Please note the original post has been revised, retitled, and extended. Research into what a new federal law at issue states has been noted. This version is largely a full rewrite of the prior post. Please keep that fact in mind. The post concerns:
https://www.startribune.com/its-time-to-approve-the-polymet-mine/600206577/
A shill MPIA, Minnesota Pollution Ignoring Agency. Not MPCA. No C to this stuff.
We need a permanent ban on sulfide mining in our watersheds. As in NEVER DO IT.
Back to that op-ed, and how it starts:
The newly signed Inflation Reduction Act provides urgently needed, if not enormously overdue, funds to help slow a warming climate, with some $370 billion for such things as subsidizing electric vehicles (EVs) and renewable and clean-energy sources, and to incentivize existing nuclear plants to increase production.
In Minnesota, the law's "Buy American" requirement will provide something else: an added element in the long-running debate over opening the state's first hard-rock mine to extract copper, nickel, cobalt and other "critical" metals from an ore body stretching across the northeast Arrowhead.
The law's subsidies for EVs require their batteries contain metals produced or recycled in North America, half by 2024 and all by 2028. Northeastern Minnesota's "Duluth Complex" contains vast stores of the needed metals, and a nickel-rich ore body lies west of Duluth.
For nearly two decades, PolyMet Mining has been tangled in a permit-approval process to mine near Hoyt Lakes. All state and federal permits have been granted, but procedural challenges continue to hold things up.
[bolding added] Let us be careful. Let us be truthful. Highlighted is one false and quite misleading early sentence of great importance at the very start of this item that needs correction to be truthful. The author wrote -
The law's subsidies for EVs require their batteries contain metals produced or recycled in North America, half by 2024 and all by 2028.
[underlining added] There is nothing whatsoever in the new law as an absolute manufacturing requirement. Optional tax credits are all that involve guidelines being met. If written to tell the truth clearly and unambiguously that sentence would read -
In order to earn tax credit subsidies for EVs as provided for in the new law there are guidelines that would need to be met, i.e., applicable percentages of critical minerals contained in the battery must be extracted or processed in the United States or in a country with which the United States has a free trade agreement, or have been recycled in North America; half by 2024 and all by 2028.
Please note the difference. Extracted or processed here or favored other nations, or recycled in Mexico, Canada, or here.
NOTHING IN THE NEW LAW SAYS MINING IN THE U.S. OF A. IS REQUIRED OR A TAX CREDIT WILL BE LOST. THERE IS MORE ALLOWED IN THE BILL THAN THAT.
Readers should pursue this Senate document link at its p.16 et seq. for the truth about all new or modified tax credit provisions for EV purchases. The above qualifying language to the misleading sentence is from there verbatim. Again, the link:
https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Summary%20of%20Subtitle%20D%20-%20Energy%20Security.pdf
In context, the operative language appears at p.16 as shown in the image capture below:
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| click the image to enlarge and read |
And the truth shall set you free. Check it out.
This man intentionally fudges. His shock-jock time-to-panic and do a dumb thing op-ed misleads. The law has changed so now we HAVE to change with it - is the man's opening theme followed by a lengthy report that some Iron Rangers are upset and he'd like to see Polymet approved and operating.
Yes. The law has changed. Yes, we should adapt to it. NO, the change is not what he said. His entire argument fails because of misstating a crucial fact. What the law actually says is that critical fact. If Ploymet is sensibly forestalled forever, no one need lose a tax credit for buying a suitable electric vehicle.
The item Strib published artfully minimizes (it does not fully ignore) that only electric vehicle purchasing tax credit provisions of the law are involved and affected if guidelines go unmet.
Incentives are involved not absolute onerous requirements imposed
The actual wording of the new law is not cause enough to do something very stupid to Minnesota's clean water legacy that might cause lasting and great deleterious effects for a millennium because some Rangers are presently mumbling and upset.
The Rangers have no special right to poison everybody's waters for centuries to eke out a few additional Range jobs for a while (with taconite remaining by far the main job source on the Range even if ill-advised sulfide mining were to happen, and this new law will be subsidizing domestic steel production to where new jobs in taconite mining are likely). Hard rock sulfide mining, when and wherever done, has been a disastrous point-source of extended environmental harm spreading long-lasting damaging pollution over acres anywhere it has been done, historically - into recent events this century.
BOTTOM LINE: A critical sentence of the op-ed misstates the truth in a misleading manner. Strib should have been more careful before publishing this misleading item. Strib is at fault.
__________UPDATE__________
Things are never easy. Above a Senate document was used as authority backing a contention. That was because finding online the final text of the law as passed by Congress and signed by Biden is not easy. So what was first found and looking authoritative was used without having a final text, (finding which is an easter egg hunt). For instance whitehouse.gov directly accessed does not link to the enacted Public Law online text. Wikipedia's sidebar link failed for me.
