I thought this piece by Eric Biber of Berkeley Law School was interesting on permitting reform and mining law. It seems like the idea of producing minerals and energy domestically is catching on, perhaps recent threats by China is moving this pragmatic point of view forward. In a sense, the permitting reform movement is the expression that “no” is ultimately not a complete answer for various forms of development, and it’s not a “good guys vs. bad guys” issue.
The whole piece with background on the clash between the 1872 Mining Act and more recent laws, but I felt bad about just copying the whole thing (and it’s open source), so below are the latter paragraphs:
There are good arguments, even environmental ones, for some level of federal support for mining activities on federal lands. Decarbonization requires development and large-scale deployment of a range of clean energy technologies that depend on a range of minerals, including rare earths. Reliance on imports from other countries – especially China – for those minerals leaves the US vulnerable to external political pressure (as China has done multiple times in constraining rare earth exports).
But it is also true that the mining industry in the United States has a history of significant environmental damage. And while it may well be the case that modern mining in the US will be less environmentally damaging than mining in other parts of the world, we still may wish to ensure that mining here achieves high environmental standards.
There’s a deal to be done here. Modern mining cannot be performed without large areas for disposal of waste rock. Creating a legally secure pathway for allowing for that disposal is an important step to helping advance domestic minerals production. But the public – the owners of these lands – should get both guarantees that the overall mining production that is the basis of that waste is meeting high environmental standards, and that the public is getting some of the value of the mineral production activity that is based on the public lands. (Right now, mining operations pay minimal amounts for their use of the public lands.) Any fix to the Rosemont case should thus include (a) providing land management agencies with the clear power to reject individual mine proposals, and setting lands aside from mining production where other resource values from those lands are high; (b) establishing appropriate fees paid for by mining operations to ensure that clean-up from mining operations meets high environmental standards; (c) a fee for use of the lands for waste disposal that reflects a reasonable share of the value of the overall mining operation (taking into account the necessary risks and uncertainties of mining). (The second component is also in the Problem Solvers Caucus proposal.)
The goal here – as should be the case in any discussion of permitting reform – is, as far is possible, to set rigorous standards, but provide clarity and certainty about those standards and their applications. The former helps us achieve environmental goals; the latter will make it easier for regulated parties to meet those standards, and in many cases advance activities that are essential to achieving important environmental objectives
I cannot argue about the intent to extract minerals from our Earth while also minimizing the adverse impacts that come from that extraction. The main sticking point is when and where have any of us in this forum see these two actions occur? (extraction and protection) Until we see actual action (and success!) dedicated to these intents, I remain pessimistic.
Brohm was an Australian company recruited by a now-dead Republican governor who gutted environmental protection in South Dakota. In the pre-cellphone days Brohm and this former Twin City Fruit marketing associate shared a radio telephone party line where managers plotting an environmental disaster at the Gilt Edge site unwittingly leaked the news to anyone listening.
I’ve preached this for going on forty years. It takes trucks, tub grinders and balers dedicated to specific materials to recycle on a regional scale. The United States has thousands of mountains of glass cullet from the municipal waste stream just waiting to be repurposed. We sell millions of tons of salvage material to India and Asia to be recycled while tearing up our own ground mining for virgin minerals while metals and plastics, that could be petroleum, are buried in landfills.
Disadvantaged populations have been subject to mining-driven environmental racism for hundreds if not thousands of years and in 2014 Nobel Prize winner, Professor Paul Krugman warned Americans that Earth hating Republicans want to make America one big strip mine.
In September Sibanye-Stillwater mining company in Montana announced the ending of some 800 jobs after Russia flooded the world palladium market sinking Democratic Senator Jon Tester’s reelection. Montana Tunnels Mining, Inc. in Jefferson County is in bankruptcy after a century of pollution and tax fraud leaving a pit where a mountain used to be.
Currently, the US is 100% reliant on foreign sources of the gallium that’s used for integrated circuits and light emitting diodes or LEDs. According to the US Geological Survey the nation imports most of its bauxite and alumina so instead of ripping up ground in America recycling aluminum is mostly working but there is so much metal buried in landfills that if we mined those we’d import even less. Electronic waste containing copper, gold and platinum is valued at nearly $100 billion but only 4% is repurposed while new mines are currently being permitted in Montana and Arizona.
Today, visitors and skiers at Terry Peak in the occupied Black Hills are increasingly concerned by the encroachment of a massive tailings pile and ever-widening mining scars from decades of scorched earth. But the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming are hardly the only public lands plundered by foreign companies under cover of the General Mining Law of 1872 that was enacted to settle Civil War debt and rob Indigenous peoples of their homes and human rights.
Until it closed in 1939 the Tererro Mine in the headwaters of the Pecos River took gold, lead and other metals then left piles of toxic waste rock in their place. After major flooding in 1991 when sulfuric acid, aluminum and zinc swept into the river miner Freeport-McMoRan was held responsible for the deaths of some 100,000 Rio Grande cutthroat trout and for the subsequent decades of acid mine drainage.
Today, towns Globe and Miami, Arizona have been swept away by flooding because strip mining turned whole mountain ranges into piles of waste rock.
“(a) providing land management agencies with the clear power to reject individual mine proposals, and setting lands aside from mining production where other resource values from those lands are high;”
If this were said in the reverse order – identify lands where other resource values from those lands are high, and set them aside to prevent mine proposals (or impose mitigation standards), we could be talking about land management planning. Except that I think only Congress can actually “set lands aside” from the 1872 Mining Law, and I don’t think they are going to want to “provide land management agencies with the clear power” to do this, so I’m not hopeful.
Younger readers may not remember this, but there was a time when the Ds controlled the Senate, House, and White House. This was during (some of) the Obama years when Rep. Grijalva (Pater) launched a strong effort to reform the 1872 Mining Law. As I recall, the bill proceeded generally along the lines suggested by Biber. Even in that ostensibly favorable political environment, it failed. The problem with governance is that wisdom and achievability often fail to coincide.