Mining giveaway

Trump's mining giveaway

Thanks to an 1872 law, Trump's decision to shrink two national monuments will give a huge windfall to miners.

By AUBREY MENARNDT

On Feb. 2, President Donald Trump’s directive shrinking the size of two national monuments in Utah, the largest reduction in U.S. history, officially took effect. Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments saw their collective size shrink by nearly 2 million acres, land with lucrative deposits of coal and uranium.

Conservatives cheered the news, arguing that the monuments infringed on the public’s ability to use its land and that Trump’s directive would allow states to make the most of their resources. Utah Gov. Gary Herbert heralded the news as a “grand compromise” that will prevent the monument land from harming local residents’ “opportunities for tourism and travel, farming and ranching, for multiple use.”

But even the most ardent supporters of Trump’s decision should still be alarmed by its fiscal consequences. Due to a law older than Utah itself, miners will be able to extract resources from the 1.84 million acres of land for just a few hundred dollars, reaping huge profits on land owned by the federal government. This subsidy already costs Washington hundreds of millions of dollars annually—and without any legislative changes, Trump just made it even larger.

Without national monument status, these federal lands fall under the General Mining Act of 1872, a comically outdated Gold Rush-era piece of legislation. The law was created in a time of seemingly endless resources as people were headed West in search of fortune and there weren’t yet rules to broker the transfer of minerals on federally owned lands to miners. Under that law, miners could originally claim land by putting stakes or piles of rocks around their desired territory, filing a claim at the Bureau of Land Management and paying a maximum fee of $5 per acre. These days, the per-acre fees are gone but the costs are still small: Miners must pay just a $212 filing fee and an annual maintenance fee of $155 to extract minerals from federal lands.

Perhaps those fees were a fair price in 1872, but they certainly aren’t now. The law doesn’t require miners to pay royalties, the method the government typically uses to collect money for extracted resources. In other words, extraction companies are essentially getting mined resources for free. As Mother Jones journalist Josh Harkinson writes, the General Mining Act of 1872 is “a legal blank check that’s allowed miners to take an estimated $408 billion worth of gold and other hard rock minerals from public lands without paying a single cent in federal royalties—ever.” If the United States used the same royalty rates for hard-rock minerals that it does for oil and gas, the government would receive an estimated $100 million to $200 million in royalty payments annually.

There have been many attempts over the past century and a half to amend the legislation. In 2007, the House passed a bill to end new mining patents under the 1872 Act and impose royalty payments on the existing claims but it died in the Senate. In 2009, New Mexico Sen. Jeff Bingaman again tried and failed to introduce royalty payments for hard-rock minerals. More than 150 years after the General Mining Act became law, miners are still paying almost nothing to mine federal lands.

Even worse, while Americans don’t get much money from these deals, they are stuck with the cleanup. The government spends $80 million to $85 million annually attempting to clean up an estimated 500,000 abandoned mines in the U.S., an expensive and dangerous process. That doesn’t even count the major costs for rehabilitating abandoned coal mines.

There is still some hope the courts will reverse Trump’s move. Numerous groups are suing the government for cutting the size of these national monuments, which will likely delay mining activity for some time. Miners might also decide to leave the uranium in the ground since uranium prices are currently quite low. But even if those court cases succeed in reversing Trump’s move, it doesn’t change the fact that Americans are already losing millions on uncompensated natural resources every year.

Environmentalists like myself may never convince Trump supporters that Bears Ears National Park deserves protection because it contains historical and cultural resources and is the ancestral home to five Native American tribes. We may never agree that Grand Staircase-Escalante National Park is worthy of protection because it is filled with dinosaur fossils and colorful sandstone cliffs. But we should agree that giving national park land to mining companies for almost nothing is bad fiscal policy.

Even if these lands were barren wastelands with no cultural, historical, or aesthetic value, the American people would still be better off leaving the land unexploited so that we don’t continue to trade away our national treasures to get nothing in return. Until there is a modern law in place, Americans will continue to give millions of dollars to mining companies, degrading our national lands for no gain. Ending this egregious subsidy—not expanding it—is one area we should find common ground.