Mining News: Victors may be ‘the biggest losers’

Shortsighted opponents of mining industry will suffer along with everyone else if America loses access to its mineral resources

J. P. Tangen

For Mining News

Although there are innumerable differences between any point in the past and the present, modern political activists of all political stripes routinely draw on one half-recalled and poorly understood event or another from the past to “prove” a point. Strict constructionists of the U. S. Constitution gladly leap over 230 years of history to bemoan the way that the President, or Congress or the Judiciary are misconstruing the framers’ “intent,” while the progressive opposition hastily condemns them as being Nazis.

One group celebrates the high incidence of voter participation in the system, while another longs for the days when governance was the province of free, white, male property owners. The debate takes place on every street corner in one way or another. Millions of nominally independent voters, who spent years condemning Bush the Younger, are now anxious to see the current social experiment run its course. Truthfully, the bric-a-brac is probably healthy, but the collateral damage is awesome.

Every day it seems that one group or another is mounting a charge against the domestic mining industry. America has been blessed with a profusion of mineral resources. By a happy coincidence of history, it was perceived by the empowered to be in the best interests of their personal agenda to encourage the development of that mineral wealth. The coal from West Virginia to Alaska facilitated the industrialization of America when we weren’t the most powerful nation in the universe. The oil from Erie to Midland, Texas greased the skids of our emergence. Gold from the environs of Sutter’s Creek and silver from the Coeur d’Alene became the means of exchange when the Gatling gun was thought to be a weapon of mass destruction.

To my mind, the General Mining Law of 1872, perhaps as much as any other single enactment brought America the standard and the affluence we enjoy. It has always made me a little sad that May 10 is not recognized as a national holiday. Yet there are those who are committed to bringing much of what has come to pass to the recycle bin. Hardly a day goes by but what some new attack on the industry is not initiated.

Nunamta Aulukestai seeks to stop Pebble and, in the process, terminate all exploration activity on Alaska land. Earthworks seeks to resuscitate two ill-conceived opinions generated in the twilight hours of the Clinton administration by Interior Solicitor John Leshy, which took the Bush 43 organization nearly eight years to correct.

Of course mineral extraction in the United States should be conducted in a safe and environmentally sound manner; the operative term, however, being “should be conducted.” There is no shortage of anecdotes concerning how the unavailability of critical minerals stymied technological evolution. We unquestionably are confronted with that dilemma today, when the sensitive people want us to drive hybrid cars, while those who kill Bristol Bay salmon for a living don’t want us to mine the extra hundred pounds of copper required to build those cars. Apparently fishermen don’t drive hybrids.

As we approach America’s quintessential holiday, Thanksgiving, perhaps it would be timely to bow our heads, not only to say thanks for all the blessings that our mineral profusion has afforded us, but also to ask a blessing for those who use their computers and cell phones to organize opposition to recovery of mineral commodities. For in the final analysis, it takes no unusual insight to recognize that their success will by Pyrrhic and that they will be the biggest losers.