by Jessica Goad

As Washington struggles to address the country’s growing deficit, a new report released today finds that the federal government has lost its grip on finances in a different way.

An analysis from the Government Accountability Office reveals that the government does not keep track of the amount and value of hardrock minerals – gold, silver, copper, etc. – mined on public lands that are being given away to private companies.

Because the government does not collect royalties on these minerals, it claims there is no reason to keep track of this information:

We found that federal agencies generally do not collect data from hardrock mine operators on the amount and value of hardrock minerals extracted from federal lands because there is no federal royalty that would necessitate doing so.

The reason that companies mining hardrock minerals on public lands are exempt from paying royalties is a law passed almost 150 years ago, called the General Mining Act of 1872.  To this day, it is the law of the land when it comes to extracting hardrock minerals from the federal estate.  This means that mining companies are able to extract taxpayer-owned copper, gold, silver, and other minerals for nearly nothing in exchange.

Other resources extracted from public lands, like oil, coal, and natural gas, are subject to royalties of some sort, generally in the realm of 8-12.5 percent.  And while the federal government receives payments for drilling and mining in other ways like bonus bids and rents, royalties provide a significant amount of money to taxpayers:  GAO found that the total royalties received on coal, oil, and natural gas totaled $11.4 billion in 2011.

Although data on how many hardrock minerals are being extracted from public lands isn’t tracked, there have been some attempts at estimating what this loss to taxpayers looks like.  Using data from 1993, the Department of the Interior approximated that more than $6 billion worth of hardrock minerals was extracted from federal lands in fiscal year 2011.

Today’s report underscores the need  for greater disclosure of what is extracted from public lands, while also reforming the 1872 mining law and requiring companies to pay a royalty on the minerals that they extract.  Democratic members of the House Committee on Natural Resources pointed out that reforming the law could raise $300 million every year.

Reforming outdated policies like the 1872 mining law and subsidies for oil companies in order to help address the deficit are also important in the context of other extreme policies that have been proposed.  For example, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) and Rep. Steve Pearce (R-NM) recently called for selling off or trading public lands in order to reduce the deficit.

As Rep. Raul Grijalva, who requested the report along with Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM), put it:  “Everybody’s penny-pinching, and here’s a penny we haven’t pinched.”

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Nearly two years after Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, the deadliest mine accident in nearly 40 years, the West Virginia House of Delegates has just passed a mine safety reform bill that should, in theory, strengthen some of the lax laws that made the tragedy possible. Through the legislative process, the bill, already mild to begin with, has been further weakened to appease coal industry lobbyists and legislators who fear them.

Part of the bill attempts to raise the maximum fine that can be levied against mine operators who violate safety laws. While coal state legislators kowtowing to the industry is nothing new, the Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward Jr. uncovered a statistic that highlights the state’s shocking disregard for the safety of miners. Under West Virginia law, the maximum fine for a safety violation that results in the death of a coal miner is one-tenth of the maximum fine for violating West Virginia University’s trademark:

Better yet — why should someone face more serious punishment if they use the WVU logo without permission (see here and here) than if they kill a coal miners? That’s right, WVU trademark violators? Up to 10 years in jail and a $100,000 fine. Mine safety criminals? Up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

The new mine safety bill makes an attempt to raise both civil and criminal penalties for mine safety violations, but even the higher fines would be incredibly weak. The maximum civil fine for most safety violations would rise from $3,000 to $5,000 — weakened from $10,000 in the original draft of the bill — falling woefully short of the $70,000 maximum fine under federal law. And while it seeks to impose new criminal penalties on violations resulting in deaths, Ward couldn’t find a single example of county prosecutors bringing criminal charges under the existing statutes.

Last week, the West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training released its report on the Upper Big Branch mine disaster last week, and though its tone was “tepid” compared to other reports, it became the fourth such investigation to find that lax mine safety laws and regulations were responsible for the explosion that killed 29 miners. After the disaster, West Virginia politicians and coal industry big-wigs vowed to never let such a disaster happen again.

If recent efforts to enhance mine safety on both the state and federal levels is any indication, though, the promise from the coal industry, industry lobbyists, and coal state legislators that such a disaster will never happen again is just another example of empty rhetoric.

