Photo Credit: Marine Conservatory Institute, Click to enlarge.

gCaptain reports,

“Largely overlooked in the tribunal’s July 12 decision was a strict interpretation of which dry land is entitled to a 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone—the surrounding ocean where a nation has sole rights to fish, drill for oil, and search for minerals.”

“The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea doesn’t allow nations to declare exclusive economic zones around “rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own.” What that’s meant has never been clear. Many countries, including the U.S. and Japan, have claimed exclusive economic zones around tiny atolls and outcroppings of rock.”

“The tribunal concluded that having people live on an island doesn’t prove habitability if food and water comes from elsewhere.”

The result could mean large stocks of fish in the Pacific including at least parts of the newly expanded Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument could loose the protection of US regulation  This could have long term implications for the US fossil fuel industry as well as the future of Offshore Thermal Energy Conversion.