The Trump Administration Approved a Big Lithium Mine. A Top Official’s Husband Profited. (New York Times)
Excerpt:
A high-ranking official in the Interior Department is drawing scrutiny from ethics experts because she failed to disclose her family’s financial interest in the nation’s largest lithium mine that had been approved by her agency, according to state and federal records.
In 2018 Frank Falen sold water from a family ranch in northern Nevada to Lithium Nevada Corp., a subsidiary of Lithium Americas, for $3.5 million. The company was planning a $2.2 billion lithium mine nearby called Thacker Pass, and lithium mining requires significant amounts of water.
The mine needed a permit from the Interior Department, where Mr. Falen’s wife, Karen Budd-Falen, worked as the deputy solicitor responsible for wildlife from 2018 until 2021. She returned to the agency last year and is now the associate deputy secretary, the third highest-ranking position.
Mr. Falen’s sale of his water rights also depended on the mine getting a permit from the Interior Department. Without it, Lithium Nevada Corp. could have terminated its deal with him.
Just before President Trump’s first term ended, the Interior Department approved Thacker Pass, using a “fast track” process to bypass typically lengthy environmental reviews.
Aubrie Spady, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, declined to say whether Ms. Budd-Falen played a role in the approval of the mine. She did not respond to questions regarding whether Ms. Budd-Falen had recused herself from decisions related to the mine, or whether she had filed an ethics waiver that disclosed the fact that her husband would benefit from it.
Current plans to update our 152-year-old mining laws fail to redress centuries of mineral-extractive colonialism.
Excerpt from this story from The Revelator:
The first time I visited Peehee Mu’huh, mining for lithium had already begun.
I was there in the fall of 2023 as part of my work with People of Red Mountain, descendants of the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe who lead the movement against extraction on this sacred landscape. We gathered at the valley in northern Nevada, known as Thacker Pass, to commemorate the massacre of 31 Paiute-Shoshone people there by the U.S. Cavalry on Sept. 12, 1865.
To dig up every pound of lithium, the mine will remove thousands of pounds of rock, soil, and other minerals, most of which will not be used and are considered waste.
That’s the secret of mining: It requires significant space to dump its byproducts.
Mine waste is no longer in the forefront for the environmental movement as it was when coal and nuclear power had their heyday, but it remains a key issue activists and scholars should be following. At Thacker Pass the 1,300 acres of wasteland will occupy the space indefinitely. Arsenic, antimony, and other hazards from the refining process to get lithium from the clay will pile up in this backfill pit and leach into the soils, watersheds, and air.
Historically miners have faced minimal oversight. Any individual could venture onto public lands and stake a claim to the minerals they contained — rights to occupy the land were established merely by proving a mineral’s presence and getting there first. Unlike loggers on public land, miners don’t pay any royalties; mine leases on public lands cost as little as $3 dollars per acre.
You might be forgiven for thinking this scenario sounds like something out of the 1800s prospector and ‘49ers era — and in fact, it is. Mining law was last meaningfully legislated under the 1872 General Mining Act.
Just as with the Black Hills gold rush in the Dakota Territory and those in Oregon and California, mine fervor during the gold and silver rushes that white settlers led on the red-colored mountains of Paiute-Shoshone lands in the 1850s-60s was violent and met by Indigenous resistance.
That resistance was crushed. Many noncombatants were killed and others forcibly displaced to Washington; the destruction continued for decades and hasn’t stopped yet.
Today the land base of the Paiute, Shoshone, and Bannock peoples of the area — collectively known as Atsawkoodakuh wyh Nuwu or Red Mountain Dwellers — is permeated by both abandoned and active mines. Gold and tungsten mining waned in the early to mid-1900s, but then companies started extracting uranium and mercury at the McDermitt and Cordero mines across the road from Fort McDermitt. According to Department of the Interior archives, this was the nation’s largest mercury mine from the 1930s to the 1970s. After the Cordero mine closed, crews spread arsenic-contaminated waste from the mine around the town and reservation as a fill dirt. The region was later declared a Superfund site, and the contaminants were removed between 2009 and 2013.
But the toxic waste caused decades of harm in the community before that removal. In a brazen environmental injustice, many Tribal members who worked there perished of cancer. Sunoco and Barrick Gold, the companies that exploited the quicksilver lode, simply “declined” the EPA’s order to clean up the area and escaped culpability.
Now the sacred landscape of Peehee Mu’huh will become the country’s largest lithium bounty.
A new bill before Congress aims to strip away even the baby-steps reform of Rosemont. The Mining Regulatory Clarity Act (HR2925) passed the House in May and awaits Senate approval (S1281). One would assume a bipartisan effort with such a name would offer progress, but the bill guts Rosemont by removing the requirement of claimants to prove minerals before using and dumping waste on public land.
