Copper Mining: Totally Not Green, But Totally Needed for “Green” Energy

Destroying the environment to save it

Philcomanforterie, CC BY-SA 4.0

This is a photo of the Morenci Copper Mine, the highest production copper mine in the United States, and third-most in the world. For scale, the tires on the dump trucks in the photo are 13’ (4m) high, meaning the vehicles are as large as small two-story houses. Mining started there underground in 1871, and then became an open pit in 1937. [ Morenci Mine at Wikipedia | Atlas Obscura ]

I’ve been there. In fact if I hopped in my truck right now I could be there in an hour and a half. Highway 191 goes right through the middle of the mine, going one from low desert Creosote Bush scrub in the south into mountainous Juniper woodlands in the north. I took that route in March 2021 to access National Forest trail heads in the vicinity. Here are wildflowers blooming in the highway divider from that trip. The lighter-colored areas on the mountains in the farthest distance, upper left, are part of the mining operations, where the vegetation and top layers of soil were removed decades ago.

Desert Margiolds (genus Baileya) and some species of Penstemon

The drive through the open pit itself is like being on another planet. The landscape doesn’t feel earthly. For me, it is the single most Hellish place I’ve ever been, even worse than clear-cut forests. Stripped, blasted, and scraped out, the mine is one big open wound, frightfully ugly beyond description.

Open pit mines like this are responsible for a host of terrible environmental effects.

• First is habitat destruction, obviously. All vegetation is razed and all animals made homeless or killed. The very ground they grew in or stood on or burrowed into or flew over is removed as what is called “overburden.” As the pit is dug deeper and wider, the footprint of destruction expands.

• Water wastage. Morenci Mine holds water rights on much of the surrounding area. Over the decades several rivers have been dammed to collect their flow, which is pumped through miles of pipes to the mine. This is water stolen from riparian areas and the ground, denying it to plants, animals and humans.

• Toxic tailings. When copper is separated from the rock it’s embedded in, the leftover materials, often ground down to a powder, are called “tailings.” Tailings contain high levels of heavy metals like lead and arsenic, and other pollutants. Water is added to tailings and the resulting slurry is piped to manufactured ponds. This slurry is super toxic and can leach into groundwater. If the embankment holding back the slurry breaks, which happens from time to time at mines around the world, it’s a disaster for the area that’s flooded.

• Water pollution. Besides the leaching from tailings ponds, acid mine drainage is also an issue. Naturally occurring sulfides in the overburden are exposed to air, and acids are formed, which are then introduced into groundwater by rain. In underground mines below the water table, the same process happens after a mine is abandoned and pumping to keep out the groundwater ceases.

• Air pollution. Dust containing toxic substances is produced as a matter of course in an open pit mine and is stirred up and distributed by the wind. This affects workers on site but also the surrounding area, both land and water.

• Noise and light pollution. Mines are operated 24/7 so disturbances from machinery sound and artificial lighting are constant.

• Last but not least, carbon emissions. Mines are highly mechanized places and require prodigious use of fossil fuels. (True, the Caterpillar Corporation has electric mining trucks in the prototype stage, but it’s not ready yet, and even if it proves capable of the work, all the other terrible effects of copper mining would remain in full effect.)

Given how awful copper mines are, we should be making every effort to reduce our consumption of the precious metal, so that no new mines are needed, and so that ongoing production can be reined in to the lowest level possible. On top of that, the amount of clean-up and site remediation that’s needed at copper mining sites all around the world is monumental.

Philcomanforterie, CC BY-SA 4.0

“Green” energy can’t happen without copper

But the “green/clean energy transition” as currently pitched will require vast amounts of copper for essential aspects of energy generation and transmission.

Besides components like wiring, inverters, turbines, generators and motors, the demand for copper for transmission lines is enormous. All those solar farms and wind farms and hydroelectric facilities in the countryside or the wildlands are far away from where the energy is used and miles and miles of new, large, interstate transmission lines will be needed to convey it there. How many miles? Estimates vary, but the most conservative figure I found for the US was “double” what currently exists. A Princeton University report calculates 3.2 times as much. The woefully misnamed National Resource Defense Council recommends quadrupling transmission capacity. The International Energy Agency [IEA] projects that the world will need to add or replace 50 million miles of new transmission lines by 2040, which Just the News notes is “the equivalent of circling the equator more than 2,000 times.”

That’s madness. How many more mines of Morenci scale would be needed to build this out? Where would they be? Whatever locations are chosen are complete sacrifice zones where all living things will be wiped out and the landscape poisoned for centuries to come. This is “green”? This is “sustainable”? This is a “solution”? Fuck that, seriously.

But can it even be done? Energy expert Robert Bryce doesn’t think so due to obstacles both regulatory and social. He points out that it takes years to approve new transmission lines, and nearby residents often push back hard against them, especially when their land will be seized under imminent domain. Bryce details these subjects in his 2023 article “Out of Transmission” which I highly recommend (though I couldn’t disagree more strongly with his conclusion, that we should site nuclear power at old coal plants).

When it comes to establishing new copper mines, one significant regulatory hurdle seems set to fall soon. On Nov. 14^th, the US House of Representatives approved the Critical Mineral Consistency Act, which was recently introduced to the Senate, where it is also expected to pass. The Act adds copper to a list of “critical minerals” maintained by the US Geological Survey. According to Cronkite News, “Inclusion on the USGS list would trigger an assortment of regulatory benefits and financial incentives, including FAST-41, which accelerates permitting for certain energy and infrastructure projects. It’s named for Title 41 of the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation [FAST] Act, which became law in 2015.” The FAST Act is a funding bill that, among other things, “expedites permitting and environmental review,” which we can read as “waters down an already watered down process.”

