Latest news with #SaveTheBoundaryWaters
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Minnesota's boundary waters are pristine. Trump's ‘Big, Beautiful Bill' could pollute them forever
The story is co-published with Public Domain, an investigative newsroom that covers public lands, wildlife and government A little-known provision of Donald Trump's 'Big, Beautiful Bill' would open thousands of acres of public lands at the edge of Minnesota's Boundary Waters wilderness to a foreign-owned mining company. The move amounts to a giveaway 'in perpetuity' to a company that has lobbied in Washington for years, environmental campaigners say, potentially opening up one of the US's most famous wilderness areas to water-pollution risks. Earlier this month, conservationists cheered when Congress withdrew from the reconciliation bill several provisions that would have sold off hundreds of thousands of acres of federal land in Nevada and Utah. Those provisions had sparked fury among public land advocates and staunch opposition even from some Republicans, including the representative Ryan Zinke of Montana, who vowed to oppose the bill if the land sell-off provisions were retained. Despite that fury, a lesser-known public lands giveaway remained in the reconciliation bill. If approved as currently written, the provision could lease in perpetuity land near Minnesota's Boundary Waters wilderness, an enormous complex of pristine lakes and untrammeled forests, to Twin Metals Minnesota, a subsidiary of the Chilean mining giant Antofagasta PLC. Becky Rom, the national chair of Save the Boundary Waters, a campaign to protect the wilderness area from mining, described the provision as 'a giveaway of critical and sensitive federal public land forever to a single mining company'. 'It is a giveaway,' Rom added. 'This is forever.' First set aside by Congress in 1964, the 1.1m-acre Boundary Waters canoe area wilderness, as it is officially known, is the only large-scale protected sub-boreal forest in the lower 48 states. Each year, some 150,000 visitors come to partake in the all-American tradition of canoe travel and enjoy a pristine landscape where wolves, moose, loons, bears and bald eagles thrive. Those who come to explore it help contribute to Minnesota's $13.5bn outdoor recreation economy. According to the US Forest Service, the landscape contains 'healthy forests with extremely high water quality'. It is 'irreplaceable'. But the boundary waters also sit atop mineral-rich lands. Antofagasta has for years sought to develop a copper and nickel mine on public land near the wilderness, amid the headwaters that feed its famous lakes. The company and its American subsidiary, Twin Metals Minnesota, came close to success during the first Trump administration, which overturned an Obama-era denial and renewed mining leases for the project. The Biden administration, recognizing the threat the proposed mine posed to the environment, subsequently rescinded those discretionary leases, arguing that they were legally deficient. The Biden administration also issued an order that prohibited mining for 20 years in the portion of the Superior national forest where Antofagasta wants to extract copper and nickel. Twin Metals Minnesota, which declined to comment for this story, filed litigation to fight the Biden policies in court. That lawsuit is ongoing. Meanwhile, the companies went to Capitol Hill in their quest to build their mine, which they say will directly employ more than 750 people and could revitalize 'the entire region'. In the last three years alone, Antofagasta and Twin Metals have poured more than $1.6m dollars into lobbying efforts in Washington DC, according to OpenSecrets. Among the lobbying shops they retained is Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, the powerful firm that was the long-time home of David Bernhardt, interior secretary during Trump's first term. Brownstein's employees and its political action committee, in turn, were together among the top 10 donors last election cycle to the campaign committee of representative Bruce Westerman of Arkansas, the powerful chair of the House natural resources committee. Last month, that lobbying apparently bore fruit. Westerman's committee unveiled its portion of the president's reconciliation bill and it contained a major win for Antofagasta and Twin Metals. The bill, which passed the House and is now being considered by the Senate, includes provisions that rescind the Biden administration's 20-year mining prohibition in the Superior national forest and grants Twin Metals 20-year mining leases to pursue its copper-nickel project on nearly 6,000 acres (2,500 hectares) of public land near the boundary waters. It also grants Twin Metals rights in perpetuity to lease renewals and it prohibits judicial review of the leases, meaning that citizens cannot sue to challenge them. Only one party retains rights to judicial review per the legislation: Twin Metals. If the federal government fails to comply with the reconciliation bill, Twin Metals can sue to enforce it. 'The reconciliation bill compels the issuance of four leases forever,' said Rom. 'To get there it, expressly overrides four federal laws, it expressly overrides BLM regulations, so all of those rules that apply to everybody else in the world, the laws, the regulations, for Antofagasta they don't apply.' 'There is a heavy hand in here,' she added. 