In this article, Max Wilbert talks about his experience in fighting tar sand mining in Washington and Utah, and how this is related to the current campaign against lithium mining in Nevada. “I think it’s wrong to blow up a mountain for tar sands. I think it’s wrong to blow up a mountain for lithium, too. I guess I’m just stubborn like that.”
It’s often said that solar panels, wind turbines, and the lithium-ion batteries that store their energy and power electric vehicles will save the planet.
What most people don’t know is that producing lithium has direct links to the Alberta Tar Sands (also known as the Athabasca tar sands), the largest and most destructive industrial project on the planet.
This is a personal issue for me. I have fought the tar sands for over a decade. Starting in 2010, I began campaigning for the city of Bellingham, Washington to forbid a spur of the Trans Mountain pipeline which carries “dilbit” (diluted bitumen, AKA unrefined tar sands to which gas has been added so it’ll flow easily through a pipeline) under the city.
After months of campaigning, Bellingham became the first city in the nation to unanimously pass a resolution declaring tar sands fuel to be harmful. But despite overwhelming public opposition, the city’s attorneys said they couldn’t prevent the pipeline from operating using the law. What that says about the state of democracy is worth a whole different article. And perhaps a revolution. But I digress.
After my years in Bellingham, I lived in Salt Lake City, where I took part in the campaign to protect the Tavaputs Plateau in northeastern Utah from tar sands strip mining. As part of that work, I took part in public meetings, family camp-outs on the site, disruptive protests, and several direct actions against the U.S. Oil Sands Corporation.
For the last three months, I’ve been in Nevada, on Northern Paiute territory, holding down a protest camp established on the proposed site of an open-pit lithium mine. I’m an equal opportunity land defender. I think it’s wrong to blow up a mountain for tar sands. I think it’s wrong to blow up a mountain for lithium, too. I guess I’m just stubborn like that.
But as I’ve implied, these projects are directly related. It turns out, the proposed mine at Thacker Pass would likely rely directly on materials sourced from the Alberta tar sands as the key chemical ingredient in their production process.
According to the Final Environmental Impact Statement, the proposed Thacker Pass mine would produce 5,800 tons of sulfuric acid per day for use in refining lithium. That would require importing 1,896 tons of sulfur per day. That’s nearly 700,000 tons per year, roughly equivalent to the mass of two Empire State Buildings annually. This would be brought in to Thacker Pass on dozens of (diesel-fueled) semi-trucks each carrying 3,800 gallons of molten sulfur.
Most sulfur comes from oil and gas refineries, where it’s a byproduct of producing low-sulfur fuels to meet air-quality regulations. And here’s the punchline: according the U.S. Geological Survey, tar sands contain 11 times as much sulfur as conventional heavy crude oil. There are literal “mountains” of sulfur piling up in Alberta, and at other refineries which process tar sands fuel.
That includes the refineries in Anacortes, Washington, which refines the “dilbit” from the pipelines running underneath Bellingham, my old home. These two refineries are major sources of sulfur for the entire western United States, shipping out millions of tons annually.
According to Lithium Americas Corp. Vice President of Global Engineering, the proposed lithium mine at Thacker Pass would purchase sulfur on the bulk commodity market, and it would be delivered by rail to Winnemucca (60 miles south), then brought by truck to Thacker Pass. That bulk commodity market sources nearly 100% of its elemental sulfur from oil and gas refineries.
And so we come full circle: the lithium destined for lithium-ion batteries that will be extracted from Thacker Pass, will almost certainly be directly connected to the total destruction of Alberta’s boreal forest, the poisoning of the water across thousands of square miles, the epidemic of cancers and rare diseases in that region, the wave of missing and murdered indigenous women in Alberta, and all the other harms that come from the tar sands. And, lest we forget, the tar sands are a major contributor to global warming. Canadian greenhouse gas emissions have skyrocketed over recent decades, as tar sands oil production has expanded.