By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The House of Representatives is considering a behemoth surface transportation bill this week, designed to fund the roads, highways, and bridges that connect our country.  It has nothing to do with the public lands that belong to all of us, but that didn’t stop three Republicans from Arizona from filing an amendment to the bill that would override Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s January decision to protect 1 million acres around Grand Canyon National Park from new uranium mining requests.

Reps. Trent Franks (R-AZ), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) penned the amendment:

SEC. __ . TERMINATION OF PUBLIC LAND ORDER 7787.

Public Land Order 7787 (77 Fed. Reg. 2563) and the withdrawal of lands by that Public Land Order shall have no force or effect, and the provisions of the land use plans applicable to such lands immediately before the issuance of such Public Land Order shall remain in effect.

If this sounds familiar, it is because this trio of lawmakers has tried three times in the last two years to undo new protections for one of our nation’s great places.  Here is a list of their other attempts to do the National Mining Association’s bidding:

– They added roll back language in the text of last year’s budget bill (which did not pass) where it was dubbed “the Flake earmark for the mining industry.”

– In October, Franks introduced the Northern Arizona Mining Continuity Act of 2011, an attempt to halt the mineral withdrawal.

– Franks introduced legislation in the last Congress to stop the mineral withdrawal.

As ThinkProgress has outlined before, the Grand Canyon is incredibly important to the economy of Arizona.  Tourists spending money in and around the Grand Canyon create jobs. Headwaters Economics found that Grand Canyon National Park supported over 6,000 jobs in 2009 and those tourists spent more than $400 million.

In addition, mining for uranium around the canyon poses risks to drinking water for 25 million people reliant on the Colorado River, as seen in the legacy of old, abandoned, and hazardous mines.     

It remains to be seen whether Congressional rules will allow the amendment to be considered.  But House Republicans have made their position clear—despite the fact that the battle over the Grand Canyon has been fought, and these three Congressmen lost, they will keep fighting another day.  Franks recently stated to E&E News that “anything that we can do to promote the legislation we will.”

By Tom Kenworthy, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Hundreds of thousands of people have stated their opposition to a proposed big expansion of a coal strip mine in Utah that would harm Bryce Canyon National Park and the recreation economy associated with the southern Utah attraction that has enjoyed federal protection for nearly 90 years.

Known for its slot canyons and ghostly red rock spires called hoodoos, Bryce is threatened by a plan to greatly expand the nearby existing Coal Hollow Mine from 635 acres to 3,576 acres, with a majority of the expansion taking place on public lands. If completed, the mine would then include areas just 10 miles from Bryce.

The National Park Service, Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have all weighed in with serious concerns about the mine proposal, as has the Hopi Tribe, which estimates up to 74 archaeological sites could be harmed or ruined. Park Service objections are particularly strong, and that agency has recommended the project not go forward, saying:

The park has determined that [the mine expansion would have] adverse effects on surrounding comunities, the tourism industry of southern Utah, air quality standards, dark skies conservation, and regional wildlife

In a letter last week, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Natural Resources, urged Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to “consider the signal this decision sends regarding the future of our parks, forests, monuments, and wildlife areas and reject the call for expanding coal mining.”

Repeating concerns raised by other federal agencies about air quality, the park’s well-known night skies, natural quiet and wetlands and wildlife, Markey also reminded Salazar of the Obama administration’s commitment to clean energy development on public lands:

Proceeding with the expansion of coal mining in a sensitive area so close to a national park calls in question our dedication to promoting renewable energy development both on and off public lands

More than 210,000 comments have been been submitted to public land managers in opposition to the strip mine expansion.

Interior’s Bureau of Land Management has issued a draft environmental analysis of the coal mine, with a proposed action that would allow the expansion to go forward.

As it has in regard to several new coal mining leases in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, the BLM has closed its eyes to the Utah mine’s impact on climate change, contending that existing climate prediction models cannot estimate potential climate change impacts from one mine.

In November, two climate scientists called that dodge flawed and scientifically indefensible.

 

By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney likes to sing about America the beautiful, but he mainly seems interested in mining it.

