30 July 23
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The second peculiarity of the situation was the demonstrative neutrality of some of the warlords operating in the east of the country. Finally, PMC "Wagner" has been implicated in involvement in the coup.
Let’s figure it out together.
From the point of view of the political situation, Niger is a rather unstable country in an unstable region. In addition to the jihadist attacks, there is a civil war (on the national-tribal principle) in neighboring Mali and Chad. The president of Chad in 2021 was assassinated in a battle with FACT rebels. Burkina Faso saw two military coups in 2022.
, in addition to gold and nickel. But a significant part of the deposits has yet to be explored and developed due to the problematic political situation. And those companies that enter, as a rule, operate under the robust force cover of PMCs.
In the case of Niger, there was an attempt by President Bazoum to find partners among the countries of the "democratic world." But he could not get significant military or financial support for the first year of work – political consultations, discussion of reforms - yes. Practical projects to stabilize the situation have only been discussed and could have begun in the next year and a half.
On the other hand, in the last two years, Russia's presence has intensified. And the well-known PMC "Wagner" was responsible for the "security" and "development" of Russian business. Let's take the neighbors of Niger:
Libya: The activities of PMC "Wagner" on the territory controlled by General Haftar (the border with Niger, among others);
Chad: Two military coups, where, as a result of the last one, forces with experience of cooperation with PMC "Wagner" came to power (and the Russian PMC itself has claimed participation in the coup);
Mali: PMC "Wagner" fights on the side of some warlords (who agree to cooperate with the government);
Benin: President Patrice Talon openly states that the government has the right to use foreign PMCs, naming PMC "Wagner" as an example;
Nigeria: PMC "Wagner" protects the oil and gas production business of subsidiaries of "Rosneft" and "Gazprom." However, they share the "security business" with Lukoil-controlled PMC "Lukom-A" in this country.
The only country without a clear presence of "Wagnerites" was Algeria.
In addition, the Prigozhin-controlled company Lobaye Invest operates in all of these. This is a "legal cover" for Prigozhin's business. Militants are hired through it. But the same company creates joint ventures with local leaders to explore and extract minerals. The essence of the work I described in the text about PMC "Wagner" is that in January 2023: the work on exploration is paid from the funds of local elites and, in part, from the Russian Federation (as a rule, with the money of state corporations"). The beneficiary is Prigozhin.
If a deposit allows commercial production to begin, it begins with the above-mentioned financial mechanism. The minerals extracted are sold through Prigozhin's companies in Africa and the UAE.
After obtaining proof of the economic feasibility of extraction, the created joint venture "suddenly" goes bankrupt. A new one is made, where Prigozhin's structures are replaced by structures affiliated with one or another state corporation (most often in the sphere of interests of the Sechin-Alekperov and Kovalchuk groups).
Finally, it is worth mentioning the radio station Lengo Songo, which began broadcasting in the CAR, but in recent years has established more than 15 branches in various countries of the region and broadcasts in national languages. I emphasize: not state languages, but national languages - the languages of particular national groups. As a rule, its "campaign" in the region coincides with the arrival of the mentioned company Lobaye Invest in one or another country.
Thus, the situation for President Bazoum of Niger was extremely difficult. Russian mercenaries were active in almost all neighboring countries, and the influence of the Russian Federation was expanding. Lobaye Invest "entered" Niger as an investment company two years ago. At the same time, potentially strong Western partners were inclined to express rather moral support and deep concern.
The coup was bound to happen. And it did happen.
What does all this mean?
The date of the coup is, in some ways, indicative. Against the backdrop of the Russia-Africa summit, the president of a country that had defiantly refused to participate in the event was overthrown. Russian propaganda and diplomacy in contact with local elites will use this fact to some extent.
In the case of an anti-Western policy of the new leadership of Niger (not necessarily pro-Russian, it can be "pro-China," for example), we have a demonstration of the Kremlin's claims to participate in the politics of developing countries far from the borders of the Russian Federation. That is an attempt to reassert its geopolitical ambitions. And also a new field for blackmail by destabilizing an already turbulent region. That is, scaling the confrontation from the war in Ukraine to issues of coexistence with the EU and the U.S. globally. The Kremlin has already tried to do this at the initial stage of the Russian-Ukrainian war. It is enough to recall Syria in 2015 and Libya in 2015-16.
What happened is also an important signal from the point of view of assessing the future of Yevgeny Prigozhin and his business (it is not only about PMCs). Russia does not have enough forces to enter the region using legal structures. It does not have PMCs capable of replacing PMC "Wagner" in the region, either. That is, Prigozhin demonstrates his "need" for the Kremlin (and Putin personally) and his ability to "solve problems." Once again, it is not only about the power component: remember the media, mining business, and political technologists.
If Prigozhin's involvement took place, this would also be a powerful signal to local elites - the Wagner group is still active and can afford large-scale operations.
And finally, this is another financial backing for Prigozhin's empire. Russia desperately needs titanium (until 2022, most of the raw material was obtained from Ukraine) and uranium. The scheme with additional exploration and extraction may work. As for Prigozhin directly, Niger has quite large deposits of gold. This metal is often used by the "Wagnerites" as a means of payment for their work. Bullion bars are taken out of the country and converted into a suitable currency in, for example, the UAE.
Does this indicate that "Prigozhin has succeeded?"
Not exactly. There was most likely no direct force participation of PMC "Wagner" mercenaries in the coup. At least, the forces of the "core" of the PMC, consisting mainly of natives of the Russian Federation and some European countries, were not involved. Local mercenaries, perhaps, but the regional press speaks about this option only as one of the probable ones. In addition, the military fought against several warlords with whom the PMC "Wagner" cooperated. Therefore, it may be more about common tactical interests with the Russians rather than strong "allied" ties.
Therefore, even with the country's new authorities, much will depend on the events of the coming months. In particular, the readiness of Western countries to stabilize the situation in the region (or at least to communicate with the junta), as well as the position of China, which may also enter Niger, leaving Russia little room for maneuver.
In any case, the dialog on the future of Niger between global players will not begin before winter. At the same time, Russia expects to start consultations on the war in Ukraine. Success in Niger will not create a fundamentally new position for the Kremlin - Russia is gradually losing influence, and the "Niger success" will only slow down this process. But failure will be another demonstration that the Kremlin is no longer as assertive as it used to think it was.
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UNESCO mission arrives to assess damage from Russian attacks on Odesa. (photo:Одеська міська рада)
"The work has started. The mission will record the consequences of Russian attacks, document everything," Odesa Mayor Hennady Trukhanov said.
