Thinking Minnesota: The Green New Twilight Zone
Plus, a new report is out by me and Debra Struhsacker at Center of the American Experiment. Stay tuned!
It’s been an unnerving week with Hurricane Milton barreling through my area, but my power and internet are back, and so am I. Still, about 370,000 customers are without power as of noon 10/14/24. Feeling extra-grateful today for hot meals and hot showers!
It was an eventful week at Center of the American Experiment.
and I released a new report last week: Mission Impossible: Mineral Shortages and the Broken Permitting Process Put Net Zero Goals Out of Reach. You may read it here in full, but stay tuned to Montalbano Mondays for shorter-form breakdowns of our findings.Below is a preview of my featured piece (and cover story!) for the Fall Issue of Thinking Minnesota, Center of the American Experiment’s in-house magazine. I hope you will read the full piece here and subscribe to receive issues of the magazine to your door for free.
While the media focused on Pres. Joe Biden’s disastrous CNN debate performance on June 27, it ignored the administration’s glaring contradictions in its climate policy. The day after the debate, the Interior Department squelched the last hopes of the proposed Ambler Road project in northwest Alaska.
Denying the construction of the Ambler Road blocks off a wealth of minerals needed for the administration’s clean-energy agenda. Mining proposals across the U.S., including Twin Metals and PolyMet in northeast Minnesota, have faltered because of the administration’s opposition to any development of natural resources. But if Biden — or a potential Harris-Walz administration — wants to do more than virtue-signal its green ambitions, it needs to promote domestic mining.
The Ambler Road would have spanned 211 miles in Alaska’s Northwest Arctic Borough and unlocked access to significant deposits of cobalt, copper, lead, silver, and zinc. Building the road and its proposed mines would create almost 5,000 direct and indirect jobs. Even the most promising potential mine would produce 149 million pounds of copper, 173 million pounds of zinc and 26 million pounds of lead — annually.
The other three potential mines have no estimates available because it is extremely difficult to explore and plan for a mine without a road to access the area. The Interior Department doesn’t seem to understand this chicken-and-the-egg problem, based on one reason it listed for denying the road: “There are no active mines in the area and no mine plan proposals pending before the federal government.”
Alaskans are all too familiar with fighting for the right to develop their natural resources, as the Ambler Road is only the latest Alaskan natural resource project to be stymied. Alaska’s Pebble Mine, a proposed copper mine in Bristol Bay, was vetoed by Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in January 2023 by a little-used section of the Clean Water Act (Section 404(c)).
In Alaska, 28 million acres were put off limits to oil, gas, and mining exploration in 2024, adding to the nearly half of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska that was put off limits in 2022. The administration also revoked leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) that were specifically intended for oil and gas exploration. It seems the administration would prefer it if western states were enormous nature preserves fully dependent on tourism.
But why should Minnesotans care about what happens in the remote corners of the Alaskan tundra? Minnesotans face the same indecisive flip-flopping that deters investment and hurts local economies. In January 2022, the Biden administration thoroughly derailed development of the Twin Metals mine, planned in the Duluth Complex in northeastern Minnesota, by canceling two federal mineral leases in the Superior National Forest. Twin Metals estimates its mine would create 750 direct jobs and 1,500 jobs within the local community.
The canceled leases flip-flopped the Trump administration’s 2017 decision to reinstate the leases and renew them for 10 years. Mr. Trump’s actions were themselves a reversal of an Obama administration decision to deny the lease renewal application in 2016. The future of Twin Metals is now also jeopardized by a 20-year mining moratorium on 225,000 acres in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, including the lands where the company’s leases are located.
The NorthMet project, which would be developed by NewRange Copper Nickel (formerly PolyMet Inc.) to extract copper, nickel, and precious metals, has been delayed since June 2023. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pulled the project’s permit under the Clean Water Act (Section 404). NewRange estimates that NorthMet would create up to 1,000 jobs and produce and process 29,000 metric tons of ore per day.
It’s a miracle that mines are ever built, given the federal government’s lengthy, costly, and adversarial permitting process. In the U.S., projects determined to have an impact on the environment must undergo either an environmental impact statement or an environmental assessment at the federal level, depending on scale. This applies not only to federal agencies, but also states, localities, private citizens, and corporations. The applicants for a project must submit a litany of technical, environmental, and procedural documents proving the safe construction, operation, and closure of mines. Applicants also engage in stakeholder meetings and public comments.
While a rigorous permitting process sets a high bar for quality control and safety, it can take a decade or more to finish, especially if it is drawn out by lengthy litigation — with no guarantee of success. For example, the NorthMet project was first proposed in 2004, and nearly 20 years later, finds itself missing a required permit after the administration radically changed. Permitting is frequently politicized, and opponents bring legal challenges to almost every project. If a judge rules that the process was done incorrectly at any stage, they can order that the agencies redo the analysis entirely, which adds years and millions of dollars to the process.
Nicely done, ma'am. Thank you.
For readers interested in greater depth regarding the minerals mining issues both nationally and globally, I would recommend Ernest Scheider's book, "The War Below."
Some questions: Was there a specific reason for cancellation of the Ambler Road project, or just hand-waving?
Assuming that the DOE is not stupid, where does it propose to get the necessary minerals for renewables production? Bryce, Mills, Doomberg and others have pointed to minerals as being the fatal flaw in the green new deal (actually, one of MANY flaws, but that's for a different blog); does the administration have so much faith in the United Nations that it is willing to sacrifice energy security for botany?
The Obama-Trump-Biden flip/flops have been going on for years; no better example exists than the Yucca Mountain Project. Every republican president (until Trump) pushed for its development; every democratic president sabotaged it, despite the fact it was mandated by Congress. Until Congress reasserts its constitutional role as the legislative power and takes back the administrative power its has relinquished to the executive branch, such flip/flops in policy will become standard.
Keep up the great work! Minnesota is controlled by communists - heck, the federal government is as well...