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In The Midst Of The Budget Battle, Congress Is Handing Out Favors To The Mining Industry

By Jessica Goad, Guest Blogger on September 20, 2013

With reports that the Republican party is in a state of “civil war” over whether to shut down the government and default on the nation’s debts as part of its 42nd effort to defund Obamacare, House Republicans are in clear agreement on at least one thing: giving mining and timber companies a sweetheart deal on publicly-owned resources and exempting them from environmental laws.

By several measures, the mining industry already enjoys the benefits of friendly laws and environmental loopholes. Under the General Mining Law of 1872, for example, mining companies pay no royalties on the gold, silver, copper, and other taxpayer-owned minerals that they extract from taxpayer-owned public lands. And the industry is exempt from portions of environmental laws like the Clean Water Act.

And yet, these facts didn’t stop National Mining Association — which spent nearly $5 million on lobbying last year alone — CEO Hal Quinn from complaining that the industry:

…remain[s] burdened by an antiquated and duplicative permitting system that discourages investment and jeopardizes the growth of downstream industries, related jobs and technological innovation that depend on a secure and reliable mineral supply chain.

One of the bills, which will likely be up for a vote next week, is the Southeast Arizona Land Exchange and Conservation Act of 2013 (H.R. 687). It would require the U.S. Forest Service to trade publicly-owned forest lands that contain a major copper deposit for certain private lands owned by the Resolution Copper Mining company, a subsidiary of multinational mining conglomerates Rio Tinto and BHP-Billiton.
 
The bill not only gives away taxpayer-owned copper deposits to a private company, but it also bypasses the standard requirement that the federal government analyze the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of land exchanges under the National Environmental Policy Act.

H.R. 687 is strongly opposed by rock climbers whose access to the recreation areas would be lost by the privatization, as well as Native American tribes who have sacred sites on the land.

The second bill, the National Strategic and Critical Minerals Production Act of 2013 (H.R. 761) passed the House on Wednesday night and gives the mining industry several new shortcuts around environmental protections. It would allow federal agencies, for example, to declare that a proposed mining project does not constitute “a major federal action” and therefore permit applications would not need to be subjected to environmental review and public comment. It also places an arbitrary deadline of 30 months on any permitting decisions regardless of the size of the project or controversy.

Mining interests aren’t the only ones getting a great deal in the House this week. The chamber today is also debating the Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act (H.R. 1526) which would — for the first time ever — legislatively mandate levels of logging in national forests. The Obama administration has threatened to veto the bill, saying that it would not only “undermine appropriate management and stewardship of these lands which belong to all Americans,” but would “increase litigation risk.”

Jessica Goad is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress.

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Folks with the Gulf Restoration Network flew over Louisiana's hard-hit Plaquemines Parish on Sunday and documented pollution from the Hurricane Isaac disaster, including an oil spill at a Conoco Phillips refinery and a coal spill from a Kinder Morgan terminal.

Oil, coal spills contaminate Louisiana in Isaac's wake

As the recovery continues from last week's Hurricane Isaac, details are emerging about oil spills and other toxic pollution left behind in the storm's wake.

Staff with the Gulf Restoration Network flew over areas of southern Louisiana on Sunday. Among the problems they documented is an oil spill from the Conoco Phillips refinery in hard-hit Plaquemines Parish (photo by GRN's Jonathan Henderson at right).

As you can see in the photos below, also shot by Henderson, oil from that spill is leaking into surrounding wetlands and an adjacent citrus grove. The refinery is located in Belle Chasse between the Mississippi River, on the right in the next photo, and Louisiana Highway 23, on the left. The facility is by far the heaviest polluter in Plaquemines Parish, releasing over 500,000 pounds of toxic pollution to the air and almost 20,000 pounds to surface waters in 2010 alone, according to the Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory. Based in Houston, Conoco Phillips is the world's fifth-largest private-sector energy corporation.



GRN also spotted toppled crude oil holding tanks during its flyover of Plaquemines Parish:



But oil wasn't the only form of dirty energy that caused pollution problems following Isaac. GRN documented a coal spill from the Kinder Morgan International Marine Terminal, located in Port Sulphur on the west bank of the Mississippi River in Plaquemines Parish:



As seen in the photo below, polluted runoff from the facility appears to be affecting a nearby cattle farm that flooded in the storm:



Coal dust contains toxic compounds including arsenic, mercury and lead. It also causes the deadly respiratory disease pneumoconiosis, also known as black lung.

GRN reports that Isaac's wind and floodwaters appear to have carried the coal runoff into nearby communities, including Myrtle Grove, Ironton and Oak Park, the latter pictured in the following two photos:




Based in Houston, Kinder Morgan has plans to expand its Gulf Coast terminal network in order to increase coal exports. The fourth-largest energy company in North America, it owns about 170 terminals that handle coal and other products. It also operates an extensive network of oil and gas pipelines is the one of the largest oil producers in Texas.

GRN says it's filing reports on the spills with the Coast Guard's National Response Center, the federal point of contact for reporting oil and other chemical spills. To view GRN's full set of photos from its flyover, click here.

(All photos by Jonathan Henderson, Gulf Restoration Network.)

http://www.southernstudies.org/2012/09/oil-coal-spills-contaminate-louisiana-in-isaacs-wake.html