A competing bill, the Green Energy Minerals Reform Act, would introduce requirements such as paying mineral royalties and funding cleanup — basic protections that should have already been in force. Congress held hearings about this proposed legislation in late 2023, but it has not moved forward since.
Tribes near the proposed mine at Thacker Pass say they weren't adequately consulted.
Excerpt from this story from Grist:
When Daranda Hinkey, a 23-year-old member of the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe in northern Nevada, gazes across the austere expanse of old growth sagebrush 25 miles southwest of her tribe’s reservation, she doesn’t see Thacker Pass, the future site of America’s largest lithium mine. She sees Peehee Mu’huh, or “rotten moon,” the Paiute name for a place made sacred by the bones of her ancestors.
According to stories told by elders, Peehee Mu’huh got its name many generations ago, when Paiute people were massacred there by members of a warring tribe. Later, a second massacre took place: On September 12, 1865, the 1st Nevada Cavalry snuck into a Paiute camp in the Thacker Pass area before dawn and murdered dozens of men, women, and children in cold blood. This massacre, which is described in government survey documents, contemporaneous news articles, and eyewitness accounts, appears to have had just one adult survivor: Ox Sam, Hinkey’s great-great-great grandfather.
Hinkey is one of the founding members of Atsa Koodakuh wyh Nuwu, or People of the Red Mountain, an organization formed by members and relatives of the Fort McDermitt Tribe who want to stop Lithium Nevada Corporation from placing a mine on land they believe is a mass grave. Most of the People, as members of the group call themselves, are blood relatives of Ox Sam and feel a special connection to this place. “We’re all descendants of a survivor,” Hinkey told Grist. “We feel like we were meant to be here at this time, fighting for the land.”
Hinkey and her family are not the only ones who want to protect Thacker Pass. In recent months tribes throughout the region, as well as state and national organizations representing Native Americans, have spoken up in opposition to the lithium mine, citing the cultural, historical, and spiritual significance of the land, concerns over environmental impacts, and a lack of tribal consultation. While the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, sent letters to four nearby tribes notifying them about the mine during the federal environmental permitting process in late 2019 and 2020, none of those tribes’ leadership offered input before the agency formally approved the mine in January. Other tribes that have ancestral ties to Thacker Pass weren’t contacted at all.
In July, the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony and the People of the Red Mountain intervened in a federal lawsuit against the mine. In August, the Burns Paiute Tribe, headquartered in southeastern Oregon, joined the suit as well. The lawsuit, launched by a rancher and several environmental groups in February, alleges that the BLM illegally ignored potential impacts on water resources and threatened wildlife like the greater sage grouse when it approved the mine. The tribes, meanwhile, are alleging that the agency violated the National Historic Preservation Act by failing to consult them.
So far, things haven’t worked out in the tribes’ favor. In September, U.S. District Court Judge Miranda Du denied their motion for an injunction to stop Lithium Nevada from carrying out an archaeological survey of Thacker Pass without further consultation.
The hastily approved project went forward without comment from the Fort McDermitt Paiute Shoshone Tribe.
This is one of those conundrum things. We need lithium batteries, without another technology, to electrify our economy and get us off the fossil fuel hamster wheel. Yet lithium comes from wilderness areas, or areas with conservation and ecological values. So which way do we go at the fork on the road? Same question about wind power: how many birds and bats die so we can have wind power? And solar: how much desert and prairie land do we sacrifice, along with the associated wildlife, so can have solar power? And so on.
Excerpt from this story from High Country News:
In the Great Basin Desert of northern Nevada and southern Oregon, Thacker pass cuts a wide swath of sagebrush and bunch grasses between narrow ribbons of mountain ranges. The region is a caldera — a collapsed volcano — that formed an ancient lakebed. For millennia, Indigenous peoples used the verdant valley as a pathway between their winter and summer homes. Today, the Fort McDermitt Paiute Shoshone Tribe’s reservation is located nearby, along with the small agricultural community of Orovada, clusters of buildings surrounded by circular green fields of alfalfa.
The ancient lakebed clays are rich in lithium, and in January, the Bureau of Land Management approved the Thacker Pass lithium mine, an almost two-square-mile open-pit mine that will dig up the nation’s largest-known lithium supply. The mine will be run by Lithium Nevada, a subsidiary of Canadian-owned Lithium Americas. But its approval was rushed through during the coronavirus pandemic, and tribal members, ranchers and environmentalists have concerns about the mine’s potential long-term consequences.
