By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Public Lands Project, Center for American Progress.

The Resolution Copper Company, owned by the large multi-national mineral conglomerates Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, is pushing a bill in Congress that would give them federal land in southeastern Arizona and allow mining of one of the largest known copper deposits in the world. In return, the company would give back a plot of land to the federal government. The Resolution Copper land-exchange bill has a blatant loophole, delaying any environmental impact statement for mining these lands until after the land exchange is completed.

That would mean that after the deal is done and the tailings pond leaks, like it did at the Clayton Silver Mine in Idaho, or after major fish kills, like the ones in the Alamosa River due to cyanide leaching from the Summitville gold mine in Colorado, we could say that the too-late environmental analysis revealed a threat. That’s not the point of our environmental laws, which recognize that the value of clean air and water needs to be considered before the government sells off public resources to private interests.

However, during a hearing on Tuesday, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), the sponsor of the bill, pulled a bait and switch by focusing on the land that would be conserved, rather than the parcel that would be given to the mining company. Gosar told Mary Wagner, Associate Chief, U.S. Forest Service, that allowing a mining company to plunder public land is “restoring the ecological balance”:

GOSAR: Now I’m a big steward of my environment so I just heard something also from my friend on the other side, that value for the San Pedro River. Ms. Wegner, could you put a value on that as an ecosystem, could you put a price for me? Give me a price in dollars.

WAGNER: I think both the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service/Department of Agriculture have testified to the importance of the non-federal parcels, the ecological values and the important of these properties. No, I couldn’t put a price on it.

GOSAR: They are almost infinite, because it’s a giving process, we’re restoring the ecological balance within the whole ecosystem. That is unbelievably much more valuable.

Watch it:

On the one hand, his bill would set aside 5,300 acres of land currently owned by Resolution Copper for conservation purposes.

On the other hand, as written, Gosar’s bill says the extent of impacts would not be known until too late because the company would not be required to undergo environmental review or even submit a plan of operations until after the land exchange takes place. Questions like where the mine tailings would go, where large amounts of water would come from, and how erosion and subsidence from a gigantic underground mine would be dealt with won’t be investigated until the deal is signed, sealed, and delivered.

Mineral development is an appropriate use of public lands, but not when it comes in the form of a hasty land exchange that circumvents environmental laws. Unlike what Gosar seems to think, environmental stewardship in this country is based upon making sure that the public is involved in decisions that may affect its health and environment. As Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) said today, “this bill short-circuits fundamental good government policies.”

Kats:  “There have been several hundred peer reviewed studies that document improvements in various aspects of health and productivity and greener more efficient design. Upgrading building energy efficiency typically improves building monitoring and occupant controls, and generally improves indoor air quality, not the other way around.”

Numerous websites have covered a recent Institute of Medicine report looking at the impact of climate change on indoor environments. The report is a good one – but very dry and probably uninteresting to anyone not involved in the building trade.

That is, until Fox News ran the headline: “Green Buildings Hazardous to Health?” And The Hill went with: “’Green’ Buildings Could Harm Your Health.”

The Institute of Medicine report warns that the effort to counter climate change has spurred a shift to untested new materials and building retrofits that could limit and alter the air flow inside buildings.

Well, that’s one way to interpret it.

The report doesn’t even focus on real “green” buildings; rather, it looks at conventional energy efficiency upgrades that tighten the envelope of residential and commercial buildings. The issue in question is whether shifting external environmental factors due to climate change will negatively impact indoor air quality in buildings with less ventilation.

People spend the vast majority of their time in indoor environments and will thus experience many of the effects of climate change indoors. The outdoor environment permeates indoors in all but maximum-containment laboratory conditions. A building that was tightly sealed as a response to adverse outdoor conditions or because of efforts to reduce energy use might protect occupants from one set of problems but would increase their exposure to another: such buildings tend to have decreased ventilation rates, higher concentrations of indoor-emitted pollutants, and more occupants reporting health problems.

It’s an important question, but certainly nothing new. Designers have always known that if you make a building more air tight, you potentially trap moisture, mold and smoke. An energy-tight building can still be a “sick” building. That’s why there’s a big difference between energy-efficient buildings like and “green” buildings that take a whole-systems approach to ventilation, lighting and materials use.

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The Senate on Thursday gave a split decision on federal subsidies for ethanol, handily voting to immediately do away with an existing blender tax credit while leaving the door open to a possible future deal to continue other assistance.

Senators gave clear agreement — 73-27 — to the idea of immediately removing a 45-cent-per-gallon tax credit set to expire at the end of the year for blending ethanol in gasoline. Along with that credit — worth upward of $6 billion this year — the amendment from Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) would also end a 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on ethanol imports….

A second amendment from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would end federal spending for ethanol blender pumps and storage facilities lost 41-59.

I am not a fan of our corn ethanol policy (see “The Fuel on the Hill” and “Can words describe how bad corn ethanol is?” and “Let them eat biofuels!“).

And this vote suggests that we will be seeing a scaling back of some ethanol subsidies at some point probably in the not-too-distant future.

But that moment isn’t quite at hand.  The Politico reports:

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