An epic, or just another fable?

Who owns the West? Rip-off artists, says the Environmental Working Group.

The non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to using the power of information to protect human health and the environment, based in Washington, celebrated the 132nd anniversary of the passage of the United States’ General Mining Law by releasing a database it had compiled of mineral titles on public land in the western U.S.

The EWG said its database “gives the public its first comprehensive look at who has profited from the giveaway of their [sic] lands and mineral resources.” It’s “a taxpayer rip-off of epic proportions.” Those evil miners have stolen the public lands. Again.

It plays well in some circles. The insightful Dorothy Kosich, in an opinion piece for Mineweb, pointed out that mining is now a favoured target for non-governmental organizations that want to get their faces in front of funding organizations. And the EWG’s whole publicity campaign was not without its victories, at least in the mainstream press.

Seattle’s Post-Intelligencer, whose sympathies were already obvious from a series of articles it published in June 2001 called “The Mining of the West,” editorialized that in next November’s U.S. elections “we should be looking for members of Congress who will eliminate 19th-century abuses in favour of 21st-century protections for public land.” (Note its question-begging assumption that modern amendments to the Mining Law would necessarily clean up “abuses” and advance “protections.”)

The editorial further suggested that the law was overdue for an update but that “environmental and mining groups disagree” about the reasonable royalty rate. We’ll let the Post-Intelligencer in on the industry’s dirty little secret: the market will set the royalty rate, whatever the politicians or any group may say. If it’s too high, projects won’t be developed.

This brings us to another repetition of the same old saw about how the legal right to mine is some guarantee of wealth. What the EWG calls “the giveaway” is nothing of the kind.

It is, it seems, frequently lost on the public and even on policy-makers that the right to mine is not a cheque made out to cash. Mineral rights to uneconomic mineral resources — and most of them are uneconomic, and stay that way — are a liability, not an asset. You pay to keep them, and you don’t sell any metal. To the EWG, mining-rights holders that have “gained control of precious metals and minerals” have bought a ticket on a gravy train. Trouble is, most of them will never board it.

Naturally an attack like this wouldn’t be complete without an environmental deception or two. The EWG says its “investigation reveals the very low prices paid to the U.S. government for operations that often leave multi-billion-dollar cleanup bills for taxpayers.” The present tense there is simply another attempt to hang the Butte mess and other old-industrial legacies around the neck of the modern mining industry. It’s mendacious nonsense.

But why stop there, when there’s more disinformation to peddle? After all, says the EWG, “metal mining accounted for 46% of pollution reported by all industries in 2001, yet comprised just 0.36% of the number of industrial operations.” Regular readers will recognize these meaningless statistics from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxics Release Inventory — waste rock and mill tailings make up 99% of that 46%, and yes, mines tend to be large, rather than small, businesses, and so don’t loom large in the phone book when people count up the “number of industrial operations.”

It was also unedifying to see how the EWG dished out a plateful of classic left-wing xenophobia, and how eagerly large news organizations dug in. An Associated Press report was headed “Foreign Companies Buy Up Mining Rights,” and The New York Times shuddered that “Foreigners Control Fifth of Mineral Wealth in American West, Study Shows.” The Post-Intelligencer’s editorial spoke darkly of how the Mining Law “has put a large share of the minerals on Western public land under the control of foreign corporations.”

Well, now. Put down that defibrillator and take a walk with us through large sectors of the Western World’s economy. Foreign ownership is a fact of life, everywhere you go. Learn to live with it, America. We had to.