Our minerals rights laws are a relic of the Frontier, and nothing but the result of lots of energy politics. The Mining Law of 1872 is an example. In the late 1800s, with the smell of industrial revolution in our nostrils, we wanted more minerals to grow with. We provided that anyone who wanted to mine on public land had only to file a claim at the county courthouse and put in $100 worth of work on the claim each year.
Miners with a valid claim could gain full title to the land for a fee of $2.50 or $5.00, depending on the deposit mined, with proof that they had spent $500 in labor or money working the claim and that the claim really had economically worthwhile mineral de-posits on it. Since 1872 we have changed neither the dollar figures nor the requirements for gaining title. Consequently, the federal government has very little control over mining. The Bureau of Land Management did launch an effort in 1968 to cancel mining claims in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah.
Bureau of Land Management In Charge Of Rights
By 1974 the agency had identified 56,000 claims, but had only been able to cancel 5,600. The 1872 law still applies to gold, silver, iron, copper, lead, zinc, bauxite, uranium, and all the hard rock minerals. The “new” Minerals Leasing Act of 1920 adopts the philosophy that resources on public lands belong to everyone, but this law applies only to coal, oil and gas, oil shale, phosphates, potassium, sodium, and asphalt. The act contains no environmentally protective features. Other laws in other areas favor exploitation, too. Ad valorem timber laws, which tax remaining stands of trees, encourage clear cutting and sometimes force reluctant owners to cut in order to pay taxes.
Capital Gains and Mineral Rights
Capital gains treatment of profits from virgin materials, depreciation schedules, depletion allowances, and other federal tax write-offs subsidized extractive industries to the tune of $1.45 billion in 1971. A staff study done for the congressional Joint Economic Committee concluded that “the subsidies to timber, oil, and other minerals appear to provide incentives to use these resources in greater amounts and instead of other alternatives.” At the same time, federal, state, and local regulations have militated against reusing and recycling. Purchasing specifications based on materials instead of function (“virgin fibers only”) have this effect. Labeling standards originally intended to protect consumers (“reprocessed wool”) achieve the same result more subtly. Some programs, such as US Department of agriculture subsidies for lime and inorganic fertilizers, discourage the use of organic wastes. Discriminatory rates condoned by the Interstate Commerce Commission make it 2.5 times more expensive to ship ferrous scrap by rail than iron ore. The scrap averages 1.5 times the iron content of the ore.
Closing The Loop on Mineral Rights
Closing The Loop Our fundamental dilemma is that we have built an open system not unlike the digestive tract of an earthworm: one end gobbles up resources and the other end ejects wastes. Were our resources infinite, as the earth must seem to a worm, that would do. But our resources are finite, so we must find ways to approximate the worm Ourobouros, which was said to eat its own tail and never run out of food. We must join the ends of our system so our wastes become resources.
In a closed-loop system, however, our materials are not so useful to us the second time around because of the degeneration of energy described by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. We must hold as many of our materials as possible in the first cycle as long as we can. This is conservation. It will not make our resources infinite; it will only stretch them further. Conservation can be implemented by designing durable goods that can be reused many times before they must be broken down into raw materials for another cycle. We can conserve best by keeping resource requirements to a minimum instead of want only generating excesses, as in current packaging. Then, when a product has deteriorated beyond repair, we must recover its materials and use them again. This is recycling, and it is already being practiced by a few infant industries. We must derive our energy for this activity as much as possible from our only nearly- infinite source, the sun.
Green Energy Only Way to Close The Loop
A Utopian Vision We picture a society that designs its products well, so it takes years for them to break down. Washing machines are handed down from parent to child; cars run 15 years or more. Industries that do repairs flourish and employ versatile and skilled workers. When machines do deteriorate beyond repair, we call the municipal recycling agency, which is profitably selling basic materials from discarded goods. A railroad carries sorted scrap to a regional reprocessor, which separates the principal ingredients and ships them off to steel mills, glass plants, and other basic industries. There, the scrap is mixed with a small amount of underbrush. It is hard to look at trees arranged like soldiers on a parade ground and think of the aggregate as a forest. Monocultural forests are more than a visual problem, however. Neither short- nor long-term effects of this kind of management are well understood. We do know that the more complex and diverse a natural community is, the greater is its stability. Monocultures are unstable communities that discourage resident wild animals, many of which depend on undergrowth for cover and nourishment. But “tree farms” proliferate. In western forests, removal of old growth exceeds the amount of new growth. In eastern forests, new growth exceeds removal—but only because 4 mature trees (slow growers) have already been cut.
