Gerard Barron

But what started to happen was, and this is more a representation of politics around the world, how the world went a bit,

You saw governments in Europe be very heavily influenced by smaller governments who had to form coalitions to govern.

So you don't have two parties, like in some countries, like UK is still that, Australia is still that, US is pretty well still that.

But in other countries like Germany and France, you had...

or Belgium or the Netherlands, you have like a dozen different parties to form a coalition to get the votes to be able to govern.

So you had green voters who might only hold two or three seats, so a very tiny, tiny, tiny majority, but they might have the balance of power.

Without their two votes, you might not have majority.

And so what the Green Party started to do is to say, we really care about this ocean metal, and there's no better example than France.

So France have a pretty good nuclear industry, right?

And if you go back four years ago now, Macron, the president, came out with a very public statement, which I was very excited about, said, here's our 2030 plan.

France needs to re-industrialize.

We need to bring back jobs.

For that, we need metals.

We have these ocean deposits.

We can get these ocean metals far more effectively than we can possibly find metals on land.

It was a pretty good speech.

18 months later, at COP, I think it was COP 23, total switch.

We should ban deep sea mining, was Macron's new pitch.

And the reason why he changed his position was because, once again, he was losing interest

influence, losing power.