A federal judge has agreed with the Biden administration and a Canadian mining business in a critical court fight against environmentalists and tribal leaders attempting to halt the construction of a huge lithium mine in Nevada near the Oregon border.
The opponents sought an immediate injunction to halt activities at the country’s largest known lithium deposit until the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard their most recent appeal, but U.S. District Judge Miranda Du in Reno refused their request on Friday.
Her decision allows Lithium Americas subsidiary Lithium Nevada to begin construction of the mine as soon as next week, claiming that it will improve the production of raw materials for batteries used in electric vehicles, which is critical in the fight against climate change.
Opponents claim that the mine would harm groundwater, pollute the air, and destroy crucial wildlife habitats and holy cultural items.
The main cause of the dispute on Friday, according to Du, was the “stress” between environmental and economic trade-offs associated to efforts to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gases to cleaner, renewable energy sources. It also discusses shifting legal interpretations of the scope of a 150-year-old mining law, which may eventually become more burdensome for mining companies.
She has now denied injunction requests from environmentalists, Native American tribes, and a Nevada rancher who lives close to the mine, 200 miles (322 kilometers) northeast of Reno, three times in the previous two years, according to her most recent judgment.
WATCH: Salton Sea lithium riches could help the region’s struggling economy shift to EVs.
According to opponents, who requested a court for an emergency injunction last week, the developer would begin tearing up a high-desert sea of sagebrush that contains some of the most critical habitat remaining intact for the decreasing sage grouse in the West.
Du claimed that she turned down the most recent request because she believed the plaintiffs had little chance of succeeding in their appeal of her decision from February 6 that the Bureau of Land Management had, with one exception, complied with the law when it approved plans for the Thacker Pass mine in January 2021.
Du wrote in her 11-page order on Friday that she was aware that when she issued her ruling earlier this month, “Lithium Nevada might start construction on the project, thereby damaging the sagebrush environment inside the project territory.”
She anticipates that “Lithium Nevada will sadly soon start pulling out sage brush that will not come back for a very long time,” according to the court.
According to Du, the project will “on balance, be environmentally advantageous because the lithium produced from the mine will enable several clean technologies.”
Furthermore, she observed, “there is at least a tension between the potential macro-environmental advantage of the project and the potential micro (roughly speaking) environmental harm that will emerge from” allowing the mine. “
This court has not resolved that disagreement.”
Environmentalists’ most recent court challenge focused on whether mining rights under the 1872 Mining Law extend to nearby sites where a developer proposes to dump waste rock and tailings. In this example, the trash would be dumped on 1,300 acres (526 hectares) of land from an open pit mine as deep as a football field.
The Forest Service cancelled Rosemont Copper’s mine permit in Arizona last year, potentially setting a precedent, because the Forest Service failed to determine or even examine whether the corporation had legal standing where the waste dump was proposed.
Both the Bureau of Land Management and the Service have long claimed that the same mining rights extend to such properties automatically.
Du stated in her February 6 judgment that she accepted the new standard established by the 9th Circuit, but rather than invalidating the BLM’s authorization for the Thacker Pass mine, she directed the organization to revisit the matter and determine whether such rights exist in the nearby territory.
Mine opponents stated that she should have ordered a “wholesale re-evaluation” of the entire mining proposal rather than allowing BLM to examine the matter and “fix its folly” instead.
The BLM “approved what is now essentially half a mine,” according to their final brief, which was delivered on Thursday, despite the corporation’s lack of legal permission to dump waste on nearby properties.
Lithium Nevada, they claimed, would “believe itself free to blast and excavate the mining pit, erect the sulfuric acid processing plant, and build other facilities on thousands of acres of public land, producing waste rock and tailings with nowhere to legally place them” if a court order was not obtained.
Du stated on Friday that she allowed BLM permission to revisit the problem since the 9th Circuit’s most current interpretation of the statute was given more than a year after the agency permitted the Thacker Pass mine and because there was a “real prospect that BLM could fix its error.”