Over the past week, Russia escalated its attacks on Odesa, leading to the destruction of civilian and historical structures.
A significant incident took place on the night of July 23 when Russian troops carried out a major strike on the city's historic center, an area that holds UNESCO protection.
As a result of this particular attack, 25 architectural landmarks in Odesa were damaged, including the Transfiguration Cathedral, which suffered severe damage. Two civilians were killed in one of the Russian missile strikes.
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren. (photo: Andrew Cabellero-Reynolds/Getty Images)
Responding to a ProPublica report, the Massachusetts Democrat has begun investigating Google’s “aggressive” pursuit of a biotechnology archive that could be used to build AI tools. She also faulted the Pentagon for favoring the tech giant.
Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat and the chair of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, wrote on Tuesday to Google and the Department of Defense, seeking information and records related to the company’s pursuit of a vast trove of medical data overseen by the military’s Joint Pathology Center. The archive represents a largely untapped gold mine for AI and health care companies, because computers can use the data to develop algorithms that detect patterns, like telltale signs of tumors, faster and often better than humans can.
In her letters, Warren accused Google of “aggressive attempts” to gain service members’ medical information and Defense Department officials of “favoritism” toward the tech giant. “I am alarmed by reports that Google tried to privately broker a deal to secure exclusive access to JPC data,” Warren wrote to Sundar Pichai, CEO of both Google and its parent company, Alphabet.
Warren was referring to a ProPublica report published last December, which revealed that at least a dozen Defense Department staff members pushed back against Google’s campaign for the medical data. ProPublica found that Google began in late 2015 to gather medical information at military installations and hospitals around the country, which it planned to use to build AI tools. Such software, the company hoped, would give it an edge in the race to develop algorithms that could help pathologists diagnose illnesses more quickly and accurately, predict prognoses and, eventually, Google scientists hoped, find new treatments for diseases, including cancers.
Google’s allies in the Defense Department and on the staff of the House Armed Services Committee tried to help the company, ProPublica reported. In exchange for exclusive access to the archive, the company offered to digitize the collection of pathology slides that are stored at a sprawling warehouse in Silver Spring, Maryland. But staff at the JPC and elsewhere expressed dismay about risks to the privacy of service members’ tissue specimens and about the use of a sensitive government resource by a corporation to develop unproven AI tools. In 2021, Google was not selected for a pilot project to begin digitizing the collection.
“The public deserves a full accounting of DoD’s secretive interactions with Google regarding private health data contained at the JPC and complete transparency surrounding DoD’s blatant favoritism towards Google,” Warren wrote to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III. She has asked both Google and the Defense Department to respond by Aug. 8.
A Warren spokesperson characterized the letters as a “prelude to inform a potential Senate investigation and potential future legislation.” The senator said in a statement on Tuesday that the JPC “has millions of tissue samples from servicemembers and veterans that are meant to support the public good — but Google came dangerously close to landing an exclusive monopoly on these samples and the right to charge DoD for access to this data.”
A Google spokesperson declined to comment but referred ProPublica to statements and a blog post that the company published in response to the December story. “We had hoped to enable the JPC to digitize its data and, with its permission, develop computer models that would enable researchers and clinicians to improve diagnosis for cancers and other illnesses,” the company said then. “Despite efforts from Google and many at the Department of Defense, our work with JPC unfortunately never got off the ground, and the physical repository of pathology slides continues to deteriorate.”
A Defense Department spokesperson declined to comment, saying the agency doesn’t discuss communications with members of Congress. The JPC has said that its highest priority is to ensure that any medical information shared with outside parties is “used ethically and in a manner that protects patient privacy and military security.”
Since the Civil War, the U.S. military has been collecting and studying human tissue of armed service members in an effort to reduce the toll of injuries, diseases and fatalities suffered in wartime and peace. The collection has spurred numerous advances in medicine and science, including the first genetic sequencing of the 1918 flu virus. Today, the repository holds more than 31 million matchbook-sized blocks of human tissue and 55 million pathology slides.
Pathology is ripe for the AI revolution. A single pathology slide, which can be scanned and digitized, holds vast amounts of visual information. In 2021, Google told the military that the JPC collection of veterans’ skin samples, tumor biopsies and slices of organs holds the “raw materials” for the most significant biotechnology breakthroughs of this decade — “on par with the Human Genome Project in its potential for strategic, clinical, and economic impact.”
But lawmakers, regulators and ethicists have struggled to keep pace with developments in AI. Some models can process information now at a scale that’s beyond human comprehension.
The corporate use of the JPC collection is particularly delicate. Most of the specimens come from military service members who did not consent to the use of their tissue for research. In addition, there are national security ramifications. China has already collected huge health care data sets from the U.S., both legally and illegally, as it seeks to develop its own AI capabilities, according to the National Counterintelligence and Security Center.
Warren has emerged as one of Google and Big Tech’s most vocal critics on Capitol Hill. In 2019, she assailed the company’s efforts to amass millions of patient records in a partnership with the Catholic health care system Ascension, dubbed “Project Nightingale.”
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The Supreme Court vacated challenges to the construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. The project was cleared in 2017, construction began a year later, but it's been hampered by challenges from environmental groups. The developer expects it to be completed by the end of the year. (photo: Ken Cedeno/UPI)
The court in a brief, one-paragraph order suspended claims filed by environmental groups in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, located in Virginia, clearing the way for the completion of construction.
The Court of Appeals ordered a halt to the pipeline's construction earlier this month amid concerns about its planned path through the Jefferson National Forest. The 300-mile pipeline would run three miles through the preserve in Virginia.
Similar concerns created obstacles for oil pipelines such as Dakota Access and Keystone XL.
The Wilderness Society challenged provisions in the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which suspended the federal debt ceiling recently to avoid a government default. Language in the act ordered federal agencies to issue all remaining permits to Mountain Valley in an effort to end the Fourth Circuit's jurisdiction to hear any new challenges.
Among the various challengers, The Wilderness Society said that language was unconstitutional, and the challenges should be allowed to be heard over the pipeline. The Supreme Court, however, vacated the lower court's ruling, allowing for construction to proceed.
"The Supreme Court has spoken and this decision to let construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline move forward again is the correct one," Sen. Joe Machin, a West Virginia Democrat said in a statement. "I am relieved that the highest court in the land has upheld the law Congress passed and the president signed."
Equitrans Midstream, the company behind the project, had appealed previous rulings, arguing it went against the "will and clear intent" of lawmakers and President Joe Biden.
Equitrans had no immediate comment on the Supreme Court's ruling. It said earlier this month, however, that it did expect the project to be completed by the end of the year at a total project cost of $6.6 billion.
