Taxpayers pay for gold mining cleanup
The Los Angeles Times reports on how gold mining companies are legally allowed to mine gold on public lands without paying, and leave taxpayers to clean up the mess.
The mining of gold and other hard-rock minerals on public lands is governed by the General Mining Law of 1872, which has remained virtually unchanged since it was signed by President Grant to encourage settlement of the West. The statute was designed to reward pioneers who survived the trek across the frontier with the opportunity to mine gold and other metals freely and in unlimited amounts.LinkThe prospectors are long gone, but the incentives remain. Today, the highly profitable hard-rock mining industry -- much of it foreign-owned -- continues to receive generous U.S. tax breaks. And it pays virtually nothing for gold and other precious metals it takes from public lands with few restraints. In sharp contrast, oil, gas and coal companies have been reimbursing taxpayers for decades with billions of dollars in royalties that were paid for resources removed from federal property.
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Dennis Kucinich is on this one.
I'm wondering these mining companies are deliberately organized under foreign ownership, just to make it easier to duck and cover with the profits when the Superfund cleanup lawsuit comes around.
How about a federal cleanup tax on everything sold with gold inside? iPods? that would wake up some folks
Actually, most of the hard-rock mines are obligated to clean up and restore the land to a reasonably natural state after the mine closes. You won't, however, find that obligation under the law quoted. It stems from later environmental laws.
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Yeah, let's punish individual consumers for corporate malfeasance.
Jared Diamond wrote about this a few years ago in his book, Collapse.
In response to Todd, yes, the companies are obligated to clean up their messes, but the easy loophole is that these groups create a new corporation for each mine. Then they file for bankruptcy as soon as the gold is all mined, and dissolve the corporation. The laws do not hold individual owners responsible for environmental damage, only the corporation. The same people then move on to another mine and do the exact same thing over again.
KG: That works for some types of mining, but not gold mining. Almost every gold mine in the US (which is mostly the Carlin Trend in north-eastern Nevada) use the heap-leach process. Any mining company would be insanely stupid to just close up like that, because they'd be giving up 10-15 years of viable gold production doing that. What usually happens when the ore runs out is that the company shuts down the pit and leaves the leach piles and refinery running until recovery starts to drop off (which'll be years for even a small mine and decades for the big ones like Newmont's Gold Quarry and North Area). That's a lot of time for the environmental people to be coming around asking when they'll be implementing the reclaim plan for the pit.
When the environmentalists talk, the first thing that comes to my mind was the couple of years I spent schlepping around the Nevada mines as a geotech. One of the hawks up there is an endangered species, and we'd see them all the time since they nested in the exploration areas of a couple of the mines. One year the state Wildlife people were in an uproar because the hawk population had declined by 1. Then a journalist uncovered a report by the state Wildlife department reporting the removal of 2 hawks from the region. That pretty much blew away Wildlife's credibility.
The Eugene Register-Gaurd recently published a five-part series on this problem:
THE SERIES
SUNDAY: The Formosa mine in Douglas County is an old-style mining mess that was created barely a decade ago by foreign investors.
TODAY: Federal and state officials and private companies work hard to avoid being pinned with the cost of cleaning up Oregon's numerous polluted metals mines.
TUESDAY: The abandoned Black Butte mine has been contaminating Cottage Grove Lake with mercury for decades, making fish unsafe for children to eat.
WEDNESDAY: A state effort to study and remediate widespread arsenic and mercury mining waste in the city of Sutherlin dies for lack of money.
THURSDAY: Soaring metals prices could spark a resurgence in metals mining in Oregon. Are regulators prepared?
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http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Agencies+refuse+to+lay+claim+to+mine+cleanup...-a0147630987
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Pollution-fighting+funds+are+starved+of+cash.(Environment)-a0147630988
Gold Bless America!