Revenue from sales of sulfur is not unimportant to the economics of tar sands oil extraction. One report from 2018 found that as much as half a million barrels per day of tar sands product would be economical to extract if legal levels of sulfur allowed in bunker fuel were lowered. Another report found that “developing a plan for storing, selling or disposing of the sulphur will help to ensure the profitability of oil sands operations.”
All this points to a relatively simple conclusion: extraction of lithium at Thacker Pass would directly support the economics of extracting additional sulfur-rich crude oil and bitumen at the tar sands, further incentivizing the destruction of the planet.
Why do we defend the land here at Thacker Pass? There are so many reasons. It is important habitat. It is sacred ancestral land for our Northern Paiute friends from the nearby Fort McDermitt tribe. It is beautiful. But we also stand to protect this place because we stand for the truth. Lithium mining, and by extension, much of the so-called “green economy” that is being developed is not separate from fossil fuels. It is firmly dependent on fossil fuels.
Besides the sulfur, this project would burn tens of thousands of gallons of diesel fuel per day — operating heavy equipment made of steel that was produced with metallurgical coke, a type of coal. That same steel makes up the frame of the electric cars, too. The roads into the mine site would likely be made of asphalt concrete. You know what another name for asphalt is? Bitumen. AKA tar sands.
The idea of a “green” electric car is a fantasy. The sooner we face that reality, the sooner we can put a stop to false greenwashing projects like the Lithium Americas/Lithium Nevada Thacker Pass mine. The sooner we face reality, the sooner we can recognize that to shut down the tar sands, we actually have to shut down the tar sands, not just blow up other mountains elsewhere and hope that leads to the end of the tar sands.
Do not fool yourself. This is not some great green transition. It is more of the same. More destroyed land, more poisoned water, more decimated wildlife.
It’s beautiful here at Thacker Pass. Yesterday morning, I woke before 5am to visit the Greater sage-grouse “lek” — mating ground — on top of the mountain directly above the proposed mine. I watched the male grouse strut and dance, and thought about the new USGS report showing that grouse populations have declined by 80% since 1965, and nearly 40% since 2002. That comes on top of previous population collapses. The population was 16 million a century ago. Now, it’s closer to 200,000. That’s a 99% decline. This region, the northwestern Great Basin, has been particularly hard hit.
It is possible for humans to live sustainably. Our ancestors managed it for hundreds of thousands of years. Is it possible to live sustainably, and drive cars? No, I don’t believe it is. You may not like it, but there’s a thing about the natural laws of the universe: they don’t give a damn if you like them or not. Gravity exists. Ecological constraints exist. If you ignore them, you will pay the price.
We cannot afford to ignore the truth, and because of this, we must stop the Thacker Pass mine — and the tar sands. We need your help. If you can contribute to this campaign, or to the broader transformation of society that is needed, reach out to us at https://ProtectThackerPass.org. Construction might begin very soon. If that happens, Thacker Pass will die. The water will be poisoned. And the truth will be crushed along with the sagebrush, under the hard metal treads of the bulldozers. Stand with us.
A controversial project to build a rail line for transporting soybeans and other commodities through Indigenous lands in the Brazilian Amazon may get its environmental license as soon as April.
Prosecutors in the state of Pará, where the line will terminate at the Miritituba river port, have filed a court request for a suspension of the project until prior consultation with the affected Indigenous communities have been carried out.
The request seeks to challenge the project on its economic viability, with prosecutors arguing that without detailed data on costs and compensation measures, there is no way of knowing how the project will impact on public coffers.
This is the first time that prosecutors have highlighted a project’s viability to seek its suspension.
A controversial freight railway line that would cut through Indigenous lands in the Brazilian Amazon looks set to be approved for construction by the federal government as soon as April, despite a lawsuit pending against it by local prosecutors.
