In late July, Tesla’s Elon Musk made a global plea for responsibly mined nickel, citing the growing need for nickel to keep up with the worldwide rise in demand for electric cars, trucks, and other vehicles. One of our northern neighbors, Canada Nickel, responded immediately, saying it was prepared to meet Musk’s challenge.
As a company totally dependent on the mining of a number of precious metals, including nickel, cobalt and lithium, Tesla knows that nearly all of these metals are being produced in violation of international environmental and labor standards, including the horrific exploitation of young children. Musk’s call for “responsible mining” reflects his understanding of the need to find a new approach, and we laud him for this willingness to turn his company’s supply chain in a more ethical and legal direction. Perhaps part of this is motivated by the fact that Tesla and other American tech giants are being sued for human rights violations on behalf of surviving families of cobalt miners.
[image_caption]David Foster[/image_caption]
Minnesota, one of the top five mining states in our nation, has the opportunity to step up to the challenge made by Musk and assume a global leadership role. We have done this in agriculture, health care, drinking water protection and other economic sectors and we have been financially successful as a region for choosing the ethical and responsible path. As a state we have been on the leading edge in efforts to address the climate crisis, and we know that our key solutions – solar energy, electrification of transportation, wind and other clean energy options — rely on minerals and precious metals. Earth needs a responsible mining leader. Minnesota should provide that leadership.
Minnesota’s responsible mining leadership should be built on the same principles that have made us successful in other fields, including transparency, adherence to global labor and environmental standards, and consistently fair enforcement. We should work with mining companies around the world to expand the availability of responsibly mined raw materials and adopt policies that ensure that cars built in the United States for U.S. buyers are no longer contributing to the exploitation of children or ecological destruction. Mining is a global industry, so our standards need to be linked to policies that consumers can rely on.
[image_caption]Mark Ritchie[/image_caption]
The Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, (IRMA), is already actively certifying mining company compliance with these principles. It has strong support from North America’s principal mining union, the United Steelworkers, as well as the world’s largest steel producer and iron ore mining company, ArcelorMittal. Both the Steelworkers Union and ArcelorMittal are major stakeholders in Minnesota’s mining sector and in our Iron Range communities. ArcelorMittal, for example, operates both the Hibbing Taconite and Minorca mines in northern Minnesota. Other company participants in IRMA include BMW Group, Tiffany’s and global mining giant, Anglo-American.
To respond to the growing need for responsible mining to achieve our clean energy future, our state should establish a Minnesota Global Center for Responsible Mining. This Center could function as a publicly supported nonprofit – perhaps affiliated with one or more colleges or universities — to provide a holistic approach to meet the technological, social, and economic challenges to mine responsibly.
Our state has a long tradition of stepping up to meet our own challenges in ways that better the world. Gov. Rudy Perpich, for instance, established the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT) after Minnesota opened its doors to refugees from many war-ravaged countries. Today, CVT has become an important and expert voice in both our state and the global community in post-conflict training and resolution.
Some of the earliest torture survivors who came to CVT were from Ethiopia; they founded a community that now exceeds 50,000 and is an economic driver of many parts of our economy. Ethiopia recently adopted a new Responsible Mining Law and its government is looking for mining partners from Minnesota and other places to help implement new environmentally and socially responsible standards. We are a logical partner, and this is an opportunity that we should pursue.
We can be the place the world looks to when it comes to responsible mining, much as we are the world’s reference point for health care and medical technology. We can become the global champion for creating technological solutions, teaching social contract processes, and developing monitoring protocols, labor and safety standards, and enforcement mechanisms. When complex problems confront Minnesotans, we don’t look the other way or hope for the best. Together, we find solutions.
David Foster is a distinguished associate with the Energy Futures Initiative, and retired USW District #11 director. Mark Ritchie is the president of Global Minnesota and former Minnesota secretary of state, 2007-2015.
