Truck Exhaust in the Middle of the Desert

Although I make no prediction about the price of gold, I found this piece interesting as it shows to what extent environmentalists will oppose any human value production -- and the terrible cost it burdens us all with. Until we challenge the environmentalists' moral position, I doubt we can ever enact the legal reform necessary to thwart their anti-life agenda.

The photo here is of Barrick Gold’s new Cortez Hills mine, which – after ten years and $500 million – has just hit something of a wall. The U.S. Appeals Court in San Francisco ordered the company to “provide injunctive relief” in a case brought by an environmental organization called the Western Mining Action Project, which is using a local Indian band for cover.

The latest hold-up revolves around a claim that Barrick and the Bureau of Land Management, which made Barrick jump through any number of costly hoops in order to permit the mine in the first place, failed to properly evaluate the impact of truck emissions on the air of the barren desert – trucks transporting the mine’s ore 70 miles to a processing facility.

If a mine can be held up, after 10 years and half a billion dollars spent, by a handful of environment activists over such a niggling concern as truck exhaust in the middle of a desert – a desert, it must be pointed out, in one of the world’s most prolific and politically favorable mining jurisdictions – then how can any mining operation expect to succeed?

Any company wishing to build any mine pretty much anywhere now has to be willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars – and a decade or more – before even hoping to start production. And even then, as the Barrick ruling shows, they aren’t safe from rear-guard actions by the environmentalists.