In an interview with the editorial board of the Reno Gazette-Journal last night, Mitt Romney expressed his ignorance of why the United States owns and manages approximately 80 percent of Nevada‘s land, most of it uninhabitable mountains and desert.  In response to a question about whether he would sell public lands back to the state, Romney stated that that “I haven’t studied it, what the purpose is of the land”:

I don’t know the reason that the federal government owns such a large share of Nevada.  And when I was in Utah at the Olympics there I heard a similar refrain there.  What they were concerned about was that the government would step in and say, “We’re taking this” — which by the way has extraordinary coal reserves — “and we’re not going to let you develop these coal reserves.”  I mean, it drove the people nuts.  Unless there’s a valid, and legitimate, and compelling governmental purpose, I don’t know why the government owns so much of this land.

So I haven’t studied it, what the purpose is of the land, so I don’t want to say, “Oh, I’m about to hand it over.” But where government ownership of land is designed to satisfy, let’s say, the most extreme environmentalists, from keeping a population from developing their coal, their gold, their other resources for the benefit of the state, I would find that to be unacceptable.

Watch it:

Romney’s statement stands in stark contrast to the conservative tradition of knowing the value of protecting the lands that belong to all of us places for future generations. Teddy Roosevelt, the great Republican conservationist, once said, “Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation.”

Public lands in Nevada – and other western states—actually provide an enormous economic boost and sustain hundreds of thousands of jobs.  Indeed, recent Interior Department statistics show that federally managed public lands in Nevada provided over $1 billion in economic impacts and supported 13,311 jobs in 2010 (and this statistic doesn’t even include the economic impacts of Forest Service lands, managed by the Department of Agriculture).  Recreation, energy and minerals, and grazing and timber all play a part in the economic effects that public lands provide to Nevada.  Activities like skiing at Lake Tahoe, boating at Lake Mead, and hiking at Great Basin National Park all take place on public lands.

Even Romney himself once mentioned on the campaign trail that when on vacations with his family when he was young “we went from national park to national park.  And they [my parents] were teaching me to fall in love with America.”

He might want to have a better answer about the purpose and value of public lands before he arrives in Colorado tomorrow.  A recent poll from the Colorado College State of the Rockies Project found that 93 percent of Colorado voters agreed that “Our national parks, forests, monuments, and wildlife areas are an essential part of Colorado’s economy.”

Climate scientists have found the Obama administration’s assessment of climate change for a proposed coal strip mine to be severely flawed. In email interviews with ThinkProgress Green organized by the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, two top climate scientists criticized the draft environmental impact statement prepared by the Bureau of Land Management for the proposed expansion of the Alton coal strip mine near Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah.

The BLM did not analyze the effects of mining and burning this coal on global climate change because, it claimed, “existing climate prediction models are not at a scale sufficient to estimate potential impacts of climate change within the analysis area.”

Dr. Werner Aeschbach-Hertig, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Heidelberg’s Institute of Environmental Physics, says the BLM reasoning “makes scientifically no sense.”

Dr. Michael Raupach, a top Australian climate researcher who has done influential research on carbon emissions, agreed that “the problem is irrelevant, because single-source impacts are globally shared.” The BLM’s reasoning “leads directly to a tragedy-of-the-commons,” Raupach explained, “in which nobody takes any action and climate change is locked in.

Research examining the social cost of climate change offers guidance on impacts of incremental greenhouse pollution, the scientists said. In the Stern review, the social cost of carbon (SCC) is estimated to lie between $25 and $30 per ton of CO2. More recent valuations estimate the cost between $28 and $893 per ton, rising each decade.

Even with an extremely conservative SCC of $25 per ton, the impact of mining the project’s 100 million metric tons of recoverable coal would be on the order of $7 billion. A proper analysis would take into account that the cost of carbon rises over time, so coal mined in 2040 has higher damages than coal mined now.

The BLM’s statement also contained a skeptical assessment of the impact of burning fossil fuels on the global climate, using qualifiers like “possible”, “potential”, and “may” to question the strength of the scientific conclusion that greenhouse pollution is causing dangerous changes. Dr. Raupach sharply criticized the BLM assessment, saying the language is “far from an accurate reflection of the state of climate science”:

The qualifiers (“possible”, “potential”, “may”) completely understate the confidence of the scientific community in the broad conclusions of climate science and the consequent imperative for action to reduce emissions. The conclusions of the IPCC (2007) Fourth Assessment were essentially that warming is unequivocal and attribution to human influence can be made with very high confidence. Numerous national scientific academies and peak bodies have released their own assessments over the last few years, reinforcing this position. Hence the qualifiers in the question are far from an accurate reflection of the state of climate science.