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Representative John D. Dingell Jr., a powerful Michigan Democrat, was one of at least nine US lawmakers who served on the NRA's board of directors. (photo: Stephen Crowley/NYT)
They served in Congress and on the N.R.A.’s board at the same time. Over decades, a small group of legislators led by a prominent Democrat pushed the gun lobby to help transform the law, the courts and views on the Second Amendment.
First jotted on a yellow legal pad in 1975, it would transform the N.R.A. from a fusty club of sportsmen into a lobbying juggernaut that would enforce elected officials’ allegiance, derail legislation behind the scenes, redefine the legal landscape and deploy “all available resources at every level to influence the decision making process.”
“An organization with as many members, and as many potential resources, both financial and influential within its ranks, should not have to go 2d or 3d Class in a fight for survival,” Mr. Dingell wrote, advocating a new aggressive strategy. “It should go First Class.”
To understand the ascendancy of gun culture in America, the files of Mr. Dingell, a powerful Michigan Democrat who died in 2019, are a good place to start. That is because he was not just a politician — he simultaneously sat on the N.R.A.’s board of directors, positioning him to influence firearms policy as well as the private lobbying force responsible for shaping it.
And he was not alone. Mr. Dingell was one of at least nine senators and representatives, both Republicans and Democrats, with the same dual role over the last half-century — lawmaker-directors who helped the N.R.A. accumulate and exercise unrivaled power.
Their actions are documented in thousands of pages of records obtained by The New York Times, through a search of lawmakers’ official archives, the papers of other N.R.A. directors and court cases. The files, many of them only recently made public, reveal a secret history of how the nation got to where it is now.
Over decades, politics, money and ideology altered gun culture, reframed the Second Amendment to embrace ever broader gun rights and opened the door to relentless marketing driven by fear rather than sport. With more than 400 million firearms in civilian hands today and mass shootings now routine, Americans are bitterly divided over what the right to bear arms should mean.
The lawmakers, far from the stereotype of pliable politicians meekly accepting talking points from lobbyists, served as leaders of the N.R.A., often prodding it to action. At seemingly every hint of a legislative threat, they stepped up, the documents show, helping erect a firewall that impedes gun control today.
“Talk about being strategic people in a place to make things happen,” an N.R.A. executive gushed at a board meeting after Congress voted down gun restrictions following the 1999 Columbine shooting. “Thank you. Thank you.”
The fact that some members of Congress served on the N.R.A. board is not new. But much of what they did for the gun group, and how, was not publicly known.
Representative Bob Barr, a Georgia Republican, sent confidential memos to the N.R.A. leader Wayne LaPierre, urging action against gun violence lawsuits. Senator Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, chided fellow board members for failing to advance a bill that rolled back gun restrictions, and told them how to do it.
Republican Representative John M. Ashbrook of Ohio co-wrote a letter to the board describing “very subtle and complex” tactics to support “candidates friendly to our cause and actions to defeat or discipline those who are hostile.” Senator Larry E. Craig, an Idaho Republican who was a key strategic partner for the N.R.A., flagged and scuttled a proposal to require the use of gun safety locks.
And then there was Mr. Dingell. In a private letter in October 1978, the N.R.A. president, Lloyd Mustin, said his “insights and guidance on the details of any gun-related matter pending in the Congress” were “uniformly successful.” Just as valuable, he said, was the congressman’s stealthy manipulation of the legislative process.
“These actions by him are often carefully obscured,” Mr. Mustin wrote, so they may “not be recognized or understood by the uninitiated observer.”
As chairman of the powerful House commerce committee, Mr. Dingell would send “Dingellgrams” — demands for information from federal agencies — drafted by the N.R.A. Other times, on learning of a lawmaker’s plan to introduce a bill, he would scribble a note to an aide saying, “Notify N.R.A.”
Beginning in the 1970s, he pushed the group to fund legal work that could help win court cases and enshrine policy protections. The impact would be far-reaching: Some of the earliest N.R.A.-backed scholars were later cited in the Supreme Court’s District of Columbia vs. Heller decision affirming an individual right to own a gun, as well as a ruling last year that established a new legal test invalidating many restrictions.
The files of Mr. Dingell, the longest-serving member of Congress, were donated to the University of Michigan but remained off-limits for nearly eight years. They were only made available in May, five months after The Times began pressing for their release.
Mr. Barr, who has remained on the N.R.A. board since leaving government in 2003, said in an interview that he did not recall the memos he wrote to Mr. LaPierre, which were among the congressman’s papers at the University of West Georgia. But during his nearly six years in office while also a N.R.A. director, he said, the group “never approached me to do anything that I didn’t want to do or that I would not have done anyway.”
“I’m doing it as a member of Congress who also happens to be an N.R.A. board member,” Mr. Barr said.
N.R.A. manuals say its board has a “special trust” to ensure the organization’s success and to protect the Second Amendment “in the legislative and political arenas.” Under ethics rules, lawmakers may serve as unpaid directors of nonprofits, and the gun group is classified by the I.R.S. as a nonprofit “social welfare organization.” No current legislators serve on its board.
In 2004, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence objected to three Republican lawmakers then serving as unpaid N.R.A. directors: Mr. Craig and Representatives Don Young of Alaska and Barbara Cubin of Wyoming. The Brady organization argued that their fiduciary duty to the N.R.A. conflicted with their government roles.
“Here, the lobbyist and the lobbied are the same,” said the complaint. It was rejected by Senate and House ethics committees.
Mr. Dingell eventually left the N.R.A. board. The turning point was his support for a 1994 crime bill that included an assault weapons ban. In a terse resignation letter, he acknowledged a problem in serving as an elected official and a director — though he would continue to work closely with the group for years.
“I deeply regret,” Mr. Dingell wrote, “that the conflict between my responsibilities as a Member of Congress and my duties as a board member of the National Rifle Association is irreconcilable.”
‘Patriotic Duty’
John Dingell was comfortable with firearms at an early age: When not blasting ducks with a shotgun, he was plinking rats with an air gun in the basement of the U.S. Capitol, where he served as a page. They were pursuits he picked up from his father, a New Deal Democrat representing a House district in Detroit’s working-class suburbs, who enjoyed hunting and championed conservation causes.
After serving in the Army in World War II, the younger Mr. Dingell earned a law degree and worked as a prosecutor. He succeeded his father in 1955 at age 29. Nicknamed “the Truck” as much for his forceful personality as his 6-foot-3 frame, Mr. Dingell was an imposing presence in the House, where he became a Democratic Party favorite for pushing liberal causes like national health insurance.
