countries, like Kiribati and a lot of other island nations, they’re kind of under the Chinese now. And there’s a lot of paradox with China because again, the domestic market is very different than the exporting markets. They’re fueling the rest of the world with nickel, so they have six licenses [in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone] and they’re lobbying quite hard now to get deep-sea mining approved. But they own 60% of the nickel capacities globally and the U.S. has 0%. So for the Chinese, they’d still get all this nickel to basically keep the rest of the world dependent on them.
I have to ask about the cinematography, which is absolutely gorgeous. I think a lot of times deep sea animals don’t get the respect of more charismatic environmental icons like polar bears or whales because they look so alien and creepy. But the footage you included really gives this part of the world vibrance, life, and personality.
It came from years and years of digging through hard drives. A lot of the footage comes from scientific expeditions. It was a very long process for me to convince the researchers to give me the license to use their footage, too, because their first reaction was like, “No, it’s scientific material; that specific jellyfish, which is undiscovered, is under embargo.” Which means the scientists haven’t published their paper yet. And I was like, “Guys.”
Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know?
The concept of the common heritage of humankind is very important. It’s outlined in the Law of the Sea, a set of strong rules by the U.N., that the deep sea belongs to humanity. And every citizen of the planet has a shared responsibility to really look at what is happening because it’s the biggest land grab in human history. The mining area is the size of Mongolia. It’s enormous: I mean, imagine if Mongolia, which is an entire country, was mined entirely. It doesn’t make sense. We have a shared responsibility because we know the climate crisis doesn’t have boundaries. Everyone is concerned.
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Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors.
You might not think that often about medium-duty trucks, but they’re all around you: ambulances, UPS and FedEx delivery trucks, school buses. And although they make up a relatively small share of vehicles on the road, they generate an outsized amount of carbon pollution. They’re also a surprisingly ripe target for electrification, because so many medium-duty trucks drive fewer than 150 miles a day.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors. Harbinger is a Los Angeles-based startup that sells electric and hybrid chassis for medium-duty vehicles, such as delivery vans, moving trucks, and ambulances.
Rob, John, and Jesse chat about why medium-duty trucking is unlike any other vehicle segment, how to design an electric truck to last 20 years, and how President Trump’s tariffs are already stalling out manufacturing firms. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: What is it like building a final assembly plant — a U.S. factory — in this moment?
John Harris: I would say lots of people talk about how excited they are about U.S. manufacturing, but that's very different than putting their money where their mouth is. Building a final assembly line, like we have — our team here is really good, that they made it feel not that hard. The challenge is the whole supply chain.
If we look at what we build here in-house at Harbinger, we have a final assembly line where we bolt parts together to make chassis. We also have two sub-component assembly lines where we take copper and make motors, and where we take cells and make batteries. All three of those lines work pretty well. We're pumping out chassis, and they roll out the door, and we sell them to people, which is great. But it’s all the stuff that goes into those, that's the most challenging. There's a lot of trade policy at certain hours of the day, on certain days of the week — depending on when we check — that is theoretically supposed to encourage us manufacturing.
But it's really not because of the volatility. It costs us an enormous amount to build the supply chain, to feed these lines. And when we have volatile trade policy, our reaction, and everyone else's reaction, is to just pause. It’s not to spend more money on U.S. manufacturing, because we were already doing that. We were spending a lot on U.S. manufacturing as part of our core approach to manufacturing.
The latest trade policy has caused us to spend less money on U.S. manufacturing — not more, because we're unclear on what is the demand environment going to be, what is the policy going to be next week? We were getting ready to make major investments to take certain manufacturing tasks in our supply chain out of China and move them to Mexico, for example. Now we’re not. We were getting ready to invest in certain kinds of automation to do things in house, and now we're waiting. So the volatility is dramatically shrinking investment in US manufacturing, including ours.
Meyer: And can you just explain, why did you make that decision to pause investment and how does trade policy affect that decision?
Harris: When we had 25% tariffs on China, if we take content out of China and move it to Mexico, we break even — if that. We might still end up underwater. That's because there's better automation in China. There's much higher labor productivity. And — this one is always shocking to people — there’s lower logistics costs. When we move stuff from Shenzhen to our factory, in many cases it costs us less than moving shipments from Monterey.
