Matt Yglesias is so, so right about Friday Night Lights, my new favorite TV series (you needn’t like football, high school, or Texas; I love only the third). So I am surprised he is not more skeptical about the Law of the Sea Treaty.
For background, here is Wikipedia, here is a Heritage critique, and here is a Cato critique. Here is an argument for the treaty. Here is another summary of arguments, and more details here. Note that many nations already have signed and ratified but the U.S. has not ratified.
In essence, the convention "guarantees" freedom of navigation (fine, noting that ocean navigation is currently free, but thanks mostly to the U.S. military, not the UN), defines territorial waters, and sets future guidelines for managing the sea’s mineral resources (not so fine). The Convention "establishes an International Seabed Authority (ISA) to authorize seabed exploration and mining and collect and distribute the seabed mining royalty."
Economic mining of the deep ocean is decades away. But the ISA has veto rights over developing ocean resources and this hardly seems conducive to increasing the value of those resources. Nor does the "some regulatory framework is better than none, if only to alleviate uncertainty" argument apply. No entrepreneurs are sitting around waiting for the U.S. to ratify the convention so they can proceed with their deep sea mining platforms. there is a potential commons problem but right now it is best to simply wait; no current "solution" will end up sticking or much reflect the actual problems that will arise.
When deep sea mining emerges as economically relevant, the Convention will have created a now-tiny but eventually clueless, bureaucratically crippled, and possibly even corrupt multilateral institution with veto rights over economic development. Once the landscape of the issue becomes clear, we’ll have to rewrite plans and agreements anyway. Why support this extra level of veto rights, namely the ISA? ISA has dispute resolution powers and of course it is geared to levy taxes and redistribute the proceeds as it sees fit.
I don’t hold the extreme view that the UN always fails. It is possibly good when there is a general consensus for action (UNESCO World Heritage sites), or when a well-targeted military action has a defined purpose. The UN is very bad at developing and enforcing open-ended commitments, and very bad at constructing well-run institutions.
Ratifying the Convention might make us look more cooperative, but that is too vague a reason to justify it. The Convention also would make it legally easier for the U.S. Navy to pass through foreign waters, although in a pinch this probably would not matter much.
The real issue these days is stopping the Russians from claiming most of the Arctic, at least the sea lanes, and this is why the Bush administration now supports the treaty. We’ll then have international support, or at least the pretext of such support, for telling the Russians they can’t colonize the Arctic. That’s it, that’s the whole real reason for supporting the treaty and jumping into bed with the UN. But hey, I can sympathize with stopping the Russians.
That reason may well outweigh the above-described costs of the treaty, which in any case lie in the future. So maybe I end up agreeing with Matt. But overall the Convention is not well thought out, and any support should be offered with the distinctly pinched nose occasioned by the most cynical (albeit sometimes justified) expressions of realpolitik.
“That’s it, that’s the whole real reason for supporting the treaty”
I thought the thing was about attempting to avert a Commons problem if as and when deep sea mining does become economically viable? It might be the wrong answer, but the question itself does need answering. Who owns what?
Commons problems and avoiding further environmental catastrophe for our oceans.
“[The UN] is possibly good when there is a general consensus for action”
When there is a consensus is precisely when a government(-like) body is useless.
When there isn’t is when it’s harmful.
When it’s useful is in pipe-dreams and propaganda.
The tax is the issue. It internationally taxes the sea bed, so can Canada use those nets they have to be nice to the area they claim?
The tax should make people think of the Live8/G8 tax. the British were behind it.
I don’t think underwater mining is exactly a commons problem. The minerals are not renewable, like fish or pastureland.
Regardless, the issue is that, apparently, the resources are quite valuable yet getting them out requires some fairly expensive technology not widely available, so without defining and enforcing ownership rights you are basically giving the resources to whoever can get there and grab them. Yet there is no particular reason that these minerals ought to be be assumed to simply belong to mining companies.
What mining companies, Bernard?
