Late last year, we reported news of the largest hard rock lithium deposit ever discovered. Given that there’s not enough of the stuff to achieve the ineffable utopia of net zero, you’d think the Dems would be pushing hard from all corners to get it out of the ground.
Nope.
The landowners want to mine it, but they have two problems.
First, it’s in America, and we’re not allowed to let anyone see what mining any sort of lithium does to the environment.
Open-pit mining is acceptable in dirt-poor third-world countries or places that hate us. It is acceptable to despoil Gaia to fulfill Western Prog fantasies of a clean energy future if they can’t see it. An interesting juxtaposition for people who claim to be liberal. Deference to one invisible “god” at the expense of all others by a political faction that denies god even exists.
It’s all good as long we cannot see the scars,
Second, the lithium deposit is on land owned by Mary and Gary Freeman, but it is in Maine, where the mining laws are so strict there are no active mines. They want the right to dig it up. State laws make it impossible, so they asked the courts to clarify the meaning of the word metals in the context of what they claim is not a metal but a rock.
At the heart of both appeals is the phrasing of the 2017 law, which refers to “metallic mineral.” Most minerals contain metallic elements, but the term has no commonly agreed upon definition in the scientific community. That has made it difficult for state regulators to figure out what qualifies as one without explicit guidance from lawmakers.
Spodumene, which has no history of regulation in Maine, was not discussed during talks on the law and should thus be considered a metallic mineral, said DEP officials, even though the mining act’s regulations “exceed what would be necessary to allow environmentally responsible extraction of spodumene, and effectively prohibit spodumene extraction.”
The Freemans argue that spodumene is a rock, not a metal, and should fall under the state’s quarrying regulations.
The Freemans own the land to look for other sorts of “rock” when they came across the spodumene: “a pyroxene mineral consisting of lithium aluminum inosilicate, LiAl₂, and is a source of lithium. It occurs as colorless to yellowish, purplish, or lilac kunzite, yellowish-green or emerald-green hiddenite, prismatic crystals, often of great size.”
Yeah, I looked it up.
I can’t say what a court might decide or what the Maine Department of Environmental Protection might say. I’m no expert on rocks or metals, but I am familiar with how government regulations prevent domestic mineral development in favor of politics even when the “mineral” is essential to the politics.
I think the Biden EPA will probably want to cause some trouble. And if the Freemans are old enough, they may be tied up in the permission-getting process until they’ve died or the government takes it from them and gives the mining rights to someone else.
If things get ugly, I can picture the IRS wanting to look at their families’ tax returns for the past hundred years, and God help them if they vote or donate to Republicans.
But it is something they might be able to fix with a donation to the right people.
HT | The Maine Monitor
