Polymet-What are you going to do with the 99% waste?
500 years of clean up is incomprehensible to a normal person, but not to a mining company. There seems to be a severe disconnect with reality. We have fragmented forests, impaired waters, and epidemiological studies show our region is below average in health in a number of important indicators. We are looking for the maximum daily load of pollutants rather than looking at the very real possibility that we should just stop polluting our forests, waters and life, that no corporation has the right to pollute to the max when we don’t know the long term effects of the increasingly complex mix of chemicals in our environment and bodies. We humans are a noble lot when cleaning up our messes, mostly, and terribly ignorant about how to prevent the disasters in the first place. 500 years ago that didn’t matter, there was a LOT of room for error. In 500 years I assure you there will be ABSOLUTELY NO room for error. Where are we now? From the known health of the ocean, the air, the forests, and us, humans it might be fair to assume we are much closer to NOT MUCH room for error. So, we should be significantly more cautious than we have been even a few decades ago.
It’s not the 1% Non-ferrous metals you’re taking that will be the problem, but what you leave behind, for how long, and at what risk and cost to those of us who live here. The one good thing, for me, that has come out of the intense scrutiny of the Non-Ferrous Mining proposals is that we now know that iron mining has a significantly more tainted history and has left us a lasting legacy of pollution that we should have dealt with a long time ago, but will have to get serious about cleaning up now. The myth of “Minnesota’s Strong Environmental Regualtions,” often tauted by Policians and Mining advocates alike is a PURE and ABSOLUTE MYTH! Doesn’t exit. Of course it is most definitely better than third world countries, but that bar is so low as to be ludicrous. What ever level of Regulations we do have in Minnesota, don’t mean a darn thing when, once permitted, a mining company just applies for a VARIANCE with the MPCA. How often are variances granted, NEARLY EVERY TIME. And, even though these variances are supposed to be temporary, our agencies continue, time and again, to renew them. Not what a reasonable person would call STRONG REGULATIONS for protecting the environment.
It’s the 99% we have to worry about.
The problem isn’t what they want to take, the problem is what they are going to leave and how easy our politicians and so-called protection agencies make it for them, the mining companies to accumulate 20 years of toxic sludge in already leaking tailings ponds upstream from life.
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