Political Concerns
Because OTEC facilities are more-or-less stationary surface platforms, their exact location and legal status may be affected by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea treaty (UNCLOS). This treaty grants coastal nations 3-, 12-, and 200-mile (320 km) zones of varying legal authority from land, creating potential conflicts and regulatory barriers. OTEC plants and similar structures would be considered artificial islands under the treaty, giving them no independent legal status. OTEC plants could be perceived as either a threat or potential partner to fisheries or to seabed mining operations controlled by the International Seabed Authority.
Read more about this topic: Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion
Famous quotes containing the words political and/or concerns:
“No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The idea that nations should love one another, or that business concerns or marketing boards should love one another, or that a man in Portugal should love a man in Peru of whom he has never heard—it is absurd, unreal, dangerous.... The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)