Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [288]
Those economic disincentives are exacerbated by the attitudes and corporate culture that have become traditional within the hardrock mining industry. In the history of the U.S., and analogously also in South Africa and Australia, the government promoted mining as a tool to encourage settlement of the West. Hence the mining industry evolved in the U.S. with an inflated sense of entitlement, a belief that it is above the rules, and a view of itself as the West’s salvation—thereby illustrating the problem of values that have outlived their usefulness, as discussed in the preceding chapter. Mine executives respond to environmental criticism with homilies on how civilization would be impossible without mining, and how more regulation would mean less mining and hence less civilization. Civilization as we know it would also be impossible without oil, farm food, wood, or books, but oil executives, farmers, loggers, and book publishers nevertheless don’t cling to that quasi-religious fundamentalism of mine executives: “God put those metals there for the benefit of mankind, to be mined.” The CEO and most officers of one of the major American mining companies are members of a church that teaches that God will soon arrive on Earth, hence if we can just postpone land reclamation for another 5 or 10 years it will then be irrelevant anyway. My friends within the mining industry have used many colorful phrases to characterize prevailing attitudes: “a rape-and-run attitude”; “robber-baron mentality”; “a rough-and-tumble heroic struggle of one man against nature”; “the most conservative businesspeople I’ve ever met”; and “a speculative attitude that a mine is there to let its executives roll the dice and get personally rich by striking the mother lode, rather than the oil company motto of increasing asset value for the shareholders.” To claims of toxic problems at mines, the mining industry routinely responds with denial. No one in the oil industry today would deny that spilled oil is harmful, but mine executives do deny the harm of spilled metals and acid.
The third factor underlying mining industry environmental practices, besides economics and corporate attitudes, is the attitudes of our government and society, which permit the industry to continue with its own attitudes. The basic federal law governing mining in the U.S. is still the General Mining Act passed in 1872. It provides massive subsidies to mining companies, such as a billion dollars per year of royalty-free minerals from publicly owned lands, unlimited use of public lands for dumping mine wastes in some cases, and other subsidies costing taxpayers a quarter of a billion dollars per year. The detailed rules adopted by the federal government in 1980, termed the “3809 rules,” did not require mining companies to provide financial assurance of cleanup costs, and did not adequately define reclamation and closure. In the year 2000 the outgoing Clinton administration proposed mining regulations that achieved both of those goals while also eliminating corporate self-guarantees of financial assurance. But in October 2001 a proposal by the incoming Bush administration eliminated almost all of those proposals except for continuing to require financial assurance, a requirement that would in any case be meaningless without a definition of the reclamation and cleanup costs to be covered by financial assurance.
It is rare that our society has effectively held the mining industry responsible for damages. Laws, regulatory policies, and the political will to chase mining scofflaws have been absent. For a long time the Montana state government was notorious for its deference to mining lobbyists, and the Arizona and Nevada state governments still are. For example, the state of New Mexico estimated reclamation costs for the Chino copper mine of Phelps-Dodge Corporation at $780 million, but then decreased that estimate to $391 million under