News from a Changing Planet -- This Week on Earth #31
Western water woes and the clean energy transition, Greenland's melting, turning cities into forests and more.
DRYING UP THE WEST: How the clean energy transition is accelerating water issues in the American Southwest, plus a brief history of American mining (Inside Climate News)
It’s probably not news to many of you that switching over to an electrified world means we’ll need a lot of metals and other critical minerals — lithium, copper, and cobalt, among others — but mining those metals takes huge amounts of water (in addition to land and energy), a requirement which often goes unmentioned.
Mining also often takes places in dry parts of the world, where water is hard to come by in the first place. One of those places is Arizona, as this article describes, and which is undergoing a groundwater crisis, as its limits are stretched by the growing population and a shrinking water supply, due to overuse and climate change.
And mining’s impacts on groundwater supply don’t begin and end with the mining stage: mines can (and usually do) pollute local streams and groundwater, as toxins from mines seep out into these waters over the years.
I’m including today’s story in the roundup despite its relatively well-known subject matter because I was blown away by the following information:
As an industry in the West, mining was established by the Mining Law of 1872, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, which was meant to spur continued expansion into the west by allowing anyone to mine on federal lands for free. “To do this, all one needs to do is plant four stakes into the ground where they think there are minerals and file a claim. Unlike other industries that make use of public lands—such as the oil and gas industry—no royalties are paid for the minerals extracted from the lands owned by American taxpayers.”
At that time, other industries — oil and gas drilling, ranching, and logging — were also given this gift by the federal government, but all of those laws have changed, except mining, which has led regulators to view it as a highest and best use of public land, above conservation and recreation, according to Roger Flynn, director and managing attorney at the Western Mining Action Project.
PLUS": “You don’t have to actually demonstrate that there are any minerals in a mining claim, you don’t have to provide any evidence that there is a mineral there at all,” said John Hadder, the executive director of Great Basin Resource Watch, an environmental group based in Nevada that monitors mining claims. “You can just be suspicious—and there’s a lot of suspicion going around.”
This has meant a boom in claims — there are 20,000 claims in Nevada for lithium alone — which has also meant a change in the economic and demographic makeup of lots of communities, as mining companies with claims come in and, recognizing a possible future need for water, buy up water rights from farmers and ranchers.
MORE WATER, THIS TIME MELTING: Greenland’s glaciers are melting more/faster than previously thought. (Washington Post)
In last week’s edition about decreasing snowfall around the world and polar temperatures in non-polar places, I included some information about Greenland’s melting ice sheet. No sooner had I sent out that edition than a devoted reader sent me this story, about how, actually, Greenland is melting faster than previous estimates suggested, with worrying implications, mainly for ocean circulation, which governs our weather patterns.
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