#extractive-industry — Public Fediverse posts

Gorsuch’s Snail Darter Argument

The Supreme Court this morning denied certiorari in Apache Stronghold v. US. This looks like the end of the road, at least the legal road, for this case. It also signals the start of something else: in short order, the Final Environmental Impact Statement for Resolution’s mine will be published, and that will trigger the transfer of Oak Flat to two foreign mining companies, Rio Tinto and BHP, joint owners of Resolution Copper.

(For more background, see this post, this, this, and this.)

Only Gorsuch and Thomas dissented; Alito did not participate. Gorsuch’s dissent is worth reading in its entirety. Here, I want to call out just one of his arguments. He’s pushing hard against the Ninth Circuit’s reasoning that the “disposition” of federal land does not substantially burden the free exercise of religion (even if the land in question happens to be essential to the exercise of that religion, as Oak Flat is to the Western Apache).

The truth is, Congress has adopted all sorts of laws restricting the government’s power to dispose of its real property. Take just one example, the Endangered Species Act. That law, this Court once held, required the government to halt “operation of a virtually completed federal dam” to protect the endangered “snail darter,” a “previously unknown species of perch.” TVA v. Hill, 437 U. S. 153, 156, 158 (1978). The Court read the Act to require that result even though Congress had spent more than $100 million on the dam—nearly half a billion in today’s dollars—and our holding effectively “‘divest[ed] the Government of its right to use what is, after all, its land.’” 101 F. 4th, at 1051 (quoting Lyng, 485 U. S., at 453). If Congress went to such lengths to accommodate the snail darter, why should we suppose it offered less protection to people practicing an ancient faith?

I get it, but the argument makes me uneasy. It comes close to holding the Endangered Species Act up to ridicule, and at a moment when the Act itself is under serious threat. Just last month, the Trump administration proposed a new rule that would change the definition of “harm” under the Act, such that habitat destruction would not constitute harm.

The federal government’s disposition of its real property often threatens the habitats of endangered species, as it did in Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill, the case to which Gorsuch refers here. Were the Trump administration’s new rule in effect, the case would have gone the other way, or never have been brought at all. I imagine Gorsuch will revisit this argument, and say more about whether he considers the accommodations of the Endangered Species Act reasonable or ridiculous, should this new interpretation of the Act come before the Court.

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#RIO #ApacheStrongholdVUS #EndangeredSpeciesAct #extractiveIndustry #habitat #NeilGorsuch #SupremeCourt

Q. has #AngloAmerican see the future of #farming?

The firm plans to invest around $9bn in #Yorkshire mine that produces an under-used #organic #fertilizer called #polyhalite.

It requires no processing & is less damaging to #soil, but remains largely untested at mass levels in a market where #potash is the dominant product.

This could be a enormous 'white elephant', or it could be a major shift in #farming and prompt an #extractiveindustry boom for Yorkshire.

Time will tell!

https://www.thedriftmag.com/a-good-prospect/

I enjoyed this read on the extractive mining (and the culture behind it) predicated by transition to a more electrified, battery-reliant economy

#Environment #Mining #ExtractiveIndustry #PresentDayColonialism

... people’s needs — food, shelter, water, transportation — are not always explicitly connected to energy, and even when they are, there are ways to dramatically reduce the amount of energy required to meet them.
That conclusion contradicted several decades of economic theory that suggested that increased energy use and, by extension, increased consumption would always equate to a longer lifespan and improved quality of life.

“Fossil fuel use does not contribute significantly to improvements in life expectancy.”

"The moral case for coal: The ethics of complicity with and amongst Australian pro-coal lobbyists" - Kari Dahlgren

https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.12389

#anthropology #aiart #midjourney #academia @anthropology #ClimateChange #CoalMining #complicity #ethics #ExtractiveIndustry
#ResearchMethods

Race You To The Water

The other day I expressed some misgivings over the word that Earthworks chose to apply to water in the first sentence of its report, Polluting the Future: their characterization of water as an “asset,” I said, made me uneasy. The water flowing from springs and brooks, the water of rivers, lakes and streams, the raindrops that fall from the sky and the dew on the morning grass, the water in our bodies, in plants and trees, the water in dogs, flowers, bugs, fish, elephants, walruses and caterpillars, the water in everything that is alive on earth — water is and will always be something greater, more wondrous and something other than a mere entry in the accounting ledgers of some grand business enterprise, which is all that the word “asset” conjures for me.

I came across the word again today as I was reading an editorial in The Detroit Free Press. I am in complete sympathy with the position it takes against plans to build a huge network of oil pipelines carrying diluted bitumen (or dilbit) across the Great Lakes region, and to transport crude oil by barge across Lake Superior. These are reckless, irresponsible ideas. The threat they pose to the integrity of the Lakes and the life the Lakes sustain is only made worse when you consider a couple of salient facts. First (and it is curious that the editorial does not mention this), the new mining around Lake Superior — as I’ve noted repeatedly — is already going to put pressure on Lake Superior and the Lake Superior watershed; the shipping of oil by barge would bring even more industrialization and greatly heighten the risk of environmental catastrophe. Second, the company building and running the pipeline (the Canadian company Enbridge) has already been responsible for an environmental disaster in Kalamazoo, Michigan — the worst inland oil spill in US history, in fact.

The editorial takes the position that these plans betray a “deep misunderstanding of the true value of the lakes,” but when the editors try to say what that value is, they run into trouble:

It’s easy to wax poetic about the value of the Great Lakes to Michigan and the other states they border. The beauty of the lakes, the wildlife and fish that dwell in and around the lakes, the environmental benefits the lakes present — they’re incalculable.

But let’s get practical: Clean freshwater is one of the scarcest commodities there is. And it’s only going to get worse. Clean water will be an asset that’s worth far more than oil. Jeopardizing the Great Lakes isn’t just morally and ethically wrong. It’s financially foolish, as well.

It’s interesting how the argument here moves, in just a couple of short paragraphs, from the “incalculable” to the crudest of calculations — the “worth” of clean water. This is tantamount to arguing that what is “morally and ethically” right should take second place to what is financially sound — as if finance should have more claim on the imagination and intellect (and the heart) than morality, and monetary value should be privileged over moral and ethical considerations.

I suppose that’s the way it goes nowadays, and I just need to get real. Still, there’s a great swirl of confusion in these two paragraphs, and I have a number of questions about the concept of morality being invoked here, how we’re to distinguish it from ethics, and why those things don’t seem to figure into what are called “practical” considerations. Practice and finance here are unmoored from and unrestricted by moral and ethical concerns; it’s precisely that kind of thinking that got us into the precarious situation we’re now in.

One remedy for all this confusion may lie in the perspective that holds water to be a basic human right — a perspective I also found missing from the Earthworks report. But even then we need to go beyond talking about assets and recognize the limitations of the argument that “clean freshwater is one of the scarcest commodities.” Why? Follow the link from The Detroit Free Press editorial to the National Geographic site on the “Freshwater Crisis.” There you enter a Malthusian world:

While the amount of freshwater on the planet has remained fairly constant over time—continually recycled through the atmosphere and back into our cups—the population has exploded. This means that every year competition for a clean, copious supply of water for drinking, cooking, bathing, and sustaining life intensifies.

Here, all of humanity is engaged in a contest or race. More and more people enter every year to compete for the same, limited resources. This is one reason why it’s imperative to recognize freshwater as a human right. Otherwise, history becomes a death match, or a big, global reality TV show: intensifying “competition” over this scarce “commodity” means that there will be winners and losers in the water game. The winners are fully vested with their rights; the losers struggle to survive in arid, toxic regions, or simply die of thirst.

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