The EF-170 railroad, known as the Ferrogrão, or “Grainway,” is a priority project of the federal government and will run 933 kilometers (580 miles) from the municipality of Sinop, in Mato Grosso state, to Miritituba in Pará state. The call for a tender is expected to be released within the first quarter of 2021, and the project is expected to be granted its environmental license in April.
All the freight traffic between the two cities currently flows through the BR-163 highway, bringing produce from Mato Grosso north to the river terminal in Pará. At present, though, more than 70% of Mato Grosso’s harvest is trucked southeast to the Atlantic ports of Santos and Paranaguá for export. With the railroad, the government aims to avoid this arduous step of the journey, instead sending commodities like soybean and corn to the transshipment terminal in Miritituba and onto ships sailing out to the Atlantic via the Tapajós, Tocantins and Amazon rivers. Aside from grains, the government also plans to transport soybean oil, fertilizers, sugar, ethanol, and petroleum products.
While the railroad is considered vital for grain shipping, the way the federal government is pushing ahead with the project has raised concerns.
In particular, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office (MPF) in Pará has challenged the government’s failure to seek the free, prior and informed consent of the Indigenous peoples through whose lands the railway would pass. In October, the MPF and five civil society organizations filed a request with the Federal Court of Accounts, the government accountability office, for the precautionary suspension of the privatization process and for the call for tender to be stopped.
Public prosecutor Felipe Moura Palha said the fact that the federal government has violated the Indigenous communities’ right to participate in discussions about the project risks imposing significant economic losses in the future. “This is the first time that the MPF has called on the Court of Accounts to analyze a large project in the Amazon with an eye on economics,” he said.
The MPF says the lack of data on the real environmental impacts of the project means the cost of compensation could be greater than imagined and possibly lead to losses from the public coffers. “We maintain that prior consultation, analysis and the effect on Indigenous communities in the economic viability analysis for the project is essential,” Palha said.
In response to the request filed by the MPF, the court notified the National Land Transportation Agency (ANTT), the federal regulator for railway and highway infrastructure, and Funai, the federal agency for Indigenous affairs, to carry out consultations with Indigenous peoples along the route of the planned rail line. But even then, the federal government has played foul, according to the MPF: prosecutors allege that the government’s Special Secretariat of the Partnerships and Investments Program (SE-PPI) tried to improperly entice an Indigenous Munduruku leader to act on behalf of the tribe.
The Munduruku people, with a population of about 13,700 occupying territories along the Tapajós River, have their own political organizations. According to the MPF, the government sought out a single person to be “the speaker granted representation to articulate the interests of his people.” On Dec. 14, the MPF recommended that the prior consultation process also include the project’s impacts on the Indigenous peoples in the state of Mato Grosso who would be directly or indirectly affected by the Grainway. The recommendation was aimed at Funai and IBAMA, the federal environmental protection agency.
Indigenous people ignored
Melillo Dinis is a lawyer with the Instituto Kabu, representing 12 communities of the Mẽbêngôkre-Kayapó people, including some 12,000 Kayapós. He said the Indigenous people have yet to form an opinion about the Grainway because the project has not yet even been presented to them. Dinis said there are currenty three issues under debate: the right to prior consultation and fulfillment of Indigenous protocol, neither of which were acknowledged by the government of President Jair Bolsonaro; the need for thorough social and environmental evaluation of the degradation, deforestation and growing tensions over territory in the region; and the fact that representatives of governmental agencies affirmed that Indigenous rights would be respected but did not carry out their promises.
“The context that has been presented to us until now is completely disrespectful of Indigenous peoples,” he said. “They have been living here for around 10,000 years. We will fight until the end.”
Dinis noted that the project has been dragged out over previous administrations; the Grainway was proposed in 2016, under the watch of then-president Dilma Rousseff, who was later that year impeached and replaced by Michel Temer. Temer was succeeded by Bolsonaro.
“Before, they would listen to us but wouldn’t pay any attention,” Dinis said of the Rousseff and Temer administrations. “This administration won’t even listen to us. So the outcome is the same.”
