Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [289]
My account of hardrock mining so far may have given the false impression that the industry is monolithically uniform in its attitudes. Of course, this is not true, and it’s instructive to examine the reasons why some hardrock miners or related industries have adopted or considered cleaner policies. I’ll briefly mention half a dozen such cases: coal mining, the current status of Anaconda Copper Company’s Montana properties, Montana platinum and palladium mines, the recent MMSD initiative, Rio Tinto, and DuPont.
Coal mining is superficially even more similar to hardrock mining than is the oil industry, in that its operations inevitably create heavy environmental impacts. Coal mines tend to make even bigger messes than do hardrock mines, because the quantity of coal extracted per year is relatively enormous: more than triple the combined mass of all the metals extracted from hardrock mines. Thus, coal mines usually disturb more area, and in some cases they strip the soil down to bedrock and dump mountaintops into rivers. On the other hand, coal occurs in pure seams up to 10 feet thick stretching for miles, so that the ratio of dumped wastes to product extracted is only about one for a coal mine, far less than the already-mentioned figures of 400 for a copper mine and 5,000,000 for a gold mine.
The lethal Buffalo Creek disaster at a U.S. coal mine in 1972 served as a wake-up call for the coal industry, much as the Exxon Valdez and North Sea oil rig disasters did for the oil industry. While the hardrock mining industry has had its share of disasters in the Third World, those have occurred too far from the eyes of the First World public to have served as a comparable wake-up call. Stimulated by Buffalo Creek, the U.S. federal government in the 1970s and 1980s instituted tighter regulation, and required stricter operating plans and financial assurance, for coal mining than for hardrock mining.
The initial response of the coal industry to those government initiatives was to prophesy disaster for the industry, but 20 years later that has been forgotten, and the coal industry has learned to live with the new regulations. (Of course that doesn’t mean that the industry is consistently virtuous, just that it is more regulated than 20 years ago.) One reason is that many (but certainly not all) coal mines are not in beautiful Montana mountains but in flatland not highly valued for other reasons, so that restoration is economically feasible. Unlike the hardrock mining industry, the coal industry now often restores mined areas within a year or two of ceasing operations. Another reason may be that coal (like oil but unlike gold) is perceived as a necessity for our society, and we all know how we use coal and oil but few of us know how we use copper, so the coal industry may have been able to pass on its increased environmental costs to consumers.
Still another factor behind the response of the coal industry is that it typically has short transparent supply chains, in which coal is shipped directly or else via just one intermediate supplier to the electric generating plants, steel plants, and other main consumers of coal. That makes it easy for the public to figure out whether any particular consumer of coal is obtaining it from a cleanly or dirtily operated coal mining company. Oil has a supply chain that is even shorter in number of business entities, even if sometimes long in geographic distances: big oil companies like ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP sell their fuel to consumers at gas stations, thereby permitting consumers enraged by the Exxon Valdez disaster to boycott gas stations selling Exxon fuel. But gold passes from the mine to the consumer via a long supply chain that includes refiners, warehouses, jewelry manufacturers in India, and European wholesalers before arriving at a retail jewelry store. Take a look at your gold