States’ rights

The State of Michigan has passed a law regulating mining of non-ferrous metals, one that Governor Jennifer Granholm says will be “the toughest set of mining regulations” in the United States.

We doubt Michigan will be vaulting past Montana or California for pure inhospitability to mining, but when we see state governors promising to get tough on the mineral industry, the visions we get are more like Neverland than Nevada. So it’s meet and right to take a closer look at the new Act of the Legislature.

What’s actually in the Act is generally unexceptionable — the government’s summary of the bill shows the same requirements you’d expect to see in the modern mining legislation of any First World jurisdiction. New mining operations will need a permit, which would only be issued once an environmental impact assessment and a closure plan had been approved; there would be public hearings. The state’s Department of Environmental Quality would be the agency with the authority to approve projects.

The new law provides for reclamation bonding and demands annual reports and incident reports from the mine operator. Really, it’s almost astonishing to find that Michigan is only now making these very ordinary provisions to regulate metal mining. Maybe it’s a measure of how the Upper Peninsula’s formerly thriving copper trade shrank, and then vanished, through the last few decades of the 20th century.

So Michigan now has the basic set of regulatory tools most governments have to ensure environmentally responsible mining. Then what’s so tough about this new law?

Three things appear. First, the State gets a “surveillance fee,” US5 per ton, on “material mined from the area.” It’s clear from the wording of the Act that this means both ore and waste, not just ore. Second, public participation in the mining approvals process elsewhere in the United States has an unpromising history (for an example, look just across the state line at the Crandon project). Third, the Department of Environmental Quality has a year to promulgate its standards, and with the enabling legislation in place, there is always the potential for unelected regulators to practise policy-by-numbers.

The people of Michigan had a right to a proper, comprehensive law covering mining practices and closure plans. The state doesn’t need to out-Montana Montana with the “toughest set” of regulations in the U.S. Our fingers are crossed for a reasonable and achievable set of criteria for environmentally responsible mining.

States’ blights

Twelve time zones away from the Copper Range, mining looks like it could become an issue in an impending election in Western Australia.

The state’s Development Minister, Clive Brown, reiterated the policy of Premier Geoffrey Gallop’s Labour government that a 2002 moratorium on uranium mining would stand. Brown was responding to a question in the Legislature from a Green Party member.

Brown was admirably clear on the government’s policy: “If the company wants to be stupid and invest lots of money looking for something that they can’t mine, then I can’t stop people doing such things, but under the Labour government, they would not be able to mine for uranium in Western Australia.”

This stems from the Gallop government’s own political trouble: December polls put the opposition National-Liberal coalition comfortably ahead of Labour. After Coalition resources critic Norman Moore suggested a new government would again permit uranium mines in Western Australia, the Development Minister was quick to raise the spectre in front of the electors.

There is an interesting irony here. Both parties have stated their opposition to having nuclear generating plants in Western Australia, but power demand in the state’s heavily urbanized southwest is rising. For a while Western Australia may happily fall back on coal-fired generation, but can it do that forever?