When the planet is burning fresh clean water will be more precious than anything they could pull out of that hole. Good to see the SC take the people over profits.
I’m going to guess that not a damn thing will happen to the officials that illegally permitted that mine.
Prolly nothing, but the mine is halted if’n I’m reading that right, so it never got built, and this is at the highest state level, so it’s dead unless they can figure out a way to take this to Federal court.
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Justices found that state regulators not only ignored concerns from the federal Environmental Protection Agency about the northeastern Minnesota mine, but attempted to conceal EPA warnings from the public.
The Corps said the permit did not comply with the water quality standards set by the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, whose reservation on the St. Louis River is downstream from the mine and processing plant sites.
The vast but untapped reserves of buried copper, nickel and precious metals in northeastern Minnesota are locked up in sulfide minerals that can leach sulfuric acid and other pollutants when exposed to air and water.
Court discoveries from that lawsuit and open-records requests by Minnesota-based nonprofit WaterLegacy unearthed documents showing that state regulators had pressured the EPA to withhold its concerns about the mine from public comments.
“Whistleblowers, Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, and the district court hearing helped us learn that the MPCA used a corrupt process to keep EPA’s criticisms of the PolyMet permit secret,” WaterLegacy Advocacy Director Paula Maccabee said.
The other justices also joined a concurrent opinion written by McKeig that more strongly criticized the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency for ignoring and disrespecting the Fond du Lac Band throughout the permitting process.
