MINING BATTLE - Minnesota Arrowhead vs Big Oil

(also a Greed File)

IMHO These big companies lie or exaggerate to just make more money no matter who or what gets hurt.

"The battle for Minnesota’s $1 trillion mining jackpot" PBS NewsHour 5/10/2016

aka Money before people or environment or Rape the Earth for more money.

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Minnesota’s Arrowhead region sits atop a trove of precious metals: four billion tons of raw material like copper and nickel, a haul worth $1 trillion, mining companies say.  But local residents and activists are taking a stand against encroaching mining operations, citing the potentially disastrous environmental consequences.  Josh Buettner of Iowa Public Television reports.

JOSH BUETTNER (PBS Iowa):  Last fall, demonstrators pressured Minnesota’s Saint Louis County Board to publicly acknowledge a proposed copper-nickel sulfide mine would threaten the health of their local watershed.

WOMAN:  It’s crazy to clean the river, only to allow it to be polluted again.

MAN:  Mining is less than 1 percent of Minnesota’s economy.

JOSH BUETTNER:  Opponents allege newly unearthed sulfur-bearing rock will create acid mine drainage, diluting previous efforts to restore the Saint Louis River, a waterway once crippled by iron ore pollution.

Since 2008, applications to conduct exploratory drilling have surged in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.  And Toronto, Canada-based PolyMet Mining Corporation is first in line to unlock precious metals from the Duluth complex, a vast mineral deposit in the Arrowhead of Minnesota.

Mining proponents say geologists have known about the formation for over 60 years, but new technology will allow excavation of four billion tons of raw material worth an estimated $1 trillion.

LATISHA GIETZEN, PolyMet:  It’s kind of a closed loop system.

JOSH BUETTNER:  Latisha Gietzen, director of public affairs for PolyMet, says new mining techniques and rehabilitated infrastructure will mitigate past damages.

LATISHA GIETZEN:  Because we’re using a Legacy site, we will actually be able to clean up some of the issues that are currently going on and bring modern technology to the process.

JOSH BUETTNER:  Additionally, corporate officials say any water released from their proposed NorthMet site will be treated to meet state and federal guidelines.

But, for some, the mining industry’s track record is suspect.  A well-established hub for agriculture, forestry and mining exports, the Port of Duluth sits between the contested estuary and Lake Superior.  Ships from North America’s furthest inland port traditionally transported taconite, a mineral used to make steel, to mills around the Great Lakes Rust Belt and the world.

The finite resource is mined exclusively in the state’s Mesabi Iron Range.  In the 1980s, two steel making facilities on the banks of the Saint Louis River became so polluted, they became qualified for EPA’s Superfund program.

With corporate- and taxpayer-funded cleanup continuing today, environmentalists such as Aaron Klemm fear relapse.

AFGHANISTAN - High Stakes Mining Boom

"Potential for a Mining Boom Splits Factions in Afghanistan" by GRAHAM BOWLEY, New York Times 9/8/2012

Excerpt

If there is a road to a happy ending in Afghanistan, much of the path may run underground: in the trillion-dollar reservoir of natural resources — oil, gold, iron ore, copper, lithium and other minerals — that has brought hopes of a more self-sufficient country, if only the wealth can be wrested from blood-soaked soil.

But the wealth has inspired darker dreams as well. Officials and industry experts say the potential resource boom seems increasingly imperiled by corruption, violence and intrigue, and has put the Afghan government’s vulnerabilities on display.

It all comes at what is already a critically uncertain time here, with the impending departure of NATO troops in 2014 and old regional and ethnic rivalries resurfacing, raising concerns that the mineral wealth could become the fuel for civil conflict.

Powerful regional warlords and militant leaders are jockeying to widen their turf to include areas with mineral wealth, and the Taliban have begun to make murderous incursions into territory where development is planned. In the capital, Kabul, factional maneuvering is in full swing, including disputes over lucrative side contracts awarded to relatives of President Hamid Karzai.

Further, a proposed mining law vital to attracting foreign investment is up in the air, with the delay threatening several projects. The cabinet rejected it this summer, saying it was too generous to Western commercial interests. But some Western officials fear other motives are at work, too, including an internal fight for spoils, and perhaps an effort by some neighboring countries to sway sympathetic officials to keep Indian and Chinese state mining companies out.