'The heavy hand of Antofagasta.' Neither Antofagasta nor Westerman's office responded to requests for comment. Twin Metals has said its mine will provide a supply of strategic minerals that are important to national security and the emerging green energy economy. For conservationists like Rom – who grew up helping her father run an outfitting business in the Boundary Waters wilderness and has since spent decades working to protect the wilderness area – the major threat from Twin Metals' proposed mine is water pollution. That threat was described in a 2016 letter by the US Forest Service, when it initially denied its consent to the Twin Metals mine leases during the waning days of the Obama administration. There is 'inherent potential risk that development of a regionally-untested copper-nickel sulfide ore mine within the same watershed as the BWCAW might cause serious and irreplaceable harm to this unique, iconic, and irreplaceable wilderness area'. The agency's letter particularly drew attention to the risk of acid mine drainage, a potent form of water pollution that is a well-known risk of the sort of sulfide-ore mining that Twin Metals and Antofagasta wish to undertake. Any drainage from the 'mine workings and mining wastes are likely to be highly acidic', the agency said of the Twin Metals mine. Any failure to contain such waste could have 'potentially severe consequences for the BWCAW' and could 'cover a very broad region'. Twin Metals Minnesota has denied that acid mine drainage will be a potential threat, calling it a 'nonissue'. As the reconciliation bill moves through the Senate, conservationists as well as their allies in Congress are hoping it will be stripped out of the bill before it lands on Trump's desk. They argue, among other things, that the bill's Twin Metals provision may run afoul of Senate rules governing the reconciliation process, which disallows the body from including 'extraneous provisions' in budget bills. Among the opponents of the Twin Metals provision is Minnesota's junior senator, Tina Smith, though the state's congressional delegation is split on the issue. 'Senator Smith strongly opposes the reckless Republican provision in the US House-passed Big Beautiful Bill that would give a foreign conglomerate full permission to build a copper-nickel sulfide mine right on the doorstep of the Boundary Waters watershed,' wrote a spokesperson for Smith in a statement to Public Domain. 'By including this language in their massive budget bill, Republicans in Congress have made it clear they don't care about the science or the data, which shows unequivocally that this type of mining poses an unacceptable risk and stands to irreversibly pollute this pristine wilderness.'
Yahoo
06-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Stauber proposes 'Superior National Forest Restoration Act' that would reopen area to mining
Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Duluth) on Wednesday re-introduced a bill that would erase mining protections for a large area of Superior National Forest near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The proposed legislation, titled the "Superior National Forest Restoration Act," would reopen a 225,504-acre area for sulfide-ore copper mining contracts. If approved, it would rescind the 20-year mining moratorium implemented by President Joe Biden in 2023, following an attempt by President Donald Trump during his first term in the White House to open up the area to mining. In his statement, Stauber says his bill would reinstate mineral leases in the area, describing that Biden's decision to protect it "a direct attack on our way of life in northern Minnesota" that "threatened our nation's strategic national security." "Thankfully, with Donald Trump back in the White House and Republicans in control of both Chambers of Congress, we are well positioned to reverse the damage done by President Biden and turn Minnesota into a critical mineral powerhouse," he added. Conservation group Save The Boundary Waters says that the bill would automatically force the issuance of federal mineral leases to Chilean mining giant Antofagasta, and introduced an expedited review timeline on any environmental review and project permits within the watershed of the Boundary Waters and Voyageurs National Park. "Rep. Stauber's bill is a giveaway of America's most popular wilderness area – the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness – to a foreign mining company,' said Ingrid Lyons, Executive Director of Save the Boundary Waters. "Rep. Stauber's bill undermines the robust record of science, public opinion, law, and economics that clearly demonstrates that this iconic American landscape is absolutely no place for our nation's most dangerous industry." A previous version of the bill passed the U.S. House of Representatives in April Boundary Waters has been the subject of a tug-of-war for the past decade, with the Obama Administration halted mineral exploration leases in 2016, only for them to be renewed by Trump during his first term as president. Biden then reversed Trump's order, ordering 350 square miles of the forest and Rainy River Watershed near Ely to be closed to mineral and geothermal leasing for two decades – the longest amount of time it can issue the moratorium without congressional approval. Much like many of the Trump Administration's recent actions in its first few weeks in power, it follows the advice of Project 2025 — a blueprint for Trump's second presidency put together by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation — which advised the repeal of the protection on mining in the Boundary Waters watershed. According to a Public Land Order (PLO) signed by then-U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in 2023, resource scientists and professional land managers in the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management stated that a reversal of protections would cause environmental risks from sulfide-ore copper mining on land, water, and to wildlife. The order also said it would cause harm to Native American communities, violate treaty rights and resources; and accelerate climate change impacts through the destruction of forest land and the vast consumption of energy by mining companies.
