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President Donald Trump luckily didn’t embrace northeast Minnesota’s dangerous Twin Metals copper-nickel mine on a recent executive order aiming to fast-track initiatives like this.
However any sigh of reduction about that by Boundary Waters Canoe Space Wilderness (BWCAW) advocates got here to a fast finish this week as Minnesota U.S. Home Rep. Pete Stauber and his GOP colleagues took one other reckless run at resurrecting this controversial mining mission.
The Twin Metals mission wouldn’t solely be situated inside the BWCAW watershed, however the underground mine and its aboveground operations would even be perched close to the shoreline of a lake that’s upstream of the beloved, interconnected watery wilderness. Any air pollution from an business already infamous for its abysmal environmental monitor report might move downstream into the BWCAW’s fragile waters.
In 2023, the Biden administration took a historic step to guard the BWCAW from this mission’s potential air pollution, enacting a coverage that’s successfully a 20-year moratorium on copper-nickel mining within the watershed. In 2024, a Stauber invoice aiming to overturn these protections cleared the Republican-controlled Home, however fortunately by no means gained traction within the U.S. Senate. It expired with the top of the final Congressional session.
Regrettably, Stauber is at it once more, cavalierly casting apart the science documenting such a mining’s troubling menace to this protected place. His invoice focusing on very important BWCAW protections has new life and an expedited path towards enactment, with key provisions now often called Part 80131 of the Home Pure Sources Committee’s price range reconciliation invoice.
Congressional Republicans, who management the Home and U.S. Senate, are utilizing the reconciliation course of, a price range software, to enact a lot of Trump’s agenda via massive spending and income laws. Reconciliation’s key benefit: The laws can clear the Senate with a easy majority vs. a filibuster-proof 60 votes. Proper now, Republicans have 53 seats within the higher chamber.