Mr. Dingell recalled, in a 2016 interview, that he saw President John F. Kennedy “fairly frequently” at the White House and generally “traveled the same philosophical path.”
“Except on firearms,” he added.
In December 1963, just weeks after Mr. Kennedy was murdered with a rifle bought through an N.R.A. magazine ad, Mr. Dingell complained at a hearing about “a growing prejudice against firearms” and defended buying guns through the mail. His advocacy made him popular with the N.R.A., and by 1968 he had joined at least one other member of Congress on its board.
Historically, the N.R.A.’s opposition to firearms laws was tempered. Founded in 1871 by two Union Army veterans — a lawyer and a former New York Times correspondent — the association promoted rifle training and marksmanship. It did not actively challenge the Supreme Court’s view, stated in 1939, that the Second Amendment’s protection of gun ownership applied to membership in a “well regulated Militia” rather than an individual right unconnected to the common defense.
During the 1960s, public outrage over political assassinations and street violence led to calls for stronger laws, culminating in the Gun Control Act, the most significant firearms bill since the 1930s. The law would restrict interstate sales, require serial numbers on firearms and make addiction or mental illness potential disqualifiers for ownership. The N.R.A. was divided, with a top official complaining about parts of the bill while also saying it was something “the sportsmen of America can live with.”
President Lyndon B. Johnson wanted the bill to be even stronger, requiring gun registration and licensing, and angrily blamed an N.R.A. letter-writing campaign for weakening it. The Justice Department briefly investigated whether the group had lobbied without registering, and in F.B.I. interviews, N.R.A. officials “pointed out” that members of Congress sat on its board, as if that defused any lobbying concerns. (The case was closed when the N.R.A. agreed to register.)
The debate over the Gun Control Act agitated Mr. Dingell, his files show. He asked the Library of Congress to research Nazi-era gun confiscations in Germany to help prove that regulating firearms was a slippery slope. He considered investigating NBC News for a gun rights segment he viewed as one-sided. At an N.R.A. meeting, he railed about a “patriotic duty” to oppose the “ultimate disarming of the law-abiding citizen.”
As Mr. Johnson prepared to sign the act in fall 1968, Mr. Dingell was convinced that gun ownership faced an existential threat and wrote to an N.R.A. executive suggesting a bold strategy.
The group, he said, must “begin moving toward a legislative program” to codify an individual’s right to bear arms “for sporting and defense purposes.” It was a major departure from the Supreme Court’s sparse record on Second Amendment issues up to that point. The move would neutralize arguments for tighter gun restrictions in Congress and all 50 states, he said.
“By being bottomed on the federal constitutional right to bear arms,” he wrote, “these same minimal requirements must be imposed upon state statutes and local ordinances.”
A New Aggressiveness
Mr. Dingell’s legislative acumen proved indispensable to the gun lobby.
The 1972 Consumer Products Safety Act, designed to protect Americans from defective products, might have reduced firearms accidents that killed or injured thousands each year. But the N.R.A. viewed it as a backdoor to gun control, and Mr. Dingell slipped in an amendment to the new law, exempting from regulatory oversight items taxed under “section 4181 of the Internal Revenue Code” — which only covers firearms and ammunition.
While Mr. Dingell’s office was publicly boasting in 1974 of his bill to restrict “Saturday night specials,” cheap handguns often used in crimes, C.R. Gutermuth, then the N.R.A.’s president, confided in a private letter that the congressman had only introduced it to “effectively prevent” stronger bills. “Obviously, this comes under the heading of legislative maneuvering and strategy,” he wrote.
Still, the public generally favored stricter limits. After a 3-year-old Baltimore boy accidentally killed a 7-year-old friend with an unsecured handgun, a constituent wrote to Mr. Dingell asking, “How long is it going to be before Congress takes effective action?” He instructed an aide to “not answer.”
When the N.R.A. board met in March 1974, Mr. Gutermuth reported that “Congressman Dingell and some of our other good friends on The Hill keep telling us that we soon will have another rugged firearms battle on our hands.” Yet he expressed dismay that N.R.A. staff had not come up with a “concrete proposal” to fend it off.
Mr. Dingell had an idea.
In memos to the board, he complained of the N.R.A.’s “leisurely response to the legislative threat” and proposed a new lobbying operation. Handwritten notes reflect just how radical his plans were. He initially said the group, which traditionally stayed out of political races, would “not endorse candidates for public office” — only to cross that out with his pen; the N.R.A. would indeed start doing that, through a newly created Political Victory Fund.
The organization’s old guard, whose focus continued to be largely on hunting and sports shooting, was uncomfortable. Mr. Gutermuth, a conservationist with little political experience, wrote to a colleague that Mr. Dingell “wants an all out action program that goes way beyond what we think we dare sponsor.”
“John seems to think that we should become involved in partisan politics,” he said.
Mr. Dingell got his way. A 33-page document — “Plan for the Organization, Operation and Support of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action” — was wide-ranging. The proposal, largely written by Mr. Dingell, called for an unprecedented national lobbying push supported by grass-roots fund-raising, a media operation and opposition research.
It would “maintain files for each member of Congress and key members of the executive branch, relative to N.R.A. legislative interests,” and “using computerized data, bring influence to bear on elected officials.” The plan reflected Mr. Dingell’s savvy as a lawmaker: “For greatest effectiveness and economy, whenever possible, influence legislation at the lowest level of the legislative structure and at the earliest time.”
Walt Sanders, a former legislative director for Mr. Dingell, said the congressman viewed the N.R.A. as useful to his goal of protecting and expanding gun rights, particularly by heading off efforts to impose new restrictions.
“He believed very strongly that he could affect gun control legislation as a senior member of Congress and use the resources of the N.R.A. as leverage,” Mr. Sanders said.
The changes mirrored an increasingly uncompromising outlook within the N.R.A. membership. In what became known as the “Revolt at Cincinnati,” a group of hard-liners seized control of the group at its 1977 convention.
The coup drew inspiration from Mr. Dingell, who a month before had circulated a blistering attack on the incumbent leadership. He was revered by many members, who saw little distinction between his roles as a lawmaker and an N.R.A. director, and would write letters praising his fight on their behalf against “gun-grabbers.”
In his responses, he would sometimes correct the impression that he represented the N.R.A. in Congress.
“I try to keep my responsibilities in the two capacities separate so that there is no basic conflict,” he wrote to one constituent.
Cultural Shift
When gunshots claimed the life of John Lennon in December 1980 and nearly killed President Ronald Reagan a few months later, the N.R.A. readied itself for a familiar battle. Its officials, meeting in May 1981, grumbled that their “priorities, plans and activities have necessarily been altered.”
