A new bill has been introduced in Congress that would overhaul the 1872 Mining Law and at last bring the United States into the 21st century — ready to meet the demands of a clean energy economy while not repeating the mistakes of the past.
For 151 years, mining for copper, uranium, and other minerals has been governed by a gold-rush era law that promoted westward expansion and extraction at all costs. As a result, according to the EPA, 40% of western watersheds are now polluted. Hundreds of thousands of mines have been abandoned and left to taxpayers to clean up. And Indigenous tribes and other communities have been polluted with arsenic, mercury, and lead. This is unacceptable.
The Clean Energy Minerals Reform Act, introduced by Representative Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), offers several solutions. It would:
- Establish environmental standards that don’t exist under the current law and make industry clean up their abandoned mines;
- Ensure a fair return to taxpayers with a royalty for mining on public lands;
- Create space for meaningful tribal consultation and improve siting/permitting with a leasing system and public process; and
- Give land managers power to protect sacred and irreplaceable resources.
Urge your elected officials to support this visionary bill and protect our public lands and water for future generations.
Find Sky Island Alliance's action here:
I have one major problem with this proposed update of the 1872 Mining Act. In Item 2: "Ensure a fair return to taxpayers with a royalty for mining on public lands."
ReplyDeleteThis will be used by mining companies to coerce taxpayers to allow mining that should not be allowed (due to environmental damage potential, poor economics involved compared to other mining options, etc.). What should instead be done is a robust multi-phase repairing of mining damages before each of the next mining phases can begin. The cities and counties don't need bribes from mining companies. What we really need in the long term is environmental protection through remediation before each additional mining phase is allowed. This would turn mining projects into slow repair as you go projects that would last a few or several times longer 60-100 years) than the quick (20-year) boom/bust cycles that communities currently go through. And it would enhance the science of rehabilitation of the land and its hydrology, and protect future generations from the rip-offs of the mining companies like Rio Tinto, BHP, etc.