John Oliver and his license to clown

Don’t blame a clown for acting like a clown.  Ask yourself why you keep going to the circus. 

Dan Nielsen

John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight show aired an anti-deep sea mining segment in early June, and the industry was understandably upset with its lopsided and misinformed content.  The Metals Company tweeted that they had provided detailed information to the show’s producers based on field studies and other credible data, but *surprise!* the information was ignored.  Impossible Metals responded with some good points. Seaver Wang, at the always thoughtful environmental think tank, Breakthrough Institute, also countered the hit piece here, with a measured and well-referenced “fact check.” 

We fully appreciate the frustration over Oliver’s distorted rant (we provide facts at the end of this piece to refute some of his program’s more egregious misstatements).  The Last Week Tonight segment damages industry because it airs on a legitimate platform (HBO) and it carries decent-sized viewership.  Oliver’s unflattering take just adds to the dumpster fire ignited by the environmental lobby.  But while we were upset to see the same old trite dogma trotted out for a sizable new audience, and we threw some barbs at Oliver on Twitter in our irritated state, we have a slightly different take than many on this affair. 

We don’t really blame John Oliver, or environmental groups like WWF, for the misinformation they spout.  These people are simply acting in their own self-interest, and in a manner that society allows.  They’re playing by the rules – even if the rules are sorta screwed up.  The real problem lies with society and policy makers and their lack of recognition and consideration for how people are aligned and motivated. 

Oliver is funny.  That’s the end of the story.  He gets paid to be funny – not accurate.  Facts, data, and science aren’t funny.  Can you imagine John Oliver sitting down with a copy of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence’s 227-page report entitled, “The Metals Company – Life Cycle Assessment of TMC’s NORI-D polymetallic nodule project and comparison to key land-based routes for producing nickel, cobalt and copper”?  We’re laughing right now.    Oliver is a comedian/storyteller.  Entertainers like him depend on devices like hyperbole, exaggeration, villainization, irony, etc. to do their jobs.  The truth isn’t important, getting laughs is important.  Laughs = viewers = sponsors = money.   

John Oliver isn’t the only clown to tackle issues around polymetallic nodule harvesting.  Environmental groups share quite a few similarities with Oliver (even if they’re rather humorless!) – in fact, they fed him material for his show. So, it’s tempting to blame these groups.

Like Oliver, environmentalists (“eNGOs”) tell stories for a living.  As in Oliver’s case, it pays for environmentalists to lie or exaggerate in their storytelling because doing so elicits drama and emotion, and emotion is the currency that these organizations crave.  They need strong emotions to generate donations and they depend on donations to survive.  Honesty and facts sometimes get in the way of fundraising campaigns just as they do in comedic relief.  As such, it is worth considering that these groups are motivated and aligned in a manner that causes them to lie/exaggerate/obfuscate/omit/etc…

Now, some will argue that industry is also motivated to lie or obfuscate to reach its objectives and so should not be trusted (full disclosure – we are aligned with industry as many in our group have made investments in operators).  There’s truth in that.  Industry is motivated to earn returns for its shareholders by picking up nodules.  Almost all of its actions are oriented, directly or indirectly, toward that end goal.  Environmentalists want you to believe that this motivation means operators will say anything they need to so that they can pick up nodules regardless of the veracity of their statements, yet there’s much more to the story. 

The fact is that when it comes to alignment and honesty there’s an incredibly meaningful difference between industry on one side and John Oliver, clowns, and environmentalists on the other.  There’s no downside to clowns & environmentalists in telling lies, while there is massive downside to industry.  In fact, society gives comedians and eNGOs license to lie – whether that is artistic license or a non-profit license.  Lies are such a standard in the NGO world that Greenpeace asserts that they are part of their First Amendment rights.  WWF has been accused of many horrific lies.  Even when the groups admit to telling lies, they’re still able to raise money, so there’s little reason not to lie.  A Financial Post headline said it best, “Environmentalists admit you shouldn’t believe what they say — but they want your money anyway.”   Society seems to have struck a social contract with these groups such that, in exchange for policing industry they’re allowed to “say whatever it takes” so that they can effectively fundraise and thus continue policing industry.

Industry does not have a license to lie.  If someone from industry tells a lie of sufficient importance, and is caught, it is often the end of their career and/or their investment.  It might even land them in jail or at least a stiff fine.  If an operator says that the bottom water plume traveled 500 meters when it actually traveled 500 kilometers, that operator would lose its license, and its management would never operate again.  If an eNGO relates the opposite as a fact, even though empirical data shows they’re dead wrong, no one cares.  Operators are monitored by regulators whose job it is to look for lies and to punish those who tell lies.  Operators are further monitored by civil society.  No one monitors the eNGOs (at least no one with the power to penalize them for their inaccuracies). 

