Lithium Mine at Thacker Pass: “We don’t need no stinking permit!”
Attack on the Earth
On July 6, 2023, an article in the Reno (NV) Gazette Journal presented “12 questions about Lithium Americas’ $2.3 billion Thacker Pass Project in Nevada”. The same article was in USA Today.
The article ‘answers’ the 12 questions with “lightly edited responses … from Tim Crowley of Lithium Americas. Crowley [is] former head of the Nevada Mining Association”.
You can read the article for yourself. I just want to highlight one strange statement in the introduction to the piece:
The $2.3 billion effort is called the Thacker Pass Project, and it’s already started moving dirt …. [and] …. doing basic infrastructure such as putting in a water line [and] fencing … about 50 miles north of Winnemucca even as the permitting process is still being hashed out in the courts.
How can this happen — starting the project before it is approved?
I asked my friend Terry Lodge, a lead lawyer for the Paiute and Western Shoshone challengers of the mine.
Terry said:
“Yeah, we’re stuck with weak and ineffectual laws. NEPA [National Environmental Protection Act] was further curtailed with statutory changes in the budget reconciliation by Congress a few weeks ago.”
So there you have it.
Once upon a time, ‘environmental protection’ meant having to get a permit to mess with lands or waters. Now that ‘impediment’ to ‘progress’ has been removed.
Terry also said:
“This mega-mine is likely to be eclipsed in size by several other potential mines being prospected in the region… The historically weak NEPA could not contain this catastrophe; the new, gutted NEPA statute will provide even less means of questioning and opposing the coming wave.
This gold rush is gaining momentum fast. Thacker Pass is only the beginning of the latest mega-cratering of the West.
He added:
It all tandems nicely with your analysis of the “Shhh! Chistianity-is-silent” discovery doctrine being widely hawked by Gorsuch. Because if the Natives get in the way of these lithium megamines, Congress is repeatedly being reassured by SCOTUS that it can act with impunity to shut ’em down.
Terry suggested we listen again to Bruce Cockburn’s Indian Wars:
“You thought it was over
But it’s just like before
Will there never be an end
To the Indian wars?”
Another friend, Robert Hager, a Nevada lawyer who sent me the Gazette article, added:
Nowhere has it ever been stated in any news articles that the mine will require 3 million gallons of water a day and that there is virtually no water there because it’s the f***ing desert.
The so called ‘green economy’ repeats the same domination story with a different coating: the transition from fossil fuels to so-called ‘green’ energy (so-called because electric cars and Lithium batteries are not at all green and the damage to the land by Lithium extraction is incommensurably high!) should happen without changing anything in the dominant way of life and without sacrifices, except, here again, for the ‘sacrifice zones’ on tribal land that keeps being treated as No Man’s Land, ignoring treaties and tribal rights and pretending to find ‘evidence’ as defined by the Bureau of Land Management about whether or not the site is sacred instead of listening to the people who have been living there since time immemorial. I am outraged that this is happening, again!