Prosecutor Palha said there’s no way to stipulate a ceiling on spending on the project without knowing how much to allocate for environmental compensation.
“We are not opposed to development projects,” he said. “Our request is: carry out the prior consultation before claiming that the project is viable so it can be discussed.”
He cited the case of the Belo Monte dam in the state of Pará as an example. A significant decline in the flow rate of the Xingu River now threatens the viability of the dam, raising the prospect of new power plants, likely fired by fossil fuels, needing to be built.
“We want to avoid this situation with the Grainway, having a project already installed that hasn’t been properly planned,” Palha said. “This is why the Court of Accounts is carrying out an unprecedented economics analysis.”
Controversy over the Grainway began in 2016 when it was announced that studies would be carried out to make the project viable. In 2018, Mongabay reported that the Kayapó people had expressed their concern over the potential threats posed by the railway and had written a letter to the ANTT. In it, tribal chief Anhe Kayapó said:
“The Grainway cannot be built without reinforcing controls, protection and vigilance in the Conservation Units and Indigenous Lands [along its route].”
The native oyster beds are gone. The vast saltmarshes that soaked up carbon and buffered the coast from stormy seas have been reclaimed for farms and towns. The species-rich maerl and horse mussel beds have vanished and now, in new research, we’ve uncovered the decline of another jewel in the UK’s marine environment: seagrass meadows.
Seagrass is a flowering plant that forms rippling underwater meadows in shallow coastal seas. Our study is the first to analyse all published data on this habitat in the UK, gathered from newspapers, diaries and other sources throughout history. We found that at least 44% of the UK’s seagrass has been lost since 1936 – most of it since the 1980s. But when we modelled which coastal areas were likely to have been suitable for seagrass, we found that as much as 92% of it might have disappeared.
Thankfully, there are still 8,493 hectares (20,987 acres) of mapped seagrass in UK waters. That’s about the same size as Newcastle upon Tyne. But seagrass may have once covered 82,000 hectares of seabed – an area as large as 115,000 football fields. While we may never know exactly how much of the UK’s seabed was once covered by this habitat – old data sets are often light on detail and contain inaccuracies – we know these underwater meadows were vast. We can only imagine how their loss has transformed the country’s coastal seas.
Widespread loss
Seagrass meadows are one of the world’s most efficient sinks of carbon and support 20% of the world’s biggest fisheries. We estimated that the UK’s meadows once stored 11.5 million tonnes of carbon, equivalent to the annual emissions of 7.7 million cars. With the destruction of the seagrass, much of that carbon has been added to the atmosphere and needs to be returned. These huge meadows could also have sheltered 400 million fish, and annually filtered pollution equivalent to the amount of urine produced by the entire population of Liverpool each year.
The first estimates of seagrass around the UK emerged in the 1930s. Descriptions and anecdotes suggest it was a common sight at the coast. Seagrass abounded in sheltered and protected spots, and there were plentiful populations in the lochs of Ireland and the west of Scotland.
Seagrass was considered so abundant in the 1860s that entrepreneurs writing in the Times of London described it as a potential cash crop that could rival imported cotton. While accurate data on the past size and extent of seagrass meadows is rare, the information we do have paints a picture of widespread loss. And these declines continue. The seagrass that has persisted is in a poor state – beset by pollution, coastal development, and disturbance from boating.
Seagrass losses were widespread from urban coastlines to remote estuaries. While huge areas of the Humber, the Essex and Suffolk estuaries lost seagrass, so did more rural locations on the east coast of Anglesey in Wales, the Cromarty Firth in Scotland, and the inlets and estuaries of Cornwall. Areas once covered by seagrass are now lifeless seabeds in many cases.
These losses have numerous and complex causes, but most involve poor water quality resulting from sewage discharges and nutrients running off farmland. Coastal developments – and mines in the past – have also polluted and disturbed seagrass.