Mentioned:
CalStart’s data on medium-duty electric trucks deployed in the U.S.
Here’s the chart that John showed Rob and Jesse:
Courtesy of Harbinger
It draws on data from Bloomberg in China, the ICCT, and the Calstart ZET Dashboard in the United States.
Jesse’s case for EVs with gas tanks — which are called extended range electric vehicles
On xAI, residential solar, and domestic lithium
Current conditions: Indonesia has issued its highest alert level due to the ongoing eruption of Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki • 10 million people from Missouri to Michigan are at risk of large hail and damaging winds today • Tropical Storm Erick, the earliest “E” storm on record in the eastern Pacific Ocean, could potentially strengthen into a major hurricane before making landfall near Acapulco, Mexico, on Thursday.
The NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center said Tuesday that they intend to sue Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI over alleged Clean Air Act violations at its Memphis facility. Per the lawsuit, xAI failed to obtain the required permits for the use of the 26 gas turbines that power its supercomputer, and in doing so, the company also avoided equipping the turbines with technology that would have reduced emissions. “xAI’s turbines are collectively one of the largest, or potentially the largest, industrial source of nitrogen oxides in Shelby County,” the lawsuit claims.
The SELC has additionally said that residents who live near the xAI facility already face cancer risks four times above the national average, and opponents have argued that xAI’s lack of urgency in responding to community concerns about the pollution is a case of “environmental racism.” In a statement Tuesday, xAI responded to the threat of a lawsuit by claiming the “temporary power generation units are operating in compliance with all applicable laws,” and said it intends to equip the turbines with the necessary technology to reduce emissions going forward.
Shares of several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday after the Senate Finance Committee declined to preserve related Inflation Reduction Act investment tax credits. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, Sunrun shares fell 40%, “bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion,” after a brief jump at the end of last week “due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.”
That never materialized. Instead, the Finance Committee’s draft proposed terminating the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed, as well as the investment and production tax credits for residential solar. SolarEdge and Enphase also suffered from the news, with shares down 33% and 24%, respectively. You can read Matthew’s full analysis here.
Chevron announced Tuesday that it has acquired 125,000 net acres of the Smackover Formation in southwest Arkansas and northeast Texas to get into domestic lithium extraction. Chevron’s acquisition follows an earlier move by Exxon Mobil to do the same, with lithium representing a key resource for the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources “that would allow the company to pivot if oil and gas demands wane in the coming decades,” Bloomberg writes.
“Establishing domestic and resilient lithium supply chains is essential not only to maintaining U.S. energy leadership but also to meeting the growing demand from customers,” Jeff Gustavson, the president of Chevron New Energies, said in a Tuesday press release. The Liberty Owl project, which was part of Chevron’s acquisition from TerraVolta Resources, is “expected to have an initial production capacity of at least 25,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate per year, which is enough lithium to power about 500,000 electric vehicles annually,” Houston Business Journal reports.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency prepared a memo titled “Abolishing FEMA” at the direction of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, describing how its functions can be “drastically reformed, transferred to another agency, or abolished in their entirety” as soon as the end of 2025. While only Congress can technically eliminate the agency, the March memo, obtained and reviewed by Bloomberg, describes potential changes like “eliminating long-term housing assistance for disaster survivors, halting enrollments in the National Flood Insurance Program, and providing smaller amounts of aid for fewer incidents — moves that by design would dramatically limit the federal government’s role in disaster response.”
In May, FEMA’s acting administrator, Cameron Hamilton, was fired one day after defending the existence of the department he’d been appointed to oversee when testifying before the House Appropriations subcommittee. An internal FEMA memo from the same month described the agency’s “critical functions” as being at “high risk” of failure due to “significant personnel losses in advance of the 2025 Hurricane Season.” President Trump has, on several occasions, expressed a desire to eliminate FEMA, as recommended by the Project 2025 playbook from the Heritage Foundation. The March “Abolishing FEMA” memo “just means you should not expect to see FEMA on the ground unless it’s 9/11, Katrina, Superstorm Sandy,” Carrie Speranza, the president of the U.S. council of the International Association of Emergency Managers, told Bloomberg.