Until now, lithium typically has been extracted from saline areas, such as Chile’s Atacama Desert, through an evaporative process. A relatively new technique using sulfuric acid to extract it from clay means the West is facing a new mining boom — and Nevada may soon be a global lithium-mining hotspot.
Lithium, the lightest metal, shines silvery when stored in protective oils. (Otherwise, it’s extremely flammable.) That lightness makes lithium ion batteries essential to everything from cellphones, to tablets, to Teslas. Lithium ion batteries also store energy for much longer than other batteries, so they can be important parts of solar and wind energy systems.
Electrovoltaic, or EV, vehicles are a growing part of efforts to combat climate change. For example, General Motors announced in January that it planned to stop making combustion-engine cars by 2035.
But as anyone with an aging cellphone knows, lithium ion batteries degrade over time. What’s more, companies seldom recycle the batteries to reuse the rare metals inside them; it’s more cost-effective simply to mine for more.
Despite the combined opposition of Indigenous tribes, environmentalists and a rancher, ground broke this week on the Thacker Pass mine.
Excerpt from this story from Grist:
Construction began this week on an open-pit mine at the largest lithium deposit in the United States, even as tribes and environmental groups continue a years-long effort to block the project.
Lithium Americas Corp. announced that it began construction on the Thacker Pass lithium project in Humboldt County, Nevada, after the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied a request Wednesday by mine opponents to block work.
The Bureau of Land Management approved the $2.2 billion mine project in January 2021. Mining operations would cover 5,000 acres and create a pit deeper than a football field. Lithium is a key component in the batteries of electric vehicles.
Thacker Pass, known as Peehee Mu’huh to the Paiute Shoshone people, is 200 miles north of Reno and less than 40 miles north of the tribal land of the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone tribe. Tribes opposing the mine say the area has historical, cultural and religious importance and that it was the site of an 1865 massacre of at least 31 Paiute people.
“It’s an important place not only because a terrible massacre occurred, but also because it’s a place where people gather, it’s a place for ceremony, for hunting,” said Michon Eben, tribal historic preservation officer for the Reno Sparks Indian Colony, a government that includes members from the the Paiute, Shoshone and Washoe tribes. The colony is advocating for Peehee Mu’huh to be on the National Register of Historic Places. “It’s really hard to be a tribal member and see our homelands destroyed,” said Eben.
Thacker Pass also comprises thousands of acres of sagebrush and is a nesting ground for the sage grouse and a migration corridor for pronghorn antelope. Environmental groups including the Great Basin Resource Watch and Western Watersheds Project say the mine would cause irreversible ecological damage, and that the project’s impact was not adequately studied.
“It got by the environmental impact statement process in just under a year and I would expect a project of this scale and complexity to take 3 to 5 years,” said John Hadder, director of Great Basin Resource Watch. “That’s sloppy permitting on the side of the federal government.”
The ruling marks a setback for opponents of the Thacker Pass project, which could ultimately become a major supplier of lithium for electric vehicle
Excerpt from this story from E&E News:
A federal judge in Nevada on Monday upheld the federal government’s approval of the largest proposed lithium mine in the nation, dismissing arguments that the Thacker Pass project would degrade nearby aquifers, air quality, and habitat for the imperiled greater sage grouse.
But U.S. District Judge Miranda Du in her ruling also asked the Bureau of Land Management to revisit a portion of its environmental analysis. The agency violated federal law by failing to validate that developer Lithium Americas Corp. has the rights to dump waste and tailings on about 1,300 acres at the site in Humboldt County, the judge concluded.
While the court’s decision is a setback for environmental groups, nearby Indigenous communities and a local rancher opposed to the project, it marks a significant milestone for the mine, which would be built on 5,700 acres of federal land in north Nevada.
Lithium Americas in a statement hailed the ruling as “favorable” and said it confirms that the permitting process was conducted thoroughly and responsibly. The company has said it wants to begin construction this year.
“The favorable ruling leaves in place the final regulatory approval needed in moving Thacker Pass into construction,” said Jonathan Evans, the company’s president and CEO.
Thacker Pass could help the United States transition away from gasoline-powered cars by giving automakers a domestic supply of lithium carbonate chemicals needed for electric vehicle batteries. Lithium is a critical component in EV batteries and renewable technologies, and demand is expected to triple in coming years.
Just last month, General Motors Co. announced it was investing $650 million in the project if it survived the lawsuit, marking the largest single investment to date by an automaker in a lithium mining project. Developers have estimated that the mine could produce enough lithium to support the production of as many as 1 million EVs annually (Greenwire, Jan. 31).
Currently, there is only one lithium mine operating in the United States.
But the Thacker Pass project has faced multiple challenges after receiving a “record of decision” from BLM in 2020 under the Trump administration, arguments that Du acknowledged and addressed in her order.