A chance for renewal
Our findings should not inspire blame, though. They should highlight the massive opportunities in restoring these habitats. Reviving the UK’s seagrass meadows could help fight the climate emergency, rebuild wildlife populations and put beleaguered fisheries back on a path to productivity.
The tide is turning for some marine habitats in the UK. Work led by the WWF is replanting seagrass in West Wales, oysters are being laid in the Durnoch Firth and coastlines are being reshaped to encourage saltmarshes in Somerset. But these projects must aspire to a bigger vision of coastal biodiversity, mirroring achievements in the US. In Virginia, thousands of hectares of seagrass have been planted. This is the scale of ambition the UK needs.
The evidence of its decline is stark, but seagrass was once common throughout UK waters and could be again. The opportunity for the restoration of this vital habitat is immense.
This article was originally published in The Conversation who are clear about that “Disinformation is dangerous. We fight it with facts and expertise.” You can read the original article here.
Lithium is the miracle element powering your smartphone and under the hood of every electric car. Will batteries save the planet or cause more harm? The controversy is heating up in Nevada.
RENO, Nevada
Activists aiming to stop an open-pit lithium mine launched a permanent protest encampment last Friday. They invite supporters to join them.
Despite winter conditions at Thacker Pass, the site of the proposed $1.3 billion Lithium Americas mine, protestors have erected tents, a wood stove, and protest signs. Lawyer Will Falk, who is on site, says they mean to stay for as long as it takes to protect this old-growth sagebrush mountainside.
“Environmentalists might be confused about why we want to interfere with the production of electric car batteries, but, it’s wrong to destroy a mountain for any reason – whether the reason is fossil fuels or lithium.” Says Falk
Activists are prepared to remain in place and block all construction, mining, and road-building activities until Lithium Americas abandons their plan to destroy Thacker Pass. They are demanding:
The establishment of a protected area at Thacker Pass preserved for the enjoyment of future generations, for wildlife including the Kings River pyrg, and for water quality.
An immediate abandonment of the Thacker Pass lithium mine project by Lithium Americas corporation.
A sincere apology from Lithium Americas Corporation for claiming that Thacker Pass is a “green” project.
The Mine Proposal
The Thacker Pass mine proposal, located roughly 130 miles northeast of Reno, is one of a handful of large mining and energy projects fast-tracked by the outgoing Trump administration in what a December article in the New York Times called an “intense push” to “find ways to increase domestic energy and mining production.”
Though Lithium Americas claims they “strive to build a business where the well-being of the local community is essential to its success,” this fast-tracking comes despite objections from local residents, ranchers, and environmental groups, who are concerned about project impacts on wildlife and rural quality of life.
Project documents detail potential harm to many species.
The threatened Greater sage grouse, whose populations have been reduced by between 97% and 99% from historic levels, and for whom the Thacker Pass area represents the best remaining habitat in Nevada. Thacker Pass is located in the Lone Willow population management unit, which is home to between 5 and 8% of the entire global population. This project would sever a key connectivity corridor between portions of the habitat;
Lahontan cutthroat trout, a federally “threatened” species under the Endangered Species Act which exists in only a small fraction of its historic range, including the Quinn River basin downstream of Thacker Pass;
Pronghorn antelope, whose migration routes would be severed by the mine; and
A critically imperiled endemic snail species known as the Kings River pyrg that is known to reside in only 13 isolated springs. According to one group of scientists, “the Thacker Pass Project area might contain the entire known population of Kings River pyrg, thereby putting the species at risk of extinction.
Other species who will be harmed by the project include Burrowing owls, Golden eagles, several bat species, native bees and other pollinators, Crosby’s Buckwheat, and rare old-growth big sagebrush. Impacts on the community include increases in heavy truck traffic, noise and light pollution, air quality issues, and reductions in the water table.