The Trump administration is expected to weaken, gut, or even eliminate environmental regulation, which will “expedite” the approval of new copper mines even faster.

Philcomanforterie, CC BY-SA 4.0

The tragic threat to Oak Flat

While many places will be under threat from copper mining, I must call special attention to the case of Oak Flat. The area, which is known in Western Apache as Chíchʼil Bił Dagoteel and in Navajo as Chéchʼil Bił Dahoteel, has been a sacred indigenous site for at least 1500 years, and is still used for coming-of-age ceremonies, sweat lodges and other events. Hundreds of archaeological sites, including petroglyphs, are found there. In 1955, knowing its significance, President Eisenhower decreed the area closed to mining in perpetuity, and it has been administrated as part of the Tonto National Forest since then.

Unfortunately, beneath Oak Flat is a huge copper deposit, so mining companies tried to gain access in the decades that followed. Finally, in 2014, Senator John McCain of Arizona abused the legislative process by slipping a rider into a must-pass defense authorization bill. The rider approved a land swap to open Oak Flat to mining, and the development rights were soon purchased by Rio Tinto, the Australian mining company infamous for blowing up a 46,000 year old Aboriginal site. (Btw, McCain is a war-monger and a right-winger, but he gained popularity among some liberals because he criticized Trump. Here’s hoping that hearing about this betrayal of Native Americans will cause them to reverse on that. He’s an asshole and no hero.)

Though not an open-pit mine, the underground excavation is expected to cause a collapse of the surface above into a crater almost two miles wide and at least 1000 feet deep. Which would be a death sentence to everything in that footprint, and a wiping away of any cultural artifacts and contemporary ceremonial places.

In other words, fucking over the Indians yet again. Jesus H. fucking Christ, can we stop doing that already?

Stephanie Salisbury, CC BY 2.0

Destroying the environment to save it

Over and over again, when the topic is “green” or “clean” energy, I’m reminded of the Vietnam era quotation from a US Army major who said, in reference to a Vietnamese village they’d just bombed the fuck out of: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” The ostensible motivation to build all this new industrial infrastructure is environmental, but its construction and maintenance will destroy or degrade untold expanses of the environment both on-site and in far-flung locations, intensifying problems like habitat loss, extinction, and toxic pollution.

The “green/clean energy” advocates who want to look the other way on these issues really piss me off. The stakes are so high, they claim, that we must do this. “This” being embarking upon an entire new chapter of industrial extraction and development under the rubric of a “green energy transition” even though it will guarantee the devastation of more habitat, the killing of more flora and fauna, and the toxification of more landscapes, plus, which isn’t even on track to achieve its objective, to replace fossil fuels, not just add to them, which is all that’s happened so far. Some advocates (looking at you NRDC) even have the nerve to talk about “energy justice” although Native Americans will be among the hardest-hit by “green” energy development due to proximity of their communities to high demand substances and places.

There’s virtually no consideration of the energy reduction transition that we really need. Instead of stressing the necessity of using less, advocates are seemingly only interested in how to consume the same or even more, just with a different power source. When it comes to the environmental costs of “green/clean” tech, most of them don’t even have the guts to talk about “hard choices” or “compromise”; they just pretend that such costs either don’t exist, are trivial, or can be hand-waved away because technology will eventually come to the rescue.

I want these people to visit the places that will be destroyed by their green/clean dreams. They should camp out there for at least a few days with their phones off, and meet as many of the land’s residents as they can: the plants, the insects, the birds, the animals. Some people say you can meet spirits in such places, so they should be open to that too. To each of these creatures or beings they should say, “Sorry, but you have to be homeless or die so I can drive my EV and charge it on ‘renewables.’”

And since that’s what they want, they should do some of “what has to be done” themselves while they’re there: yank up some wildflowers, chop down a tree, dump poison into a water source, smash a butterfly, kill an animal or a bird and stomp its body into mush. If they feel any sadness or regret about any of that, they should push that shit down because we can’t afford that. This is what we have to do, after all, right? That’s what they’re telling us.

I can’t say it enough: Fuck that.

Some sources:

• Treehugger.com: What Is Open-Pit Mining? Definition, Examples, and Environmental Impact

• Medium: Top 10 Environmental Challenges in Copper Mining

• Green Living Magazine: Oak Flat: Here’s What to Know About the Area’s Sacred Land Exchange

• Apache Stronghold: Defending Holy Sites, Protect Chi’chil Bildagoteel

Note:

As an interesting aside, the oft-repeated claim, now disproved, that introduced Saltcedar/Tamarisk trees (Tamarix sp.) take up more water than native Cottonwoods and Willows originated with the Phelps Dodge Corporation, which owned the Morenci mine in the 1930s. Requiring more water for operations, and running low on their claims, they overstated how much the trees were drawing so that they could take that much more after they cut them down. They had previously razed Cottonwoods under a similar rationale. To this day, people still say that Tamarix is an especially thirsty tree, even though it totally isn’t at all. What do they say? “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on”? For a fuller version of this story, see this piece by Nikki Hill and me: “Shooting the messengers: How plants are unfairly blamed for wasteful human water practices in the U.S. West.”