Sunday, Oct. 29, 2006 | 7:53 a.m.
Rep. Jim Gibbons slipped a provision into a House budget bill last fall that would have radically altered the landmark 1872 Mining Law to allow for the sale of large tracts of public lands.
The Reno Republican said it would help Nevada's small rural communities that depend on mining provide for the future. The law would have
liberalized rules for staking mining claims and privatizing public lands, both important issues for mining communities.
As details of the provision bounced around Washington, however, opponents multiplied into a diverse coalition. Environmentalists opposed it. So did hunters and anglers and local governments and a taxpayer advocacy group. They painted an ugly picture, arguing that aside from opening mines in protected areas, mining companies or real estate developers would convert or sell newly privatized land for ski resorts or second homes. They forecast rampant land speculation and a massive, chaotic sell-off of public lands.
Some mining advocates covered their eyes at the emerging political fiasco over a bill they weren't all that excited about anyway. Then, two Republican senators, Wayne Allard of Colorado and Larry Craig of Idaho, mining state lawmakers who could have been allies of Gibbons on the bill, came out against it.
The provision died an ugly death.
Its history, however, illustrates the politics, effectiveness and deeply held beliefs of the Republican candidate for governor. After a long career championing mining causes, this was to be his signature achievement. In some ways, the failure blemished a career of devotion to mining interests.
Gibbons has every reason to support mining. He touts a master's degree in mining geology from UNR and time spent as a mining lawyer. The industry is an important source of jobs and economic development in Gibbons' district, which encompasses nearly the entire state outside of Las Vegas.
More than 11,000 people work directly for mining companies in Nevada, with another 50,000 employed by their vendors in 2004, according to the Nevada Mining Association.
With the price of gold at more than $500 an ounce, and Nevada the third-largest gold producer in the world, the industry is important to constituents of his largely rural district. Also, Gibbons has collected more than $200,0000 in contributions from the mining industry during his nearly two-decade career in state and national politics.
His opponent in the race for governor, state Sen. Dina Titus, also voices support for mining, and the state's congressional delegation is similarly inclined.
Still, environmentalists say there's no sense of proportion in Gibbons' mining advocacy - with air, water and earth always losing out to mining interests. The League of Conservation Voters recently gave him a zero on its scorecard, which followed a zero for 2005.
One reason for the criticism is Gibbons' opposition to mining regulation in the 1990s, when the Environmental Protection Agency sought to include the industry in the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act.
The act, approved by Congress in 1986, forced businesses to inform the public of all their toxic releases, which were then cataloged in the Toxic Release Inventory. The mining industry was exempt from the law.
When the EPA moved to include mining under the act, Gibbons fought it. He argued, as did Barrick Gold, a mining company that filed a lawsuit against the EPA, that much of the toxic releases from mines occur naturally and that minerals stored in rock are thus perfectly safe.
Lauren Pagel Nason, the policy director of Earthworks, an environmental group that specializes in mining issues, recalled a subcommittee meeting at which Gibbons moved a large piece of lead from one part of the dais to another, arguing that it demonstrated how mining companies harmlessly move rock around.
Scientists, however, say that toxic chemicals in mining waste rock, which would otherwise be buried, are exposed to water and air when mined and are transformed into an environmental hazard.
Indeed, once mining was subject to the Toxic Release Inventory, the industry shot to the top of the list of polluters, at 250 million pounds a year. The list included arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury.
Gibbons said in a recent interview that if mining companies must report toxic releases, so should farmers and highway construction firms: "It's fair to have the mining industry report the movement of soil and the content of soil. But if it's fair for mining, it should be a requirement for everybody."
Opponents note that neither farmers nor highway firms dig mile-deep pits or use methods that create such toxic waste.
Mining companies often use a cyanide solution to separate valuable from worthless metals. Tailings, or finely ground materials that are left over after valuable metals have been extracted, can also contain toxic heavy metals.
When the cyanide and tailings aren't properly stored, the toxins can leach into ground or surface water. That happened in Romania in 2000, when 100,000 cubic meters of toxic sludge flowed into a tributary, and then into the Somes River in nearby Hungary.
Mercury is another problem, scientists say. When mining companies "roast" the rock they mine, or heat the ore to extract the gold, mercury is released into the environment. According to the EPA, Nevada has some of the highest concentrations of airborne mercury in the country.
Gibbons sought to dispel public fears of mercury by releasing a report about mining in early 2005 with his friend and colleague Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif. The report was viewed as a proxy defense of coal-fired power plants and - to a lesser extent - gold mines.