But remarkably, no new gun restrictions made it through Congress.
The group saw the failure of gun control efforts to gain traction as a validation of its new agenda and a sign that, with Reagan’s election, there was “a new mood in the country.” The N.R.A. and its congressional allies seized the moment, eventually pushing through the most significant pro-gun bill in history, the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act of 1986, which rolled back elements of the Gun Control Act.
The bill — largely written by Mr. Dingell but sponsored by Representative Harold L. Volkmer, a Missouri Democrat who would later join the N.R.A. board — was opposed by police groups. It lifted some restrictions on gun shows, sales of mail-order ammunition and the interstate transport of firearms.
The N.R.A. also went ahead with Mr. Dingell’s plans “to develop a legal climate that would preclude, or at least inhibit, serious consideration of many anti-gun proposals.” A strategy document from April 1983 laid out the long-term goal: “When a gun control case finally reaches the Supreme Court, we want Justices’ secretaries to find an existing background of law review articles and lower court cases espousing individual rights.”
The document listed several scholars the N.R.A. was supporting. Decades later, their work would be cited in the Supreme Court’s landmark 2008 decision in Heller, affirming gun ownership as an individual right. And it would surface in last year’s New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen ruling, which established a right to carry a firearm in public and a novel legal test weakening gun control efforts — prompting lower courts to invalidate restrictions on ownership by domestic abusers and on guns with serial numbers removed.
Key to those victories were appointments of conservative justices by N.R.A.-backed Republican presidents. By the time Antonin Scalia — author of the Heller opinion — was nominated by Reagan in 1986, the joke was that the “R” in N.R.A. stood for Republican, and internal documents from that era are laced with partisan rhetoric.
A 1983 report by a committee of N.R.A. members identified the perceived enemy as liberal elites: “college educated, intellectual, political, educational, legal, religious and also to some extent the business and financial leadership of the country,” inordinately affected by the assassinations of “men they admired” in the 1960s.
Lawmakers joining the board during that time — Mr. Ashbrook, Mr. Craig and Mr. Stevens — were all Republicans. Mr. Craig, a conservative gun enthusiast raised in a ranching family, would become “probably the most important” point person for the N.R.A. in Congress after Mr. Dingell, said David Keene, a longtime board member and former N.R.A. president.
“He was actually like having one of your own guys there,” Mr. Keene said in an interview.
He added, however, that a legislator need not have been a board member to be supportive of the group’s ambitions.
Mr. Craig did not respond to requests for comment, and Mr. Ashbrook and Mr. Stevens are dead. The N.R.A. did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Dingell, under increasing pressure as a pro-gun Democrat, faced a reckoning of sorts in 1994, when Congress took up an anti-crime bill that would ban certain semiautomatic rifles classified as assault weapons. He opposed the ban but favored the rest of the legislation.
A year earlier, he had angered fellow Democrats by voting against the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which imposed a background check requirement. This time, after intense lobbying that included urgent calls from President Bill Clinton, Mr. Dingell lent crucial support for the new legislation — and resigned from the N.R.A. board.
His wife, Representative Debbie Dingell, a proponent of stronger gun laws who now occupies his old House seat, said her husband faced a backlash from pro-gun extremists that left him deeply disturbed.
“He had to have police protection for several months,” Ms. Dingell said in an interview. “We had people scream and yell at us. It was the first time I had seen that real hate.”
Despite voting for the ban, Mr. Dingell almost immediately explored getting it overturned. Notes from 1995 show his staff weighing support for a repeal proposal, conceding that “a solid explanation will have to be made to the majority of our voters who favor gun control.”
‘Best Foot Forward’
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were too young to legally purchase a firearm, so in November 1998 they enlisted an 18-year-old friend to visit a gun show in Colorado and buy them two shotguns and a rifle. Five months later, they used the weapons, along with an illegally obtained handgun, to kill 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School.
The massacre was a turning point for a country not yet numbed to mass shootings and for the N.R.A., criticized for pressing ahead about a week later with plans for its convention just miles from Columbine. That sort of response would be repeated years later, after a teenager killed 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, and the N.R.A. went on with its convention in the state shortly afterward.
After Columbine, the organization mobilized against a renewed push for gun control. It had a new lawmaker-director to help: Mr. Barr, who had joined the board in 1997.
A staunchly conservative lawyer with a libertarian bent, Mr. Barr was among the House Republicans to lead the impeachment of Mr. Clinton. He served on the Judiciary Committee, which has major sway over gun legislation, and proved an eager addition to the N.R.A. leadership.
Mr. Barr wrote to another director with a standing offer to use his Capitol Hill office to ensure that any “information you have is cranked into the legislative equation.” Mr. Barr’s chief of staff sent the congressman a memo saying the gun group wanted him to review the agenda for a meeting on the “upcoming legislative session” and “make any changes or additions.”
The post-Columbine legislative battle centered on a bill to extend three-day background checks to private sales at gun shows, something the N.R.A. vigorously opposed, saying most weekend shows ended before a check could be completed. In the Senate, Mr. Craig engineered an amendment softening the impact, and Mr. Barr worked the House, earning them praise at an N.R.A. board meeting as “two people that put our best foot forward.”
The N.R.A. also turned to an old hand: Mr. Dingell.
Together, they came up with another amendment that narrowed the gun shows affected and required background checks to be completed in 24 hours or else the sale would go through. Publicly, Mr. Dingell argued that the shortened time window was reasonable.
But his papers include notes explaining that while most background checks are done quickly, some take up to three days because the buyer “has been charged with a crime” and court records are needed. Gun shows mostly happen on weekends, when courthouses “are, of course, closed.”
“It is becoming increasingly tougher to make our case that 24 hours is indeed enough time to do the check,” a member of Mr. Dingell’s staff wrote to an N.R.A. lobbyist.
Nevertheless, Mr. Dingell succeeded in amending the bill. He tried to win over his fellow Democrats with a baldly partisan message: “We’re doing this so that we can become the majority again. Very simply, we need Democrats who can carry the districts where these matters are voting issues.”
But his colleagues pulled their support. Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who fought for the stronger bill, said she believed Mr. Dingell was “trying to make progress, and had, he felt, some credibility with the N.R.A. that might allow him to do that.”
“Even though what he wanted to do was far from what I wanted to do,” she said.
At the N.R.A., the collapse of the bill was seen as a victory. An internal report cited Mr. Dingell’s “masterful leadership.” A year later the group honored him with a “legislative achievement award.”
‘We Can Help’
Despite the victories, Mr. Barr saw bigger problems ahead. In memos to Mr. LaPierre in late 1999, he warned that the “entire debate on firearms has shifted” and advised holding “an “issues summit.”
