Politics threatening to derail approval of a large gold and copper mine in Alaska have Republican lawmakers worried that other mining projects around the country could face similar fates.
“No president has done more for American mining and American mineral security than President Trump,” said Rep. Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican and the chairman of the Congressional Western Caucus. “However, on Pebble Mine, they were simply wrong.”
“More importantly, we can’t let this process be an example of how we do or don’t permit mining in America,” Gosar told the Washington Examiner, adding that domestic mining is critical for U.S. national security. “It should be a process driven not by radical NIMBYism but science, with an eye on making America more secure and the global mining footprint better.”
The politics surrounding Pebble Mine may not directly translate to other pending mining projects. The controversial Alaska gold mine has seen an unusual gang of opponents team up alongside environmentalists in the final leg of the permitting process to try to stop it, including prominent conservatives such as Donald Trump Jr.; Nick Ayers, the former chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence; and Tucker Carlson.
The project’s future is now up in the air: The Army Corps of Engineers recently announced it would require significant mitigation from Pebble’s developers to compensate for harms to wetlands and streams. Opponents of the mine have said the requirements will be extremely difficult to meet.
That uncertainty concerning the future of the project, which has been seeking approval for more than a decade, could deter investment in U.S. mining more broadly, Republican lawmakers and other backers of the mine fear.
Those concerns come as Republican lawmakers in particular have been making a concerted push to reboot the domestic mining industry, especially for minerals such as lithium, graphite, platinum group metals, and rare-earth elements that have been listed as critical for everything from medical equipment and military devices to renewable energy technologies.
Not having a domestic supply of those minerals, they argue, is a massive national security risk that leaves the United States dependent on China and other countries.
“Am I going to invest in a process when all of a sudden it becomes a popularity contest, not science, that’s dictating whether or not we go forward with a permit?” said Darrell Henry, executive director of the Western Caucus Foundation, posing a question he said is a key part of investors’ calculus when considering projects in the U.S.
For example, northeastern Minnesota is poised to see a boom in its mining economy over the next several years. At least two major mining projects, from PolyMet Mining and Twin Metals, are hoping to tap into the state’s rich deposits of copper, nickel, and other metals.
Environmentalists are vigorously fighting those projects, which they say would harm Minnesota’s wilderness and lakes. They draw particular similarities between the Twin Metals project, which would mine copper, nickel, and platinum group metals, and Pebble Mine given the rare qualities of the wilderness and waters they say those mines would harm.
Pebble Mine in Alaska’s Bristol Bay headwaters threatens one of the world’s most productive salmon habitats, environmentalists say. The Twin Metals project would harm the pristine Boundary Waters Canoe Area, a 1.1 million-acre water-based wilderness that’s one of the country’s oldest protected areas, said Becky Rom, national chairwoman of the Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters.
In fact, the Twin Metals project would be even closer to the Boundary Waters wilderness than Alaska’s Pebble Mine would be to Bristol Bay, Rom added. The Minnesota mining project would be immediately adjacent to the wilderness and the lakes and rivers that flow directly into the protected waters, she said.
Another similarity between the two projects is that the Obama administration attempted to halt both. The Environmental Protection Agency was poised before the Obama administration left office to veto Pebble Mine. Just weeks before leaving office, the Obama-era Bureau of Land Management declined to renew leases to withdraw minerals from the Minnesota region.
The Trump administration has since reversed course on both of those actions.
“Politics is involved in this,” said Rep. Pete Stauber, a Republican whose Minnesota district houses much of the state’s mineral deposits and the Boundary Waters wilderness area.
Stauber said he holds the same philosophy as Alaska Republican Rep. Don Young, who has expressed outrage at the recent hurdles thrown up for Pebble Mine.
“Let the truth, the facts, and the science dictate whether a project should move forward, not fearmongering or scare tactics,” Stauber told the Washington Examiner in a recent interview.
The Twin Metals project isn’t as far along in the permitting process as Pebble Mine, which is now awaiting a final decision from the Army Corps. Twin Metals just submitted its mining plan to state and federal regulators late last year. In June, the Bureau of Land Management said it would move forward with an environmental review.
All told, it could be five to seven years before the Twin Metals project is in position to receive approval.
The company said it supports a robust review of its mining plans.
The review “will evaluate our proposed mine against rigorous scientific and legal standards,” Twin Metals said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “We have great faith in the stringent standards in place in Minnesota and at the federal level.”
Environmentalists, however, say the permitting process for Twin Metals has already been compromised.
The Trump administration buried a Forest Service analysis on the environmental effects of mining in the Boundary Waters region, likely because that study validates Obama-era conclusions that mining would be too damaging in the watershed, Rom said.
Though she’s drawn similarities between the Pebble project and Twin Metals, Rom said her group isn’t advocating for political support from Trump Jr. or others to try to change the administration’s mind.
In fact, personal politics aren’t on environmentalists’ side for the Twin Metals project. Andronico Luksic, whose family owns Chilean-based mining company Antofagasta, the owner of Twin Metals, is Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s Washington landlord.
“We’re not urging that decisions be made because the president’s relatives tweet out, ‘Don’t do this here because it’s a unique and fragile environment,’” Rom said. “Instead, we’re arguing for something that is not arbitrary and capricious, that is based on science and facts and economics.”
She added that it’s “pretty clear on a commonsense basis” that there shouldn’t be a mine directly upstream of the pristine Boundary Waters.
Ultimately, many conservative and industry groups see the Trump administration’s decision on Pebble Mine as a first big test of whether the president follows through on pledges to take politics out of the permitting process.
“If Pebble is blocked, these Minnesota projects will just fade away very quickly,” said Myron Ebell, the energy and environment director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who led Trump’s EPA transition team.
Conservatives complain the Obama administration politicized the process by interfering to block projects such as Pebble Mine, the Twin Metals project, and others before they completed the permitting process.
“If this project is stopped because of political interference from the White House, it will make a mockery of what the president has claimed he wants to do,” Ebell said. “It will also discourage and probably prevent any rational investor from ever looking at a big natural resource project, a mining project, in this country ever again.”
