Earth Matters: Manchin helped kill reform of 1872 mining law that harms people and costs billions
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Manchin wreckEd latest move to reform 150-YEAR-OLD MINING LAW Sen. Joe Manchin III has got a lot of reasons for that smile. In the last year of his first term as president, Ulysses S. Grant signed the 1872 Mining Law that set modEarth Matters: Manchin helped kill reform of 1872 mining law that harms people and costs billions
Manchin wreckEd latest move to reform 150-YEAR-OLD MINING LAW Sen. Joe Manchin III has got a lot of reasons for that smile. In the last year of his first term as president, Ulysses S. Grant signed the 1872 Mining Law that set modest rules for individuals and corporations to stake mineral claims on land never before in private hands. That is, land snatched at gunpoint from Indigenous peoples. This allowed royalty-free extraction not only of gold and silver, but also numerous other minerals that today include lithium, essential for electric vehicle batteries. According to Earthworks, in the century and a half since the law went into effect, the mining industry has pulled an estimated $300 billion worth of minerals from public lands, leaving giant, toxic messes behind. You would be hard-pressed to find another statute that has been on the books as long with no more than minor tweaks over the decades. By comparison with hard-rock mining, which brought in just $71 million in administrative fees in 2018, the federal leasing system for energy resources, which accounts for 17% of mining on federal lands, brought in $550 million in royalties, coal being by far the largest generator of this revenue. On its 100th anniversary in 1972, environmental advocates and other activists made a vigorous effort to reform the law. But mining lobbyists and their congressional allies easily beat back the attempt. Since 2007, members of Congress have introduced reforms to the law six times without success. In 2019, the mining giant BHP Group and the National Mining Association spent $1.2 million in a lobbying campaign to defeat the proposed reform. Another attempt was made this August when Democratic Rep. Raúl Grijalva, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, added mining law reform language to what was then the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better bill, since axed to $1.7 trillion or so and still chopping. This would have set an 8% royalty on existing mines and 4% on new ones and a 7-cent fee for every ton of rock extracted. One estimate says this would raise $2 billion in revenue over 10 years. Given that the feds have incomplete data on the value of minerals extracted from public lands, this is likely a significant undercount. Enter Democratic spoiler Sen. Joe Manchin, the chairman of the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources committee. Read more