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Believing that our MPCA will enforce strict environmental standards considering its behavior in allowing MinnTac to operate on an expired permit for a quarter of a century, cancelling a mercury TMDL study for the St. Louis River before it was begun because it was too hard (and because of pressure from the pro-mining DNR and Range legislators), and issuing permits (a new one, finally) to MinnTac and to PolyMet that don’t contain WQBELS (numerical limits on specific pollutants) do no inspire confidence in the boosterism displayed in this piece.
https://waterlegacy.org/minntac/
There have been Water study after water study done by Polymet trying to get permitted. You expect folks to believe that Polymet will refuse to fulfill the regulation requirements and expect to get permitted to mine? There are laws passed that state exactly what requirements are needed to get permitted, unfortunately lawsuits and “new “ studies keep popping up to delay the process.
This has nothing to do with responsible mining and the need for these metals, it is strictly a “not in my backyard “ issue. The “love the earth” folks, who use all of the precious metals daily, want them mined for their own use just irresponsibly elsewhere.
WATER. It is Minnesota’s greatest resource.
You can’t protect it while creating sulfuric acid leaching piles of waste.
Mining companies leave lifeless hellscapes wherever they operate, and bankruptcy is the pattern when the mine is played out.
In this week’s news, Glencore announced their 2.6 bn dollar loss and has dumped their dividend. Peabody Energy has written $1.4bn off the value of the world’s largest coal mine, an acknowledgment of electricity generators’ permanent shift away from coal.
Lithium? The biggest lithium miner is shutting down two mines for lack of demand. https://www.mining.com/albemarle-to-shutter-two-lithium-facilities-in-the-us/
“…Australian iron ore major Fortescue Metals Group (ASX: FMG) said on Friday it would re-evaluate an expansion plan…” “[the company] Fortescue’s decision comes after fellow miner Rio Tinto (ASX, LON, NYSE: RIO), the world’s number one iron ore producer, blew up in May a 46,000-year-old sacred indigenous site in Western Australia…”
Alberta Oil is losing its investors and Enbridge is desperately trying to get new pipelines quick– before it is clear we do not need them. What else is happening around the world in extraction industries?
PAY ATTENTION. https://www.mining.com/
Joe– NIMBY. NIYBY either if you care about the North Country for future people.
Read the industry news and you’ll see, unlike the article’s authors, that the future of mining is not one of more jobs, but more automation.
Those are facts, Joe. Don’t trust the global extractors. They don’t care a whit about you or our State.
This article is unmoored from facts. Minnesota is a terrible place to promote hard rock mining, and by now everyone should know it.
Well, quite the opposite. The actual (Northern MN) dynamic seems more like, “Please mine in my backyard! I don’t care about the environment; never have, never will!”
If all these mining proposals are so environmentally safe, why worry about another study, why not let the opponents have the ability to make their case? After all, once a mine fails and craps the environment for hundreds of miles, from surface water to aquifer, it’s basically irreversible for centuries, so the dangers of extracting the metal/mineral better be thoroughly understood, and performance bonds and forfeitures of company assets (including personal assets of mining company officers and directors) all lined up for when the “foolproof” system catastrophically fails–as it always seems to do. With the environment (and innocent species) left holding the bag of crap…
The water permit that was issued by our supine MPCA to PolyMet violates the Clean Water Act. The one that was issued to the taconite miner MinnTac did, too.
The authors’ideas are just green washing.
If all the nickel and rare earth mining that is apparently so necessary for electric transport is already a massive global problem, it’s telling that no thought whatever has been given to actually adopting (let alone enforcing) standards for mining “supply chain” evils. We are long past the time of needing some non-profit US think tank (located anywhere) to start what appears to be the initial[!] development of (non-binding!) global standards for such mining, and Musk’s call for “standards” after Tesla was sued for engaging in practices that would certainly be prohibited is comic.
Such standards should have been mandated by Congress 25 years ago for US vehicle manufacturers and importers, when the NASA scientists conclusively proved the cause of the accelerating warming and spectacular rise of CO2 emissions. Instead, this sounds like another proposal for “voluntary” corporate compliance, “enforced” by consumer “choice”, which (in the area of pollution and off-loaded social ills) means no real regulation whatever. So another facade of “ethical responsibility”.
(This was not intended as a “reply” to the esteemed Joe Smith, but a stand-alone comment. Sorry.)
That’s a facile argument, Joe. The water permit issued by the MPCA to PolyMet is toothless because it has no WQBELs in it. There is nothing to enforce, by environmentalists or anybody else, because of something called the “permit shield.” It’s a license to kill clean water.