The system isn’t perfect – few systems are.  Sometimes operators get away with lies.  Sometimes misdeeds go unpunished.  Sometimes regulators are misaligned.  But the important thing is that there is a system in place to punish lying and cheating for industry participants and there is none for the environmentalists and clowns.  That circumstance leads to vastly different behaviors and motivations on the part of each side. 

What does all of this say about who is to blame for the misguided opinions, and policies on nodule harvesting?  Clowns are going to clown, but we don’t need to go to the circus for advice.  Would you seek a doctor’s medical counsel if you knew that his pay depended on him telling you exaggerated stories, or outright lies, and that there was no downside to him/her from telling those lies?  Should you be more willing to seek advice from a professional who could lose his/her license for lying to you, or one who is able to lie without repercussion?

When the circus determines the outcome on tough questions around mining regulation, energy policy, or other intricate societal problems, we should expect a clown show, and not a happy clown show.  The situation can lead to wars, bring great harm to people and the environment, threaten commercial interests, and cause intractable national security problems among other things. 

Why isn’t the above patently obvious to policy makers around the world?  We don’t know, tbh.  We’re so out of touch that we hang onto a hope that leaders would pay attention to the facts, logic, data, and the science, to make informed policy decisions.   Absent that, we’d expect that they at least understand which advocates have been given a license to lie.   Clowns are entertaining, but there’s no reason to believe they give good policy advice. 

A License to Lie:  a few misstatements of fact from Last Week Tonight

False assertion	What the research says
30-40% of the species on abyssal plain live on nodules	According to the study that Oliver references on the show (Rabone, 2023) “Overall, 14% of named species and 13% of unnamed species in the CCZ are estimated to be primarily nodule dwellers.”  So, somewhere between 13-14% of all species live primarily on nodules.  Oliver was only off by a factor of ~3x!
Millions of species live on nodules ( Diva Amon)	A highly misleading statement.  As Oliver states earlier in the show, and the Rabone study confirms, there are approximately 8,000 metazoan species in the entire CCZ.  Amon cites “microbes” so she’s talking about the tiniest of organisms – like bacteria or viruses – that exist in great quantities all over the world but generally aren’t counted when it comes to accounting for environmental damage.  If we want to make sure we don’t harm bacteria, since they are everywhere, we shouldn’t walk or drive anywhere, nor should we eat anything.  When we evaluate the impacts from mining we almost never take into account bacteria/microbes because of their omnipresence and because the harm we do to them in every activity we undertake is uncertain and  unavoidable.  Amon is simply taking advantage of people’s lack of understanding, and pandering to their emotions with the claim that millions of species live on nodules (for reference, there are 1mn bacteria in a milliliter of ocean water (link)).  It is a conniving and disingenuous strategy.
Harvesters will take 5-30 cm of sediment	Operators (such as TMC) note that they will disturb around 5 cm of sediment with the harvester.  The 30cm number is based on outdated information.  Regardless, any proper analysis would compare this with the 20-250 feet of overburden removed if we extract the same minerals from terrestrial locations.
Sediment will choke anemone’s and other sessile creatures	Field work that studied actual impacts from nodule harvesting operations demonstrated a 0% decline in biodensity and biodiversity within the collector plume zone (O’Malley, 2023).
We aren’t  sure that nodule harvesting won’t release vast stores of CO2.	Yes, we actually are certain of this, because scientists have studied it in great detail.  What they’ve found is that while sediment on the abyssal plains contains small quantities of stored co2 that can be disturbed by a nodule harvester, that disturbed co2 does not have a mechanism by which it can be released into the atmosphere.  CO2 is soluble at the depths of the abyssal plains and does not bubble up (Teng, 1996).  Instead, it is generally redeposited with the plume on the bottom of the ocean.  If any dissolved CO2 remains suspended in the water it will stay on the abyssal plains for a thousand years or more and will generally be redeposited into sediment through adsorption or hydrolysis (Atwood, 2020).  Some operators may use risers to bring up nodules and this can release small amounts of co2 from bottom water into the atmosphere, but the quantities are miniscule.  Multiple life cycle analyses note a stunning 16x decrease in sequestered co2 release when we take nodules vs. when we mine on land(Paulikas, 2022).
Lithium ion batteries are being replaced by Na-ion batteries.	False.  Sodium ion batteries suffer from relatively low energy densities and so compete principally with lithium iron phoshpate batteries, not lithium ion (NCM cathodes).  Limited energy density conveys limited range for an EV.  The misinformation from Oliver is dangerous because any battery analyst/engineer will tell you that if we are going to decarbonize, we will need to use many different technologies depending on the end market or application.  But energy density is key if we want to transition because it allows people who want to drive further than the average golf cart (humor – we clown) to electrify their transport, and high energy density generally requires a cathode with a combination of nickel/cobalt/manganese.  It’s also worth noting that we will always need nickel and cobalt for purposes other than decarbonization.  Shouldn’t John Oliver want to extract those metals in the manner that does the least harm to humanity and to the environment?