“If you were to pick a country that involves high risk in developing a new mining sector, Afghanistan is it,” said Eleanor Nichol, campaign leader at Global Witness, a group that tries to break the link between natural resources, corruption and conflict. “But the genie is out of the bottle.”

Already this summer, the China National Petroleum Corporation, in partnership with a company controlled by relatives of President Karzai, began pumping oil from the Amu Darya field in the north. An investment consortium arranged by JPMorgan Chase is mining gold. Another Chinese company is trying to develop a huge copper mine. Four copper and gold contracts are being tendered, and contracts for rare earth metals could be offered soon.

The Ministry of Mines has also requested bids for a richer oil concession in the Afghan-Tajik basin, and American officials are optimistic it could come online soon.

And in the shadow of the Black Mountain, here in the Kalu Valley in remote Bamian Province, villagers hope that Indian and Canadian mining operations can turn buried iron ore into new lives for struggling families, breaking a cycle of poverty in this high place cut off by snow for six months of the year.

When the digging begins, Abbas Ali, a 30-year-old farmer here, will have to give up the four-acre potato field his family has worked for generations. He is more than ready.

“Our life will change 180 degrees,” Mr. Ali said this summer, staring up with fervent brown eyes at the bowed wooden roof beams in the white-walled madrasa where he teaches for extra income. “We support any effort to make it happen quickly.”

That hope, and the prospect of more self-sufficiency as international aid ebbs, is driving Afghan officials like the minister of mines, Wahidullah Shahrani, as he tries to get more projects going. The World Bank estimates that if things go very well, mining and agriculture together could raise annual growth rates by 3 to 4 percentage points between now and 2025.

HEALTH - Black Lung Disease Rising

"Deadly Black Lung Disease Rises Among Coal Miners" PBS Newshour 7/9/2012

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): .... a new investigation finds a resurgence of a deadly disease in coal mining country.

Again, Hari Sreenivasan.

HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour): More than four decades ago, Congress set a goal of eradicating black lung disease by passing a law that limited miners' exposure to coal dust.

But a joint investigation by NPR and the Center for Public Integrity found many miners are still exposed to too much dust, leading to a doubling of black lung rates in just a decade.

The disease, which can be accompanied by coughing, congestion and difficulty with breathing, is debilitating and irreversible. More than 10,000 miners died from it nationwide between 1995 and 2004. The analysis shows many cases in Appalachia, a region that includes parts of Virginia, Kentucky and West Virginia.

In West Virginia alone, more than 2,000 miners died over a decade.

Howard Berkes of NPR was one of the lead reporters on this story. He joins me now from Salt Lake City.

Other significant excerpts

HOWARD BERKES, National Public Radio: But the other thing that's occurred is that the law that was passed to protect miners from black lung and from the dust that causes black lung was never really seriously enforced. It was filled with loopholes from the very beginning that enabled mining companies to basically game the system.



HARI SREENIVASAN: Your reporting indicates discrepancies between when federal inspectors decide to measure the coal dust in the mines vs. when the companies report it themselves. How does that happen?

HOWARD BERKES: Well, that happens in part because, in the system, which is partially dependent on self-policing by mining companies, a federal mine inspector goes into a mine and takes a measurement for coal dust and finds there's a violation, that there's too much coal dust.

The mining company then has the opportunity to take five of its own samples of coal dust and then average them. And right off the bat, just the averaging could lower the reading. And if the averaging is below the standard, the limit, the safe limit for coal dust, then the violation is erased.

And what we found is that there were more than 50,000 coal dust -- valid coal dust samples taken that were above the federal limit, but only 2,400 violations were issued. We don't know exactly what happened with each of those cases, but it suggests that there were thousands of coal miners in those cases who were exposed to excessive coal dust, but the system that is easily gamed by mining companies was such that those overexposures didn't result in violations issued to those companies.

COMMENT: Need I say, Republicans don't mind. This is better than tough government regulation of the mining industry (which could jeopardize industry 'donations' to the Republican cause).