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Mining claims have proliferated across Western states in recent years, driven by demand for minerals to produce electric vehicle batteries and other renewable energy technologies, and helped by the fact that staking a mining claim is very easy to do under the General Mining Law of 1872, which still governs hardrock mining despite being wildly outdated. These minerals are present in significant quantities in Western states; however, the massive amount of water required to mine them is not. The proposed Resolution copper mine in Arizona, for example, will need an amount of water that would be enough for 1.5 million Arizona homes for 40 years. And as Tao Etpison, vice chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, points out, "Once the groundwater is gone, it's gone. How is this in the best interests of Arizona?" A report commissioned by the Tribe concluded that, "By pumping billions of gallons of groundwater from the East Salt River Valley, this project would make Arizona’s goal for stewardship of its scarce groundwater resources unreachable."
This challenge is all too familiar to other Western states. "Nevadans almost more than any other state have had to wrestle with the availability or lack thereof of water for development for its entire history," said Mason Voehl, executive director of the Amargosa Conservancy. But because mining is still governed by an antiquated law that was designed to encourage resource extraction by giving away rights to land, the rights that come along with mining claims are powerful. According to Roger Flynn, director and managing attorney of the Western Mining Action Project, "Water is going to be scarcer in the Southwest but the mining industry is basically immune from all these issues."
Department of Energy survey finds that community opposition, not environmental review, delays and kills wind and solar projects
A survey of wind and solar developers conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2023 and released this month found that local ordinances or zoning, grid interconnection challenges, and local opposition to wind and solar projects based on visual concerns, community character, and property values were the most likely cause of project delays and cancellations. Fewer than 20 percent of respondents listed environmental restrictions among their top three causes of delays and cancellations. Both a summary and a full report are available on the LBNL website.
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