@CJ19 couple thoughts. I do appreciate the post, just a couple spots where I have a thought or familiarity with one aspect of this and could use some clarification.
Your list of orgs is NOT a list of conservation orgs. Your list includes both environmentally focused conservation orgs, as well as outright preservation orgs. That is two very different things. The list includes both orgs that actively work with industry becasue they recognize this exact problem, ie that we need resources and that offshoring the damage isnt a solution; as well as orgs that dont recognize that. At least one org on your list literally owns hundreds of thousands of acres of land that they manage for extraction in various forms. Even though it may be a tangent I think that's important to note--your group of orgs may be addressing some of the same environmental problems, but it includes a massive range of approaches to this exact issue that imo doesnt warrant lumping them together especially in the context of this topic.
You mentioned that it would be expensive to reimburse a company for their investment. I'm not clear what stage of the process you are referring to—are you saying some company already has permitted rights to a mine, even though there had already been a moratorium in place? But also my question back is, what is the dollar-value of the boundary waters? If a mine runoff spill were to happen in the future, and pollutes the watershed, what would the cleanup cost borne by the public be, and what will the cost be to the area in lost revenue and lost value (the estimates I read were that the economic impact of tourism to the BWCA was already pushing $100million per year)? My guess is "hundreds of millions" could be by far the cheaper option compared to some of those numbers. Part of the problem is that what is LOST to a spill or degradation from industry in terms of environment has always been, and continues to be, woefully undervalued. Especially when the list of places that are still relatively pristine is not large. Scarcity drives value up—BWCA’s are pretty scarce.
Everyone can see what is occurring with the national security argument crowd. People don't want the mine so they are wildly grabbing onto any argument they can to stop it. Most of the people talking about muh national security do care about national security or supply chains.
This is not clear to me. Do you mean "most people talking about national security DO care about national security...or DONT care about national security? The point is that national security was the actual justification for using the congressional review act to rescind the moratoriumon on mining, but since we'd be sending ore to china it certainly doesnt appear to make us more secure--the whole issue with the security in the first place is that we DONT want to be beholden to China. Can you clarify what you are saying?
The mine will have a long term contract with a company to take and smelt these goods with a buyer in place. The same as every other mine in the US. If you don't like it, just give this company their money back in addition to 100s of millions in damages. It turns out just seizing a companies assets after they have put a lot of investor money into them is a costly legal endeavor.
can you explain what you mean? are you saying that the US will retain ownership of the ore, a chilean company will mine it for us, and they will send to a chinese smelter to process the ore, and our allotment will then come directly back to us? If so that is very different than how most supply chains I am familiar with work. What I'm familiar with is more like a commodity market--take milk as an example. A farmer sells milk to a processor. The processor combines the raw milk from dozens or hundreds of farms, finishes and bottles it, and sells it all mixed up to grocery stores on an open market. So if the farmer wants milk he buys it from the grocery store, but it's not "his" milk, it is all of the mixed up milk from all of the farms that he then buys at whatever the retail price of milk is,
becasue he is competing with every other consumer of milk on an open market. Does mining work differently than such a market? Even if there is an agreement in place, what recourse is there if a chinese smelter gets siezed by the chinese government or they simply forbid shipping any of the processed material to the US? From a security standpoint I just dont see the advantage or the security in literally sending the "critical material" to an antagonistic place regardless of what agreements are in place, especially when its the specific place that we're trying to be less dependent on.
And regardless of any of this, the implications of rescinding the moratorium in this particular way--via the congressional review act which creates specific legal barriers around this topic in the future--still needs to be addressed. Even if we say that mining needs to happen here in the US, and that until we have our own start to finish processing capacity we still have to allow mining to continue, my understanding is that the "substantially similar" language in the congressional review act will make it much harder to strategically locate and manage any mines in a responsible way in the future. I'd really like to hear what those advocating for this being a good thing have to say about this aspect.
