The Grand Staircase Story: morality of mining, no-compromise environmentalists, unreliable sources

(First published Sept. 2018)

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5

Convenience of modern life comes with environmental trade-offs, inconvenient truths.

This report was researched and written using a Mac Book Pro whose power was stored in a lithium-ion rechargeable battery that needs cobalt. The original power stored in the battery was likely generated by coal dug up by miners in eastern Utah and transported to a power plant using trains and trucks powered by diesel fuel refined after being pumped up from fields also located in eastern Utah.

Consumers in the United States, like myself, use the majority of the world’s cobalt. Prices for it on the world market reflect our skyrocketing demand. But there’s a darker cost: a history of human-rights violations, including use of child labor associated with production of 66 percent of the world’s supply in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Children grub for cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the global source of more than half of the raw ore used in rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. (Sky News)

As consumers, we have an absolute moral and possibly a national security imperative to explore alternatives to cobalt dug up overseas under conditions of unimaginable horror and embedded in our lifestyle. (The Department of Homeland Security considered one cobalt mine in the Congo so vital that its “incapacitation or destruction … would have a debilitating impact” on U.S. security or the national economy.)

One alternative could be the proposed subsurface Colt Mesa cobalt and copper mine 30 miles or so east of Boulder, Utah, just outside the current boundary of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah.

Three of Grand Staircase-Escalante’s current units plus its “excluded areas.” A small subsurface mine at Colt Mesa has been proposed. Planning and permitting required to begin operations of the Smoky Hollow coal mine were shut down when the monument was created in 1996. Click to see the BLM map.

Yet even the remote possibility of its becoming a reality has unleashed a backlash of NIMBYism (“not in my backyard”). The…