Specifically, he pointed to civil lawsuits seeking to hold the firearms industry liable for making and marketing guns used in violent crimes. Gun control advocates saw them as a way around the political stalemate in Washington — Smith & Wesson, for instance, chose to voluntarily adopt new standards to safeguard children and deter theft.
Mr. Barr had introduced a bill that would protect gun companies from such lawsuits, but lamented that “I have received absolutely zero interest, much less support, from the firearms industry.”
“We can help the industry through our efforts here in the Congress,” he wrote.
Mr. Craig took up the issue in the Senate, drafting legislation that mirrored Mr. Barr’s House bill. After Mr. Barr lost re-election in 2002, a new version of his liability law was sponsored by others, with N.R.A. guidance. To draw support from moderates, an incentive was added mandating that child safety locks be included when a handgun is sold, but N.R.A. talking points assured allies that the provision “does not require any gun owner to actually use the device.”
The political climate shifted enough under President George W. Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress that the assault weapons ban of 1994, which had a 10-year limit, was allowed to sunset, and the gun industry’s liability shield finally passed in 2005. The twin developments helped turbocharge the firearms market.
The private equity firm Cerberus Capital soon began buying up makers of AR-15 semiautomatic rifles and aggressively marketing them as manhood-affirming accessories, part of a sweeping change in the way military-style weapons were pitched to the public. The number of AR-15-type rifles produced and imported annually would skyrocket from 400,000 in 2006 to 2.8 million by 2020.
Asked about his early role in pressing the N.R.A. for help with the liability law, Mr. Barr said he believed the legal threat was significant enough “that the Congress step in.”
“The rights that are front and center for the N.R.A., the Second Amendment, are very much under attack and need to be defended,” Mr. Barr said. “And I defended them both as a member of Congress in that capacity and in my private capacity as a member of the N.R.A. board.”
Sensitivities
With each new mass shooting in the 2000s, pressure built on Congress to act, and the politics of gun rights became more polarized.
The N.R.A. lost another of its directors in Congress — Mr. Craig was arrested for lewd conduct in an airport men’s room and chose not to run again in 2008. But by then, the group’s aggressive use of campaign donations and candidate “report cards” had achieved a virtual lock on Republican caucuses.
That left Mr. Dingell increasingly marginalized in the gun debate. For a time, his connections were useful to Democrats; in 2007, after the shooting deaths of 32 people at Virginia Tech, he helped secure N.R.A. support to strengthen the collection of mental health records for background checks.
But by December 2012, when Adam Lanza, 20, shot to death 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, any vestige of good will between the N.R.A. and Democrats was gone. When House Democrats created a Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, they included the 86-year-old Mr. Dingell as one of 11 vice chairs, but his input was limited.
Notes from a task force meeting in January 2013 show that when it was Mr. Dingell’s turn to speak, he joked that he was the “skunk at the picnic” who had set up the N.R.A.’s lobbying operation — the “reason it’s so good.” He went on to underscore the rights of hunters and defend the N.R.A., saying it was “not the Devil.”
A few days earlier, he had privately conferred with N.R.A. representatives. Handwritten notes show that they discussed congressional support for new restrictions and the N.R.A.’s desire to delay legislation:
“Need to buy time to put together package can vote for, and get support, also for sensitivities to die down,” the notes said.
Three months later, a bipartisan gun control proposal failed after implacable resistance from the N.R.A. It was not until June 2022, after the Uvalde shooting, that a major firearms bill was passed — the first in almost 30 years. The legislation, which had minimal Republican support and fell far short of what Democrats had sought, required more private gun sellers to obtain licenses and perform background checks, and funded state “red flag” laws allowing the police to seize firearms from dangerous people.
By the time Mr. Dingell retired from the House in 2015, his views on gun policy had evolved, according to his wife, who said he no longer trusted the N.R.A.
“I can’t tell you how many nights I heard him talking to people about how the N.R.A. was going too far, how they didn’t understand the times,” Ms. Dingell said. “He was a deep believer in the Second Amendment, and at the end he still deeply believed, but he also saw the world was changing.”
In June 2016, after 49 people were killed in a mass shooting at an Orlando, Fla., nightclub, Ms. Dingell joined fellow Democrats in occupying the House floor as a protest. When she gave a speech, in the middle of the night, she broached the difference of opinion on guns she had with her husband.
“You all know how much I love John Dingell. He’s the most important thing in my life,” she said. “And yet for 35 years, there’s been a source of tension between the two of us.”
Mr. Dingell, too, briefly addressed that tension in a memoir published shortly before he died. He recalled that as he watched a recording of his wife’s speech the following morning, “I thought about all the votes I’d taken, all the bills I’d supported,” and “whether the gun debate had gotten too polarized.”
“As Debbie had said with such passion the night before, ‘Can’t we have a discussion?’” he wrote. “And I thought about the role I know I played in contributing to that polarization.”
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Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hear testimony from singer Elton John, founder of the Elton John AIDS Foundation, who urged Congress on April 19 to reauthorize the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. (photo: Ken Cedeno/UPI/Shutterstock)
As a result, lawmakers have spent months wrangling over whether Congress will reauthorize the program for five years, for one year or not at all — a decision that experts warn has both practical and symbolic consequences.
“If PEPFAR doesn’t get reauthorized, the program can continue — but it could send some pretty chilling messages to people in the field who depend on PEPFAR for life support,” said Jennifer Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at KFF, a health policy organization that has tracked the provisions set to expire Sept. 30.
Treasured by medical professionals and praised by foreign leaders, PEPFAR is the world’s largest health program devoted to a single disease — a status that officials say achieves the dual goal of strengthening U.S. diplomatic ties and boosting public health. Since the program’s inception in 2003, spearheaded by President George W. Bush, PEPFAR has spent in excess of $100 billion across more than 50 countries; distributed millions of courses of medicine to treat and prevent HIV; collected data that shed new light on the virus’s spread; and forged durable partnerships with local governments and organizations.
Experts have credited PEPFAR for helping stabilize health systems in regions including sub-Saharan Africa, which was devastated by the spread of HIV in the 1990s, and for building global capacity for future crises.
But the program is now dogged by accusations that its funds are helping prop up abortion providers, a charge first publicly leveled in a report from the conservative Heritage Foundation in May and amplified by Rep. Christopher H. Smith (N.J.), an antiabortion Republican who chairs a key House panel.
“It’s just dumbfounding to me that the charge has been taken seriously,” said Shepherd Smith, a co-founder of the Children’s AIDS Fund International who has worked closely with PEPFAR since its start and is among the advocates urging Congress to reauthorize the program before key provisions expire later this year.