Among the report's broad assertions: Most mercury is released through natural processes; power plants account for less than 1 percent of mercury emissions; mercury emissions have decreased since 1990; mercury levels in fish have remained the same or slightly decreased; there's no evidence of harm to pregnant women or their unborn children from regular fish consumption; scientific literature shows no link between U.S. power plant emissions and mercury in fish; and the EPA's mercury standards are too restrictive.
"As a result of their well-funded effort to push their political agenda, environmentalists have caused American citizens to be unnecessarily concerned about possible health effects from exposure to trace amounts of mercury," the report read.
Gibbons said in an interview this month that the report was an attempt "to balance out the debate, let people draw their own conclusions. Nowhere in anything I've written or said indicates I don't believe mercury is toxic. It's toxic in concentrated amounts," Gibbons said.
Gibbons and Pombo stood alone, however. Research by the National Academy of Sciences and the EPA have contradicted the findings.
The problem, scientists say, is that mercury accumulates and moves up the food chain. John Risher, a toxicologist for the federal government's Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry, said, "We should reduce exposure as much as we can, but we're not going to be at risk as much as our children and grandchildren and future generations."
Concentrated mercury is one of the most toxic chemicals known to man. Its gravest threat is to fetal brain development.
Glenn Miller, a professor of toxicology at UNR and an occasional critic of the mining industry, was blunt in his assessment of the Gibbons report: "That report has no scientific credibility in the scientific community at all. It's contrary to everything I've read about mercury in the last 30 years."
Some people in Washington found the report politically puzzling, if in keeping with Gibbons' history of ideological theater.
A mining lobbyist who didn't want to be identified for fear of alienating a potential governor said he found efforts like these misguided, serving only to draw attention to mercury while failing to persuade the public.
One clue to this behavior is found in Gibbons' admiration for smaller mining companies. The aim of his ideological stridency is, at least in part, to protect small mining companies, which he believes are victimized by government regulation.
"Small companies don't have the resources to fight a lot of the battles that the big companies have," he told the Sun. "Small mining companies are made up of the kinds of individuals who started this great state. Some of these people are eating cornflakes. They've invested their life out there."
This affinity for workers in small mining companies and the rural Nevada towns they call home could explain last fall's effort to reform the mining law.
It was a troubled effort from the beginning.
Lobbyists were summoned and told they could read the language but not take the draft with them.
The legislation, though, was badly written, according to John Leshy, a former Interior Department solicitor general under President Bill Clinton, as well as mining lobbyists and Capitol Hill aides who did not want the Sun to name them.
A group of law professors who specialize in public lands law wrote to Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and said the law contained troubling provisions: 6 million acres of public land would be open to privatization at prices far below true value because "fair market value" was specifically not to include the valuable minerals beneath the land; it would eliminate the bedrock "discovery" requirement, allowing companies to place claims on land without demonstrating the likelihood of creating a mine; it would allow mining on existing claims in environmentally protected areas; it would prevent the government from collecting royalties on mineral production; and it would have allowed mining companies to avoid certain federal environmental standards by mining private rather than public land.
Gibbons said the law was misunderstood, fed by a misinformation campaign conducted by opponents.
Perhaps, but that's not how it was viewed on Capitol Hill.
Hunting groups, a reliable Republican constituency, lined up against it quickly, afraid that cherished hunting areas on public land would be privatized and thus no longer accessible. Gibbons was denounced by name on editorial pages throughout the West.
By angering sportsmen, Republicans risked an important constituency. It was enough to convince crucial Western Republicans that the bill was politically toxic and not worth the juice required to pass it.
Quite simply, Gibbons failed to create a coalition, which is the first requirement in any attempt to get legislation passed, especially in such a politically sensitive area as mining.
"Because there were those who saw it as a threat to the existing way they want to change mining law, they built a tremendous network of misinformation," Gibbons recalled. "They were too far ahead of us, and the process was overwhelming to get the truth out to counteract that."
Gibbons said the experience taught him a lesson: "An educational process has to lead the legislation rather than the other way around."
It was an odd admission for someone in his fifth term in Congress, and it may explain his relatively small number of accomplishments on behalf of mining. His office gave the Sun a list of mining-related achievements that contained just one piece of legislation: creation of the Army Corps of Engineers Restoration of Abandoned Mine Sites program, which has helped clean up abandoned mines.
The rest of the accomplishments are difficult to measure because they involve educating, advocating and moving "the discussion about our national minerals policy forward."
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