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By Root 2243 0

from the energy generating companies that buy coal. Hence consumers know whom to embarrass or boycott in the event of an oil spill or coal mine accident. However, individual consumers are eight steps removed from the hardrock mining companies that extract minerals, making a direct boycott of a dirty mining company virtually impossible. In the case of copper, not even an indirect boycott of copper-containing products would be feasible, because most consumers don’t know which of their purchases are the ones containing small amounts of copper. But consumers do have leverage over Tiffany, DuPont, and other retailers that buy metals and that have the technical ability to distinguish clean from dirty mines. We shall see that consumer leverage over retail buyers has already begun to be an effective means for consumers to influence the timber and seafood industries. Environmental groups are just beginning to apply this same tactic to the hardrock mining industry, by confronting metal buyers rather than confronting metal miners themselves.

At least in the short run, environmental safeguards, cleanup, and restoration incur costs for mining companies adopting them, regardless of whether government regulations or public attitudes ensure that the safeguards save the companies money in the long run. Who should pay for those costs? When the cleanup is of messes that mining companies made legally in the past because of weak government regulation, the public has no choice except to pay the costs itself through government tax revenues, even though it galls us to pay for messes made by companies whose directors voted themselves bonuses just before declaring bankruptcy. Instead, the practical question is: who should pay for the environmental costs of mining being carried out now or to be carried out in the future?

The reality is that the mining industry is on the average so unprofitable that consumers could not point to excessive company profits from which costs should be met. The reason why we want mining companies to clean up is that we, the public, are the ones who suffer from mining-related messes: unusable mined land surfaces, unsafe drinking water, and polluted air. Even the cleanest methods for mining coal and copper create messes. If we want coal and copper, we have to recognize the environmental costs of extracting them as a legitimate necessary cost of hardrock mining, as legitimate as the costs of the bulldozer that digs the pit or the smelter that smelts the ore. The environmental costs should be factored into metals prices and passed on to consumers, just as oil and coal companies already do. Only the long and opaque supply chain from mineral mines to the public, and the historically bad behavior of most mining companies, has obscured this simple conclusion to date.

The remaining two resource extraction industries that I shall discuss are the logging industry and the fishing industry. They differ from the oil industry, and from the hardrock mining and coal industries, in two basic ways. First, trees and fish are renewable resources that reproduce themselves. Hence if you harvest them at a rate no higher than the rate at which they reproduce, your harvest can be sustained indefinitely. In contrast, oil, metals, and coal are not renewable; they don’t reproduce, sprout, or have sex to produce baby oil droplets or coal nuggets. Even if you pump or mine them slowly, that doesn’t let them reproduce and maintain the field’s oil, metal, or coal reserves at constant levels. (Strictly speaking, oil and coal do become formed over long geological times of millions of years, but that is much too slow to balance our pumping or extraction rates.) Second, in the logging and fishing industries the things that you are removing—the trees and the fish—are valuable parts of the environment. Hence any logging or fishing, almost by definition, may cause environmental damage. However, oil, metals, and coal play little or no role in ecosystems. If you can find some way of extracting them without damaging the rest of the ecosystem, then you have