Making the long story short, search = Pub.L. 117-169 got this, as passed by Congress, so hence as signed by Biden(?); here in pdf form. Page 139 et seq. of 273 single spaced pages of Public Law appears to be fully in line with the p.16 of the earlier found Senate item.
The operative language seems only to set tax credit guidelines based only on the battery, not that and the motor or electronics, so that Chinese rare earth elements in either motor magnets, or electronics, is not a concern.
Thus validating beyond doubt the earlier main post conclusions.
Nations with free trade agreements are listed here: https://www.trade.gov/us-free-trade-agreement-partner-countries
From that, as example, lithium mined or refined in Australia and fabricated into batteries in the U.S. would not snuff any tax credit, whereas from Bolivia, there might be a question, although "processed" via fabrication of a final battery would seem to not snuff any credit. Copper from Chile for motor wiring, general auto wiring, and if in batteries assembled in the U.S. would not snuff any credit. It would be a detailed thing the government would monitor, etc.
BOTTOM LINE: High risk hard rock sulfide mining in Minnesota is no more essential TO ANYBODY after passage of the new law, than before (including Polymet and Twin Metals with no changed status per the new law); hence the status of Polymet being somehow greatly enhanced or magically improved under the new law is a fiction within the mind of that biased editorial writer. That writer's status at the Strib page footer is only:
Ron Way, of Minneapolis, is a former legislative director of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. He's at ron-way@comcast.net.
Note "former." If the man presently has any skin in the game it is not disclosed. Whether he now lives in Iron Range territory or has an employment or shareholder stake now in mining in general or in particular for a party in interest such as Polymet or Twin Metals, or their controlling parent companies outside of our nation, would be interesting to know. His own past history in the whole sordid chain of Polymet and Twin Metals troubled and questionable regulatory history would also be telling detail. Did he have any say in MPCA (or make it MPIA, lacking C) about those long-pending sulfide mining approval efforts?
What I best believe is he is now retired from business. He knows. I don't.
_________FURTHER UPDATE_________
To abuse the actuality of Climate Change to suggest it and a new law in some twisted way says the risk of major environmental harm should be wisked away and Polyment should be into production is, first and foremost, a laughably fashioned excuse of an argument.
Climate changes. An act was passed (saying what it actually says). Polymet is being still restrained from high-risk mining. We should kiss the Iron Range's Ass because that's been the habit. In essence that is the "argument" of that op-ed.
That's not a compelling line of thought.
FACT - Mining Technology an online publication reports:
Chile, the world's largest copper producing country, hosts six of the ten largest copper mines in the world, while the remaining four are located in Peru, Mexico and Indonesia. Mining-technology.com profiles the ten biggest copper mines in the world, based on contained reserves.
Chile and Mexico fit the wording of the statute as to favored trading partners. Work with them and nobody's EV purchase tax credit gets snuffed or even endangered.
Moreover, nobody has proven a Minnesota Mine would tilt the worldwide commodity pricing or be able to produce metal or metal ores cheaper, better or faster or safer. The big Chilean heavyweight is behind Twin Metals, while a Swiss firm is behind Polymet. Why sacrifice our water integrity for them? What have they done for us lately?
They are the heavyweights, already. So we should risk great damage to Minnesota's waters, because - Why exactly? Because a retired regulator who cannot even get the statutory language right says he'd like to see it and Polymet has been fighting the regulatory process and the clear public will statewide for a long time because of the extreme danger their intentions entail? Huh?
The big item in lithium batteries, no surprise, is lithium, and it has nothing to do with mineral reserves within Minnesota. It is not here. The thrust of the trade incentives in the new law seems to have BMW, Toyota, et al. incentivized to build battery factories in the States, as well as final vehicle assembly plants, where they can be regulated as to safety and labor standards, while being the real new job providers, but likely elsewhere than Minnesota's Iron Range.
So?
There is so much decent argument about sulfide mining that Strib's publishing this thing is a disservice to rational discourse and to the public.
It is laughable, if not having been taken seriously by Strib, which should have been less negligent in its publishing decision making.
__________FURTHER UPDATE___________
Here, on Friday, Sept. 16, Strib publishes a counterpoint op-ed to the one by Ron Way. It notes things differing from emphasis in this Crabgrass analysis. Reading it, the arguments against the industry flak's points stand even stronger. And Mining the Climate Crisis, an online item author Aaron Klemz links to, helps undress the industry's "new thing" to gull people.
In total, Just say NO. To high-risk, low upside, dangerous, unneeded hard rock sulfide mining in Minnesota. That is the message from a combined Strib pair of outside authored op-eds. First a weak and highly flawed industry flak item, and next the sound counterpoint Strib published, in fairness. Metal recycling is a part of the better answer. Honest judicial review of questionable permitting is happening, and is a sound response to regulatory capture by those who are supposed to be regulated. And claiming that climate trouble is somehow answered by dangerous mining is a contention that is as bogus as it sounds. Last, when you deal with a statute, do it right. Misdirection, when noticed, weakens a string of contentions which fail to hang together into an argument.