News from the Minnesota Reformer that should give the howling fantods to those caught in a romance with mining in Minnesota, though Bluestem suspects many of our readers will be pleased.
DFL lawmakers introduce bill to crack down on mining near Boundary Waters
By Christopher IngrahamLast summer, the Department of Natural Resources asked the Legislature whether certain high-impact mining practices in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) watershed were compatible with preserving and protecting the wilderness area, as required by state and federal law.
This week, a pair of DFL lawmakers introduced a bill with an emphatic answer: “no.”
The bill, cosponsored by Sen. Kelly Morrison, DFL-Deephaven, and Rep. Sandra Feist, DFL-New Brighton, would ban four specific copper-sulfide practices in the Rainy River – Headwaters watershed:
- The above-ground storage of waste tailings either as a wet slurry held back by a dam or a dry pile;
- The above-ground storage of waste rock, which can contain toxic metals;
- Heap leaching, which involves spraying chemical solutions over piles of rock to separate metals from ore;
- And smelting, which involves heating ore to high temperatures to extract metals from it.
The bill would be “a crucial piece of legislation to protect the Boundary Waters by banning the riskiest practices associated with sulfide-ore copper mining,” said Ingrid Lyons, executive director of Northeastern Minnesotans for Wilderness, in a statement.
The bill is narrower in scope than legislation introduced by the same lawmakers last year, which would have completely banned copper-sulfide mining in the Boundary Waters watershed. But at a press conference, Morrison said the net effect of the new bill would be the same: Absent the invention of new technology, copper-sulfide mining as proposed by companies like Twin Metals could not be done without these four practices.
The sponsors hope the narrower focus will help the bill draw more support in the closely-divided House and Senate. “Given that DNR suggested that these [proposals] were needed, I think it does improve our chances,” Morrison said. She noted that historically, Minnesota laws were written to govern iron and taconite mining, not copper-sulfide mining.
Mining companies and their allies at the statehouse have argued that minerals like copper are essential for the transition to the cleaner energy sources needed to cut carbon emissions. The new bill is “disconnected from a commonsense reality of what it will take to reach Minnesota and the United States’ carbon free energy goals,” said Julie Lucas, executive director of Mining Minnesota, in a statement. “We not only need the minerals to produce new energy sources but to do it in a way that also protects our communities and the environment.”
But electric car makers and other manufacturers are continually looking for ways to reduce their need for copper, which has taken a bite out of global demand. And supporters of the bill say the consequences of allowing copper-sulfide mining near the Boundary Waters would be catastrophic and irreversible.
“To get the minerals out of this particular ore body, the rock has to be brought to the surface, and once it is exposed to air and water it leaches heavy acid, akin to battery acid,” Lyons said. It also leaches trace amounts of heavy toxic metals like mercury and lead.
“This would drain directly into the BWCA and change it forever,” Morrison said. “And once it’s gone we can’t get it back.”
This Minnesota Refomrer article is republished online under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Photo: Minnesota Boundary Waters. Photo by Peter de Sibour, courtesy of Explore Minnesota/Minnesota Reformer.
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