Dr. Aeschbach-Hertig specifically showed how the BLM statement systematically lowballed the scientific understanding of climate change, as represented by the IPCC in 2007 : Read more

By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

As ThinkProgress reported yesterday, Republican members of Congress have been waging a war to open 1 million acres around the Grand Canyon to uranium mining. Last week Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar took one of the last steps in withdrawing the area from new mining claims. But in response, Republicans have introduced H.R. 3155, the Northern Arizona Mining Continuity Act of 2011, to keep the decision from moving forward. The issue has become “one of the top legislative priorities of Republicans in Congress” as Energy and Environment Daily reported this morning.

At a hearing yesterday on the bill in the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forest and Public Lands, Republicans called a witness to the stand who is a retired United States Geological Survey scientist. Dr. Karen Wenrich noted in her testimony supporting the bill that the Bureau of Land Management has “vastly overstated the environmental harm caused by past and potential uranium development.”

However, under questioning from Representative Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), it became clear through public Securities and Exchange Commission filings that Wenrich stands to make $225,000 by selling 61 uranium claims that she owns only if the Interior Department’s withdrawal does not go forward.

Read more

By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Last week, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced plans to withdraw 1 million acres around Grand Canyon National Park from new mining claims for 20 years. After a two-year stakeholder involvement process, nearly 300,000 public comments were received on this proposal, 90 percent of which were in favor of the full withdrawal according to Bureau of Land Management Director Bob Abbey. But that has only caused Republicans from both chambers to hurriedly introduce bills that would prevent the Department of the Interior from taking this action and throw open the areas to new mining.

One such bill is Congressman Trent Franks’ (R-AZ) Northern Arizona Mining Continuity Act of 2011. This morning the House’s Subcommittee on National Parks, Forest and Public Lands held a hearing on the bill, and Rep. Rob Bishop, chairman of the subcommittee, downplayed the threat of mining near the Grand Canyon. He described the great distance between the Grand Canyon National Park and the new mining claims by stating that the administration’s decision to withdraw 1 million acres around it was:

…something akin to saying that if there was a terrorist threat to the Statue of Liberty they would close down the boardwalk of Atlantic City.

As this map from the Pew Environment Group shows, mining claims have actually been staked right up against the border of the park. Indeed, exploratory mining on one claim just three miles from a lookout into the park began in 2008. Much closer than the 122 miles that separate Liberty Island and Marvin Gardens.

Republicans have been on a warpath in their efforts to allow uranium and other mining around the Grand Canyon to continue. Indeed this is the third time a bill or amendment has been introduced in this Congress to achieve such a purpose — others are S. 1690 from Senator John McCain (R-Z) and a portion of the budget bill H.R. 1 inserted by Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ). Because Flake proposed throwing open 1 million acres to mining companies on a budget bill, Rep. Jesse Jackson referred to that section of the bill as the “Flake earmark for the mining industry.” Flake has already accepted $47,750 from mining interests in the 2012 election cycle.

ThinkProgress reported last week that Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), chairman of the subcommittee in charge of this bill, called the size of the area that would be mined under Frank’s bill “the size of the state of New Jersey” and that “whether we mine or not will have no impact on the Grand Canyon water or tourism that happens to be there.” In today’s hearing Flake called the administration’s decision to protect the Grand Canyon “regulatory overreach based on specious environmental concerns.”

Contamination and discarded waste from uranium mining in the Colorado River and surrounding areas has plagued the national park for years — the contaminated water leaking from the Orphan Mine Site on the South Rim of the canyon is just one example of the legacy of uranium mining. Additionally, in May, the representatives from water authorities in Arizona, California, and Nevada wrote to the committee saying “federal agencies with oversight over mineral exploration and mining operations in the Lower Colorado River Basin must use their authority to prevent any potential for deterioration of this critical water supply for millions of people.”