The Biden administration had sought a “clean” five-year reauthorization of the HIV program, with no new policy restrictions, allowing Congress to quickly update the existing PEPFAR legislation without opening it back up to a lengthy debate.
Antiabortion advocacy groups insist that is a nonstarter. Heritage, Family Research Council and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America have warned lawmakers that if they vote for the Biden-backed bill, they will be docked on the organizations’ scorecards — a key metric that many antiabortion Republicans rely on when campaigning for reelection.
“What’s changed is the Biden administration’s radical insistence on ramming abortion into our foreign policy in an aggressive manner that we’ve never seen before,” Travis Weber, vice president for policy and government affairs at Family Research Council, said on a July 24 podcast, calling for more controls on the program. “Anyone who wants to be pro-life in their political voting record, we have to say, PEPFAR cannot go as it has been, it has to be amended.”
“As it stands under the Biden administration … this will be a very dangerous piece of legislation,” agreed Tony Perkins, the group’s president.
Instead, antiabortion advocates and Republicans have pushed for a one-year reauthorization that adds explicit abortion restrictions to PEPFAR. They also argue that the shorter extension buys time in the event a Republican returns to the White House in 2025, potentially ushering in changes to PEPFAR and the United States’ broader global health strategy.
Biden officials have said the claims about PEPFAR being used to support abortions are baseless, and that forcing annual votes on the program will inevitably create opportunities to weaken it.
As a result, negotiations over PEPFAR’s future have stalled on Capitol Hill.
The fight is “broader than PEPFAR — it’s really about the larger politics around abortion, electoral politics and the partisan divide,” said KFF’s Kates. “Those issues have come up in the past … it’s just that the bipartisan alliance has been able to withstand them in the past.”
David P. Fidler, a senior fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations, singled out Republican attacks on public health policies in a CFR report last month, warning that “populism, nationalism, and polarization have undermined domestic collective action and solidarity” on global health priorities such as PEPFAR.
The logjam over the HIV program has angered Democratic leaders such as Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who has been negotiating for months to reauthorize PEPFAR and attempted to include it in the armed services bill that passed the Senate on Thursday. In an interview, Menendez singled out the public health and foreign policy implications of the program, including its geopolitical role at a time when rival nations such as China seek to curry favor with African countries.
PEPFAR “helps us in a continent where China is all over the place,” Menendez said. “The one place they’re not all over the place is on helping to save people’s lives. We are, and we are known for that.”
Menendez recalled traveling to Africa this year where he met children and parents whose families were affected by HIV.
“None of the people I met would likely be alive today, but for PEPFAR,” he said.
If lawmakers fail to reauthorize PEPFAR, most of the program’s funding would remain intact, but some of its provisions are set to expire soon — including measures that conservatives originally fought to include, said Tom Hart, president of the ONE Campaign, a nonpartisan advocacy and campaigning organization. That includes a provision ensuring that a certain amount of PEPFAR funding would go to treatment, which was backed by conservative former senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), and another conservative-backed provision that ensures funds are set aside for orphans and vulnerable children.
“Ironically … several provisions important to conservatives will be lost,” Hart said.
Smith’s office pointed to a separate House Republican appropriations bill that would extend the expiring provisions.
PEPFAR’s overseas partners say they are alarmed by any potential retreat from the program’s historic five-year reauthorizations. Robinson Ogwang, who sits on the board of The AIDS Support Organization, a PEPFAR partner in Uganda, said “a lot of time is being wasted” as Congress debates the program’s future, sparking confusion on the ground for organizations trying to plan their own operations.
Without certainty about PEPFAR’s fate, “you start cutting the long-term strategic interventions into midterm and short-term,” Ogwang said in a call Thursday from Kampala, Uganda. “You are not confident because you don’t know whether funding is going to be continuous, whether it will be reduced.”
The former Republican president who launched PEPFAR has quietly stumped for it.
“I don’t really come to Washington often … but I’m here to remind people that American taxpayers’ money is making a huge difference,” Bush said at a February 2023 event marking PEPFAR’s 20-year anniversary. “This program needs to be funded. And for the skeptics, all I ask is look at the results, if the results don’t impress you, nothing will impress you.”
PEPFAR’s defenders say they remain mystified that a program that has long enjoyed bipartisan support, with Congress voting three times to reauthorize it, has been drawn into a political miasma.
But they say they’re clear on how it happened: the shifting position of Rep. Smith, who chairs a key foreign affairs panel overseeing PEPFAR legislation. He touted the program for years, working to reauthorize it under the antiabortion Trump administration, and signaled he would do so again.
“PEPFAR is widely viewed as the most successful U.S. foreign aid program since the Marshall Plan,” the congressman said in January.
But by June, after the Heritage report, Smith was publicly circulating a letter saying that President Biden had “hijacked” the program to promote abortion abroad, citing examples of organizations that had received PEPFAR funding while separately supporting access to abortion. The effort effectively froze progress on the bill.
In a one-hour interview in his office Friday, the congressman defended his stance, arguing that while he remains a passionate supporter of PEPFAR, the broader battle over abortion around the world took precedence over immediately reauthorizing the program.
“Every single statute protecting life in Africa is under siege right now,” the congressman said, citing efforts to expand access to abortion in Liberia and other nations. “The children are worth the fight.”
Smith said he began to grow concerned that PEPFAR was being “hijacked” after reading the program’s September 2022 strategic direction document and February 2023 guidance to local partners, which make brief mention of improving “sexual and reproductive health” — shorthand for abortion access, the congressman said — and encouraging local reforms.
“I reached out to every group possible, including Heritage, to take a look at this,” he said. “It wasn’t the groups telling me what to do, you know, with all respect.”
A congressman for 42 years, Smith repeatedly cited examples of prior legislative fights in which he claimed Democrats attempted to ensure abortion access through “subterfuge,” such as a long-running battle over whether the 2010 Affordable Care Act funded abortion.
“They claimed, as they’re claiming now, ‘Oh, no, don’t look here. It’s nothing to see.’ And it’s just one example of many,” he said, arguing that the White House could win over Republicans by reinstating the Mexico City Policy, a GOP-backed measure barring foreign organizations that receive U.S. funding from supporting abortion access. Beginning with Ronald Reagan, Republican presidents have enacted that policy while successive Democratic administrations have rolled it back.
The congressman’s claims about PEPFAR have been flatly rejected by the Biden administration.
“We are not ‘injecting’ abortion into PEPFAR in any way, shape, or form or seeking to make changes in law related to abortion,” said a senior White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity given ongoing discussions with Congress.
