Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Unreliable, weather-dependent solar and wind power has put a price tag on our oceans. The phrase 'blue economy' is used to soften the ugly truth that, to achieve Australia's transition to net zero, the world's oceans must be strip-mined for rare-earth minerals. Batteries, solar panels and wind turbines are produced in China, in part using materials that companies, mostly Chinese, mine from the sea floor. Polymetallic nodules needed for solar panels, wind turbines and batteries lay along active volcanic rifts mostly found on the seabed. Giant vacuums suck up the seabed ecosystem to bury and choke the surrounding area in a thick layer of silt. Animals, eggs, sediment, plants—everything is taken off the seabed.

A Greenpeace research fellow, distressed with what was being done, said:

In all cases, seabed mining will, by its very nature, destroy species and habitats within the mining zones. There is no justification for a 'gold rush' to mine the seabed …

International waters, particularly in the Pacific, contain more value than the combined mineral wealth of Earth's continents.

The Pacific is ground zero for this green rush, with China holding the majority of licences that the United Nations International Seabed Authority handed out. The UN International Seabed Authority supports undersea mining because it aligns with the UN's 2030 so-called—and bogus— Sustainable Development Goals. The former head of the Office of Environmental Management and Mineral Resources at the UN International Seabed Authority is on record saying that the UN International Seabed Authority is 'not fit to regulate any activity in international waters' in part due to a perceived conflict of interest with mining giants. Corporations are in control, and, on behalf of those corporations, climate warriors are destroying everything they touch. Explain that to our children. We are one community, we are one nation, and we want our oceans protected from crazy climate warriors.