Polymet has a job to fulfill the multiple regulations in place by DNR, MPCA, Dept of land management once they pass those regulations, they get permitted, its the law. If you want to change the law, contact your lawmakers.
As I stated before, I’ve seen the Greenies claim the taconite process was going to ruin the water on the Range back in late 60’s, early 70’s….. Still waiting for that to happen. Crying Wolf only works once!
Wrong, Joe. In fact, the Dunka Pit was opened for taconite in 1964, but had an overlay of sulfide rock that is leaking and leaching sulfuric acid into the groundwater and watershed to this day.
Wisconsin and Canada both have more examples of groundwater destruction and habitat destruction in the waterways where mining has occurred.
I don’t understand your insistence that this is good for the Range or for Minnesota.
[Timberjay] http://www.timberjay.com/stories/mining-vs-water,12329
“…Unlike other mining in northeastern Minnesota, the ore that PolyMet proposes to mine is part of what’s known as the Duluth Complex, a zone of sulfide-bearing rock that stretches from southeastern St. Louis County in an arc through central Lake and Cook counties. The sulfide rock contains copper, nickel, platinum and other valuable metals, but it is also known to leach acid, metals, sulfates, and other potentially toxic chemicals when exposed to air and water. To critics, this process, known as acid rock drainage, has come to symbolize the dangers associated with the mining of sulfide ores.”
[and]
“For 30 years, beginning in 1964, LTV Steel operated the Dunka Mine, located just three miles southeast of Babbitt. While LTV mined taconite at the site, a layer of the Duluth Complex lay on top of the iron ore along one end of the mine. In exposing the iron ore, LTV removed an estimated 50 million tons of sulfide-bearing rock that it stockpiled at the mine site, where it remains to this day.”
Factual and clear.
Richard, the mine site has been under a constant renovation to mediate leakage from Dunka site. Please show me the water studies that show the old mine site is polluting the watershed. Every open pit mine up here has removed some sulfide rock while going after Iron ore and taconite, haven’t seen the water polluted yet… Crying wolf only works once.
.
I’d like to read up on your renovation at the Dunka Mine if you could provide a link or source.
August 2010 study by ITRC, mining waste treatment technology selection. As I said, every mine up here on the Range exposed and moved sulfide rock to get to iron ore or taconite, where is the waste water damage to our water?
Read it Joe. The mine has not EVER been in compliance for effluent standards.
Just stop. You cannot make truth out of untruths and wishful thinking.
You do not show your work nor do you reference any others who do.
Just Stop defending sulfide mining.
Here is the Dunka Mine case study on technical and regulatory guidance. I hope you would accept the DNR’s work building a database and trying to build predictive tools for pollution regulation.
There have been many attempts to mitigate and bring into compliance for effluents this pit since the bankruptcy, as this site can attest.
Evidence supporting your opinion must be in here somewhere, but I can’t find it. Can you?
https://www.itrcweb.org/miningwaste-guidance/cs_dunka_mine.htm
Please state the content of your acronym, then state the acronym in parentheses, then use the acronym at will.
In agriculture, the waters and soil are more polluted than they have ever been, and pollinators are facing extinction.
It sounds like what is really going to happen is we are going to turn the rest of earth that isn’t industrially farmed into mines. Will you call those mines responsible in the way you say agriculture is responsible? The nickle copper mining we ard talking about doing will be two generations mining for 25 generations of pollution. If that is responsible then we are living in a Responsible world indeed.
A 500 percent increase in lithium every year? What earth are we living on?
I would say, a moritorium on any new mining until we clean up the thousands of Superfund sites, and do something meaningful with nuclear waste.
If Glencore and Antofagasta open copper mines in Minnesota, how many other mines around the world that don’t meet Foster and Ritchie’s environmental and labor standards will close? Well, of course, none.
First, because the copper deposits in Northern Minnesota are of such low grade they will have almost no impact on the global market.
What will really happen is that the mining companies will play their mines here off against their mines in other countries for labor concessions by workers and for environmental concessions by governments. It’s just another race to the bottom that we’ve seen time and time again in the “global marketplace.”
In a downturn, which happen periodically, as we know, the mining companies will shut down the highest cost producer first and reopen it last.