Lithium Americas has already built roads, drilled boreholes, constructed a weather station, and dug a 2-acre test pit. They plan to build large tailing ponds for toxic mine waste, drill new wells, build a sulfuric acid processing plant, import more than 170 semi-loads of sulfur (a byproduct from oil refineries) per day, and dig an open pit of more than 2 square miles into the pristine Thacker Pass mountainside.
The encampment went into place on Friday, the same day the Bureau of Land Management handed down the permit for the mine. For now it is home to only a few people. But Max Wilbert, another organizer of the protest and author of Bright Green Lies, a book looking at the environmental harms of renewable energy projects, expects that more people will come as the weather improves.
Wilbert states,
“Many see Nevada as a wasteland, but in truth it’s one of the last wild places left. Where else can you find silence, clean air, starry nights, and solitude? As soon as people spend time in these wild lands, they fall in love with them, and want to protect them.”
Join the Occupation
For more information, to support the campaign, or to join the occupation, visit www.ProtectThackerPass.org. Feel free to reproduce this press release in your publication.
Contact: Max Wilbert and Will Falk
contact@protectthackerpass.org
This analysis was written by Jeremy Hance, and published on 3 August 2020 in Mongabay. Jeremy draws attention to the issue of critically endangered species not being offered the help needed to ensure their survival.
70% of Critically Endangered Species Receive No Help
Many critically endangered species receive no conservation action because they are deemed ‘uncharismatic’ and fail to attract funding.
Charisma challenged species are often small, less colorful, and little known to the public.
Scientists have long argued that umbrella species protect uncharismatic species, but is that true?
Meet the Tanzanian gremlin. Shhhhhh … though. She’s shy. But check out those bat-like ears. And those massive eyes. And that long scaly tail that ends in a flamboyant bush. And look how tiny she is: at around 100 grams (3.5 ounces) she’s the size of a newborn chihuahua. Yes, I know her name isn’t actually the Tanzanian gremlin, it’s the Rondo dwarf galago (Paragalago rondoensis). But I prefer gremlin. For one thing, let’s be honest, most of us probably don’t know what a galago is (it’s a primate in the suborder that includes lorises, lemurs and pottos) and gremlin is more evocative. Still, whatever her name is, isn’t she lovely?
Oh, did I mention? She’s critically endangered — and, at the moment, no one is working to save her.
She’s not alone. The Rondo dwarf galago, or the Tanzanian gremlin, is one of hundreds, if not thousands, of species already identified on the IUCN Red List as endangered or critically endangered that is receiving zero direct conservation attention or funding.
The EDGE program, which stands for “evolutionarily distinct and globally endangered,” is a unique conservation program in that it seeks focal species not based on the potential for dollars raised or articles written or Instagram followers secured, but on the desire to preserve, as far as possible, distinct evolutionary branches that are in danger of being chopped off.
To do this, EDGE has created lists of the top 100 mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles (as well as shorter lists for corals and sharks and rays) of the most evolutionarily distinct and endangered species: Basically, the world’s most unique species, often single members of an evolutionary line, that are imperiled with extinction.
“Charisma is subjective and even though EDGE species may not be traditionally charismatic there is nothing else like them on Earth, they are unique in the way they live, look and behave,” Couchman says.
To date, there isn’t much hard data on how many less-popular species lack direct conservation funding or assistance, but anecdotally, it’s a lot.
The IUCN analyzes the conservation actions taken for each species, but using 12 criteria it can be difficult to ascertain the amount of attention paid to one animal versus another, especially en masse. The IUCN doesn’t categorize species based on level of action. Still, to give us an idea, the EDGE program has labeled its 400-plus potential species under four straight-forward categories of conservation attention: very low, low, medium, and high.
This is part 1 of a series written by Mongabay columnist Jeremy Hance. You can read part one of the original article below. Part 2 is also available via Mongabay.
![The Long Shadow of the Tar Sands: Lithium Mining and Tar Sands Sulfur [Dispatches from Thacker Pass]](https://dgrnewsservice.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2021/04/Shadows-980x652-1.jpg)