The Spanish government on Tuesday released its report on the causes of the April 28 blackout that left much of the nation, as well as parts of Portugal, without power for more than 12 hours. Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen, who heads Spain’s energy policy, told reporters that a voltage surge in the south of Spain had triggered a “chain reaction of disconnections” that led to the widespread power loss, and blamed the nation’s state-owned grid operator Red Eléctrica for “poor planning” and failing to have enough thermal power stations online to control the dynamic voltage, the Associated Press reports. Additionally, Aagesen said that utilities had preventively shut off some power plants when the disruptions started, which could have helped the system stay online. “We have a solid narrative of events and a verified explanation that allows us to reflect and to act as we surely will,” Aagesen went on, responding to criticisms that Spain’s renewable-heavy energy mix was to blame for the blackout. “We believe in the energy transition and we know it’s not an ideological question but one of this country’s principal vectors of growth when it comes to re-industrialisation opportunities.”
Metrograph
“It seems that with the current political climate, with the removal of any reference to climate change on U.S. government websites, with the gutting of environmental laws, and the recent devastating fires in Los Angeles, this trilogy of films is still urgently relevant.” —Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal on the upcoming screenings of the Anthropocene trilogy, co-created with Nicholas de Pencier and photographer Edward Burtynsky between 2006 and 2018, at the Metrograph in New York City.
Shares in Sunrun, SolarEdge, and Enphase are collapsing on the Senate’s new mega-bill draft.
The residential solar rescue never happened. Shares in several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday as the market reacted to the Senate Finance Committee’s reconciliation language, which maintains the House bill’s restriction on investment tax credits for residential solar installers and its scrapping of the tax credit for homeowners who buy their own systems.
The Solar Energy Industries Association, a solar trade group, criticized the Senate text, saying that it had only “modest improvements on several provisions” and would “pull the plug on homegrown solar energy and decimate the American manufacturing renaissance.”
Sunrun shares fell 40% Tuesday, bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion, a comparable loss in value to what it sustained the day after the passage of the House reconciliation bill. The stock price had jumped up late last week due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.
Instead the Finance Committee proposal would terminate the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed. The text also zeroes out investment and production tax credits for residential solar when “the taxpayer rents or leases such property to a third party,” a common arrangement in the industry pioneered by Sunrun.
Sunrun’s third party ownership model well predates the Inflation Reduction Act and is about as old as the company itself, which was founded in 2007. The company had been claiming investment tax credits for solar before the IRA made them tech neutral. The company began securitizing solar deals in 2015 and in a 2016 securities filling, the company said that it had six deals where investors would be able to garner the lease payments and investment tax credits.
“Ain’t no sunshine for resi,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday. “Overall, we view Senate's version as a negative” for Sunrun, as well as SolarEdge and Enphase, the residential solar equipment companies, whose shares are down by about 33% and 24% respectively.
“If this language is not adjusted before the bill passes the Senate floor,” Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Perocco wrote in a note to clients, “we believe Sunrun, SolarEdge, and Enphase will trade towards our bear cases.”
Morgan Stanley had earlier estimated that cutting off home solar from tax credits would lead to a “85% contraction in residential solar volumes” due, in many cases, to solar products no longer resulting in savings on electricity bills.
That’s because the ability to lease solar equipment (or have homeowners sign power purchase agreements) and then claim tax credits sits at the core of the contemporary residential solar model.
“Our core solar service offerings are provided through our lease and power purchase agreements,” the company said in its 2024 annual report. “While customers have the option to purchase a solar energy system outright from us, most of our customers choose to buy solar as a service from us through our Customer Agreements without the significant upfront investment of purchasing a solar energy system.”
This means that to claim tax credits for the projects, they have to be investment tax credits, not home energy credits. These credits play a role in Sunrun’s extensive business raising money from investors to finance solar projects, which can then be partially monetized via tax credits.
Fund investors “can receive attractive after-tax returns from our investment funds due to their ability to utilize Commercial ITCs,” the company said in its report. The financing then “enables us to offer attractive pricing to our customers for the energy generated by the solar energy system on their homes.”
Without the ability to claim investment tax credits, Sunrun could be left having to charge higher prices to homeowners and face a higher cost of capital to raise money from investors.
“Last night’s draft text confirms the Senate intends to abruptly repeal tax credits available to homeowners who want to go solar – effectively increasing costs and limiting choice for countless Americans,” Chris Hopper, chief executive of Aurora Solar, said in an emailed statement.