When times get tough, or the mine begins to be played out, the mining companies will turn to the regulators in the state’s administration and say, “Give us environmental concessions or the miners get it.” And then you have a bunch of long-faced miners in hard hats at the Capitol demanding that the Wild Rice Rule be abolished. For example.
In the wake of the Mout Polley tailings dam collapse, it was discovered in the investigation that a scenario like this happened with the regulators in British Columbia. I wrote about that here:
http://left.mn/2014/08/hiring-dingoes-babysitters/
And this will all happen irrespective of Foster and Ritchie’s badge of excellence.
There is no such thing as a safe copper sulfide mine. Look up Mt. Polley in British Columbia. Water is a finite resource. We must protect it.
The title is seductive : responsible mining. The history is less so. I have no doubt that at some near future point in time these mineral resources will be profitably and responsibly extractable from the very water-logged environments of NE Minnesota. But now is not yet that time. If any/all of the authors’ predictions are true, then by then there will be ever more profit for the region but with less risk. Waiting for that time does not squander the mineral resource. Not waiting for that time surely squanders other resources.
I spoke with a friend of mine in China who is currently developing a refueling design for robotic cars. He has both an MS and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science. He indicated that electrical cars are a bad idea for northern climates as the cold temperatures will have a deleterious effect on the batteries: batteries will lose their charge faster in cold weather than warm weather. He also indicated the the current time it takes to refuel an electric vehicle from zero charge to full charge is four hours.
Combine that with the fact that the sulfide nickel mining will damage the water table for five hundred years after the mining stops, and we have a solid reasoning for saying NO to sulfide mining in our state.
Polymet = An eighty acre lake of sulfuric acid sludge (toxic for 500 years) behind an earthen dam just up the hill from Lake Superior. What could go wrong?
I would like to reiterate, one of the most pathological things about America’s economy is the infatuation with tech, with an equal indifference to the blowback.
Most of us here are aware the Republican party would eliminate every and all enivronmental regulation for corporations and really just about anyone, to pollute and profit as they please. But this article is a good example of Democratic leadership embracing corporate inspired greenwashing, otherwise known as dumbing down regulations to the point of meaninglessness.
Again, agriculture in Minnesota has been devastating to water quality, soil health, biodiversity and local economies. To claim that agriculture in Minnesota is some kind of example of ecological responsibility is fraudulent in the extreme, and suggests without doubt that “responsible” mining is just another phrase for leaving future generations to do something about the ecological devastation left by today’s profiteers.
Indeed, this article acts as though the future of commerce is letting foreign corporations/conglomerates remove the resource and the profits from everywhere in America, to international investors. Making of America a “banana republic” as it were, while Minnesota-based internationalist think tanks churn out globalist apologia.
Are Foster and Ritchie listening?
The dirty little secret in all of this is that sulfide mining is only viable if a deep pocketed partner (also know as the State of Minnesota) is on the hook for any disastrous outcome. If all goes well and optimistic projections are met, all of the pro-mining, damn the consequences, folks can let out their loud:
“I told you so…”
Of course if the projected bad consequences occur, these mining companies will cut and run, hiding behind bankruptcies and corporate immunity and the State of Minnesota will be left to pick up the pieces. Joe and others see no problem with this, it’s a bet they are willing to make with everyone’s money. And that is consistent with the long help GOP game plan: Privatize the gains, subsidize the losses.
Force these companies to set aside enough profit reserves to cover potential losses and they will head for the hills: Hills not in Minnesota.
I used to think highly of Mark Ritchie. Sigh.
Does Minnpost ask writers of Minnpost articles to disclose ANY conflicts of interest on the subject they’re writting about?
I guess that why it is called a web…
I read Frank’s comment and wondered what “Global Minnesota” is all about.
Googled that and read a little of it’s long history.
https://www.globalminnesota.org/about/
And learned one of its’ founders was Gladys Brooks. And I had recently thought about Gladys Brooks as she was the City Council person for the ward I grew up in. I thought of her while reflecting on the current council make up.
Now with two Gladys Brooks encounters in a matter of days, I Googled her to learn:
https://www.startribune.com/obituaries/detail/11776934/
And if you read her obituary, you will learn that there was a time when serious, smart, responsible, civic leaders led the City of Minneapolis.