IMHO taxing resources that aren’t yet profitable is a great way to prevent them from ever being used. Who’s going to invest in developing deep-sea mining technology if the UN has already declared its intention of taxing the proceeds? There’s a precommitment problem here — until a mine exists, the ISA’s incentive will be to set taxes at 0, but the moment a profitable mine appears, the ISA’s incentive will be to tax the entire marginal gains without regard to sunk R&D or capital costs.
A better system for the sea, the moon, the fruits of biodivesity, etc. would be for the treaty to precommit to granting the first successful companies tax-free, 5-20 year exclusive rights (or prizes of equivalent value), and then taxing the follow-on companies that don’t bear the R&D costs after the market is already established.
Here is an opinion piece by George Shultz (Sec. State under Reagan) and James Baker (Sec. State under H.W. Bush) supporting the law of the sea treaty. http://bakerinstitute.org/Pubs/Law%20of%20the%20Sea.pdf
Bernard,
Whether there is a commons problem or not has nothing to do with renewability or non-renewability of
the resource in question. There can be a commons problem for a pool of oil, if multiple parties are
trying to pump out of it at the same time. It can be overpumped, with a resulting inability to get
all the oil out due to resulting pressure problems.
The technology is immediately available to use the deep sea as a dump. That alone is a good reason why veto rights might be important.
Northwest Passage , Sidra Gulf( Jefferson ordered a bombing for it, and Reagans Government ordered a dogfight over it), Venezuelan Gulf( american ships fought UBs there in the WWII and defied claims of Venezuela over it) and Chesapeake Bay can became internal water or territorial waters under the treaty. Venezuela has not ratified it because a big chunk of the Caribeamn Sea is territorial waters of Venezuela or part of the 200 miles of exclusive economics zone. The USA has recognized it in treaties with Venezuela( Virgin Island and Puerto Rico).Under the treaty it wouldnt be that way because it has origin in a litle rock in the middle of nowhere.
In the 80s it was tought as an important reason against ratification.Nobody wanted Ghadaffi with the right to close the passage of the American fleet to the Mediterranean
I don’t really see the point of the obsession with the seabed mining part of this treaty. It got in there because that was supposed to be a ‘next big thing’ back in the 70′s-80′s. It turned out not to be, so this section is pretty irrelevant. Even so, if someday seabed mining becomes economicaly relevant, is it that bad a thing that 70% of the planet isn’t opened to unrestricted strip mining? I do wonder a bit how much of Regan’s opposition to this section had something to do with the Glomar Explorer ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USNS_Glomar_Explorer_%28T-AG-193%29 ) and our ability to pull similar stunts in the future.
Looking at the parts of the treaty that actually matter, there are a lot of impressive successes:
- The 200 mile economic zone. Prior to having this, ocean fisheries were a classic commons problem. The 12-mile limit is pretty meaningless to fish. Since there was no real way to manage fisheries, by the 80′s many were on the verge of collapse, and in some cases, near-millitary conflicts emerged over fishing rights. (Including one between Britan and Iceland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_War ). Resolving this issue and placing most fisheries under national jursidiction is, in itself, enough to justify the treaty.
- Dumping and environmental regulation. Does anyone really it’s a good idea to let anybody dump anything in the ocean, as long as it’s 201 miles away from shore? Hope so, ’cause, ya know, I heard the Russians got a lot of spent fuel cores looking for a home…
- Dispute resolution. It really saddens me to see Americans oppose any form of dispute resolution besides “our millitary’s stronger.” There’s a pretty clear line between strength and bullying, and this is way on the wrong side of it. Even beyond fairness arguments, having one set of rules and procedures is a huge administrative aid
The Canadian claims are no good. It started with the natives, who they claim everything for; then it was the RCMP, then it was CSIS(archepilic archeologists) going for land claims leading to water claims; this was followed by three PMs and now it’s the military base they are building. The US and Russian have claimed the entire arctic with subs. It’s all mapped. It’s probably had some harvesting and I’ll bet the Russians put the marker there to show they have mined like the US.
The natives have a new military base. The natives should be the people who don’t want a tax. The natives could make alot of money from a country that wants to harvest, but they don’t own it, the UN does.
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