It's time to approve the PolyMet mine

Opinion editor's note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

The newly signed Inflation Reduction Act provides urgently needed, if not enormously overdue, funds to help slow a warming climate, with some $370 billion for such things as subsidizing electric vehicles (EVs) and renewable and clean-energy sources, and to incentivize existing nuclear plants to increase production.

In Minnesota, the law's "Buy American" requirement will provide something else: an added element in the long-running debate over opening the state's first hard-rock mine to extract copper, nickel, cobalt and other "critical" metals from an ore body stretching across the northeast Arrowhead.

The law's subsidies for EVs require their batteries contain metals produced or recycled in North America, half by 2024 and all by 2028. Northeastern Minnesota's "Duluth Complex" contains vast stores of the needed metals, and a nickel-rich ore body lies west of Duluth.

For nearly two decades, PolyMet Mining has been tangled in a permit-approval process to mine near Hoyt Lakes. All state and federal permits have been granted, but procedural challenges continue to hold things up.

The permitting has taken far too long, understandably frustrating Iron Rangers who see PolyMet's mine as providing good jobs and stability for a region beset by a cyclic economy largely tied to iron mining.

Environmental advocates in the Twin Cities, mostly DFLers, fear the effects of toxic wastes endemic to such mining, and they've effectively applied legal and other resistance to PolyMet's plan. The Range has been reliably deep-blue forever, but the mining hullabaloo has changed that, leaving widening political fissures and an unfortunate regional divide.

Sure, copper mining has a dismal worldwide record of failing to keep toxins from leaking into the environment, and a nasty habit of closing mines while sticking others with costly cleanups. Eco interests have rightly sought to keep all that from happening in Minnesota.

But there's a dark and overshadowing force pushing most other public issues to second tier: worsening climate change with increasingly devastating wildfires, intense hurricanes and storms, floods, drought and rising seas. Recent measures show greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere at their highest point ever, revealing the industrial world's woeful response to a calamitous juggernaut that's been marching in plain view for a long, long time.

Copper mining and nuclear power present challenges, of course, and I'm among those who've long had serious doubts about both. But with the burgeoning threat of climate change, it's past time to think differently about some things, including getting to timely decisions on large energy projects; indeed, transforming to a green economy will require it.

The new law recognizes the important advantage of carbon-free nuclear power. Coal and natural gas plants emit tons of greenhouse gases and must be shuttered sooner rather than later — and renewables cannot provide replacement baseload energy without a radical infrastructure expansion and a much more reliable national power grid. California just reversed course and now supports nuclear power precisely to reduce carbon emissions; Minnesota should do likewise.

The important advantage of hard-rock mines is they produce copper, nickel and cobalt for the gazillion energy-storage batteries needed to store energy from renewables and to power EVs.

The new law's "Buy American" requirement is squarely aimed at shrinking China's world dominance of the "critical metals" market. Too, there's concern about child labor in deep African cobalt mines.

While wilderness designation and use restrictions of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area have long stoked antagonism between Rangers and urban DFLers, it's never gotten to the breaking point as now. Incensed Rangers are drifting from their political moorings, moving to a neutral corner as the mining controversy wears on.

Arguably, that affects state progress. While socially conservative, Range legislators have helped shape Minnesota as a bastion of educational opportunity, premium health care, a celebrated quality of life, and a good place for those whose labor is foundational to the state's exceptional economy.

The Range, whose iron made America a 20th-century industrial power, has provided livelihoods for generations and melded an ethnic mix into a unique Ranger culture. Rangers are a big part of the "L" in DFL, and they'd again be a positive policymaking force by unifying with their political kin.

The Inflation Reduction Act underscores the significance of hard-rock mining in Minnesota. Let's get on with it.

Ron Way, of Minneapolis, is a former legislative director of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. He's at ron-way@comcast.net.