The White House also rebuffed Smith’s suggestion that Biden reinstate the Mexico City Policy.
“The Mexico City Policy significantly inhibits our ability to confront health challenges, not only HIV/AIDS, but also tuberculosis and malaria, and also to support programs that prevent and respond to gender-based violence when it comes to women’s health,” the official said.
PEPFAR updated its strategic direction document to stress that the program does not support abortion.
“In the context of PEPFAR, [sexual and reproductive health] services refers to four areas,” reads a recently added footnote. It lists prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV and access to condoms; education and care around sexually transmitted infections; cervical cancer screening and treatment; and prevention of gender-based violence. “PEPFAR does not fund abortions, consistent with long-standing legal restrictions on the use of foreign assistance funding related to abortion.”
Meanwhile, the program’s partners overseas said they were not aware of U.S. funding being used to support abortions.
“I’ve talked to a number of implementing partners and I can tell you, there is nothing like that in Uganda,” said Ogwang, whose organization treats more than 100,000 HIV patients with PEPFAR support.
He added that controls and transparency around PEPFAR funding are strict.
“If there is a program funded by United States government that is highly regulated, and demands the highest degree of compliance, it’s PEPFAR,” said Ogwang, a professional accountant who chairs his HIV organization’s audit committee.
Health GAP, an international organization working on access to HIV medication, has urged supporters to call Congress and oppose “one zealot politician and the extremist think tanks … lying about PEPFAR and blocking reauthorization.” Fellow lawmakers have been unsparing in their criticism of Smith, too.
“It took some members like Chris Smith of New Jersey to start spreading what I think is absolute misinformation that PEPFAR is somehow producing abortion issues,” said Menendez, who added that he had been working with Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) to try to assuage Republican concerns. Menendez said his goal remained reauthorizing the program this year, at least from the Senate.
Antiabortion advocates insist that Smith is right and Democrats have it backward.
“President Biden was the one who started this,” said Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, blaming Biden’s announcement on Jan. 28, 2021, that he was rescinding the Trump administration’s policies that barred U.S. funding for organizations abroad that perform abortions or promote them as a method of family planning.
Shepherd Smith, who describes himself as a pro-life Christian, said he has investigated the allegations about PEPFAR indirectly funding abortions. “I haven’t found evidence, and all the people in the faith community working on PEPFAR — overwhelmingly pro-life people — would have been the first to say, ‘Hey, you know, we’ve got a problem here, because this is happening,’ but it just hasn’t,” Smith said.
He added PEPFAR faces “real trouble” if it doesn’t swiftly receive a five-year reauthorization.
“It’ll be death by 1,000 cuts in the future, if it has to go up for reauthorization every year,” Shepherd Smith said.
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Greenpeace activists protesting against deep sea mining in front of the Ministry of Industry in Prague, Czech Republic, in June. (photo: David W Černý/Reuters)
We already know the damage that mining can cause on land. It could be devastating to the deep sea
This spring, scientists embarked on a search for new underwater formations aboard the Falkor (too), a research vessel operated by the Schmidt Ocean Institute, which one of us co-founded. Zooming in on three newly discovered hydrothermal vent fields with an underwater robot, the scientists found something unexpected.
Life.
As the robot shone a light along the vents belching black mineral-rich plumes, it revealed thousands of tiny wriggling shrimp in this inhospitable environment. The potential for discovery in the deep – of new life forms, of clues to how life on Earth began, of organisms that could be used for new medicines – is incalculable.
It’s a cruel irony that renewable energy, at least at this point of technological development, is thought to require nonrenewable deep-sea minerals, pulled from ecosystems we know so little about. But we can’t protect our planet by destroying it, nor can we mine our way out of the climate crisis.
Last week, a little-known autonomous global body, the International Seabed Authority council, opted to delay the start of large-scale commercial ocean mining likely until 2025 amid growing opposition from world leaders, ocean advocates and marine scientists worldwide.
This moment marks a profound and rare opportunity when it comes to environmental protection. Rather than learning the gravest impacts of resource extraction years or decades into the process, we now have the opportunity to look before we leap.
During this pause we need to pursue three goals for human and planetary health: scientific exploration and research; continued pressure on land-based mining companies to clean up their act; and innovation to answer our connectivity, mobility and energy needs in more sustainable ways.
Deep-sea mining might seem, initially, like a distant concern. But consider the process: mining companies send mammoth robotic vehicles, outfitted with spiked wheels and powerful suction tubes, thousands of meters underwater. Once minerals are extracted, the machinery dumps wastewater, sediment and all the other disruptive outputs of the mining process back into the water, damaging seafloor habitats and the life within them. From seafloor and ship-based discharges, plumes spread and pollute the water column even further afield, suffocating and imperiling ocean life.
This is the equivalent of vacuuming your rug, rescuing a lost earring from the canister, and then dumping all the collected debris back on to the rug and into the air in the room – except, in this case, you can only guess at how badly the debris will damage your rug, your home or your family.
There has to be a better way – for the safety of our ocean, our planet and ourselves. It starts with research, from basic science to understanding the full scale of potential mining impacts. We have so much yet to discover on the seafloor: new species, compounds that can treat disease or even cure the next pandemic, and insight into how life began and how it might regenerate.
The ecosystems at the bottom of the ocean have developed over the same time periods as the minerals within them – up to millions of years – and damage to them may be irreversible. The same is true for all the marine life that might suffer, right up to the fisheries that contribute $1.5tn annually to the global economy and provide protein for 3 billion people.
We already know the damage mining can cause on land, and yet we’re still mining. Before even considering digging up the ocean, we should continue to pressure the mining industry to clean up its act on land.
Perhaps the most challenging step we must take is to reduce demand. Renewable energy manufacturers and innovators should design their products with responsibly sourced minerals and with an eye to reclaiming minerals and collecting batteries for reuse. Leaving aside the opportunity for innovation, with existing methods, recycling dead batteries alone could reduce global demand for electric car minerals – by 55% for newly mined copper, 25% for lithium and 35% for cobalt and nickel by 2040.
We have to think outside the sedan. Simply replacing gas-powered cars with electric vehicles on a one-to-one basis could mean an impossible demand for minerals. Electrifying mass transit, telecommuting and other solutions can ease the global burden – particularly if industry, governments and all of us consider this an opportunity to creatively and completely reimagine transportation and decarbonization more broadly.
The stakes aren’t just high – they’re existential, for the ocean and for all life on Earth. We need to move quickly toward a renewable energy future, but let’s not mortgage the ocean to pay for it.
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