And just to please the right side readers, she was a Republican. Unfortunately, not the type that is allowed to exist in today’s Republican party.
If you don’t ask the right question, you’ll never get the right answer.
Should copper be mined in Northern MN is the wrong question. To replace one coal fired electrical power plant with wind turbines requires over 3 million pounds of copper.
The correct question is where should the copper be mined for all the wind turbines, electric cars, battery storage ( for when isn’t’ blowing or the sun isn’t shining) the “environmentalists” want. If Northern MN is a “bad” place to mine copper, where is place copper can be mined with less risk and/ or damage to the environment than Northern MN
The people opposing copper mining have had over 10 years to select a place they think is a better place to mine copper than Northern MN and they have refused to do so. The people that oppose copper mining in Northern MN need to state where they believe there will be better protections for the environment than what is being proposed by the MPCA
People who oppose copper mining in Northern MN and don’t name a place they think is a “better” place to mine copper are not environmentalists they are NIMBYs They don’t care if there are horrible disasters from copper anywhere else in the world
That’s an easy question to answer:
Chuquicamata (/tʃuːkiːkəˈmɑːtə/ choo-kee-kə-MAH-tə; referred to as Chuqui for short) is the largest open pit copper mine by excavated volume in the world[citation needed]. It is located in the north of Chile, just outside Calama at 2,850 m (9,350 ft) above sea level, 215 km (134 mi) northeast of Antofagasta and 1,240 km (770 mi) north of the capital, Santiago. Flotation and smelting facilities were installed in 1952, and expansion of the refining facilities in 1968 made 500,000 ton annual copper production possible in the late 1970s. Previously part of Anaconda Copper, the mine is now owned and operated by Codelco, a Chilean state enterprise, since the Chilean nationalization of copper in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Its depth of 850 metres (2,790 ft) makes it the second deepest open-pit mine in the world after Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah, United States.
As I stated previuosly, I can agree to the MN copper mining proposals if the mining companies simply agree to reserve the funds necessary to clean up a disaster. They will never agree to this, unlike the government nationalized mine described above, so pro mining and anti mining folks should all agree it is not the State of Minnesota and its’ taxpayers responsibility to clean up environmental disasters, it is the folks who cause it.
And, I should add, the Chile mines are in a high mountain desert not threatening adjacent water ways and they have plenty of reserves:
“Chile has the world’s largest copper reserves of any country by far, with 200 million metric tons as of 2019. It is also the world’s largest copper producer, having produced some 5.6 million metric tons of copper from mines in 2018. ”
Plenty of reserves, not an environmental risk, a nationalized industry with a 40+ year of reserves. Let’s use theirs first and then worry about ours later…
MPCA and the DNR were in the deep pockets of the Brazilian (?) mine companies all along the way. Fortunately, we have courts that possess sound judgment and adhere to the rule of law. Polymet bought “regulatory” agencies and did end runs around the regulations that are supposed to protect Minnesota’s air and water. That’s our air and water. And we must protect them from predatory mega-miners whose histories are abysmal. Thank God for the Minnesota Center for Environmental Justice.
I see this fact is hard to get on this particular thread, but I will try again. In the process of open pit mining for the last hundred years, tons and tons of sulfide rock has been dug up. The sulfide rock is gathered and moved along with overburden rock to access the iron ore or taconite. The sulfide rock is exposed to the elements as it is piled in huge amounts on mine property. Where is the damage to the water table from a century of this practice. Sulfide rock and water are natural to this place called the Iron Range. All I hear is once sulfide rock is exposed to water the whole watershed is destroyed.
I do believe that sulfide rock removed as overburden (boulders) in getting down to iron ore is exposed to water as Joe describes.
When we move on to extracting copper/nickel/precious metals we now reduce the boulders to powder, powder that is suspended in water in holding ponds or powder dried and stacked (Twin Metals proposal?)
Equating the dangers of a boulder to a powder is a pretty questionable point.
Talc is essentially made from powdered clay, clay being a pretty common item in these parts. Talc is an identified carcinogen, clay, not so much.
So just what are these “international environmental and labor standards”? I don’t think they exist.