160+ Groups Denounce Mining Industry Giveaways in ‘Dirty’ Manchin Side Deal

More than 160 advocacy groups on Monday joined progressive U.S. lawmakers in opposing proposed federal permitting reforms that Sen. Joe Manchin and Democratic leadership negotiated. The deal “delighted” the fossil fuel industry, but activists have condemned it as a “climate disaster.”

Monday’s letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) focuses on the “environmental impacts from reckless hard rock mining and processing” that the proposed side deal between Manchin (D-W.Va.) and party leadership would cause.

The compromise— that opponents like Sen. Bernie Sanders blasted (I-Vt.) as a “dirty side deal”—would allow expedited approval of oil and gas projects like the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a top priority for Manchin, in exchange for the fossil fuel industry-funded senator’s support for the Inflation Reduction Act, the weakened reconciliation package that President Joe Biden signed last month.

“A leaked draft of a side deal to weaken and truncate environmental reviews is nothing more than the wishlist for all extractive industries—more extraction, less community input, less scrutiny of potential impacts, and less accountability when harm occurs,” the letter states.

“Our concerns include those that relate to the environmental justice impacts to communities and environmental impacts from mining and mineral processing this side deal would cause,” the groups added. “There is no way to mitigate the damage that this side deal would do, we must reject it unequivocally .”

The letter’s signatories argued that “one of this side deal’s many horrible facets is that it allows the mining industry to tilt the scale of our governments’ decisions even more heavily in their favor.”

The signers warned that if passed, the deal would gut some environmental and cultural protection laws, including the Clean Water Act, National Environmental Policy Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act.

The letter also notes that the 150-year-old General Mining Law—designed to aid in the genocidal U.S. colonization of Indigenous lands in the West, still “encourages the mining industry to claim public lands as their own, almost entirely for free, and at great expense to the public.”

The groups asserted the Environmental Justice for All Act and the Requirements, Expectations, and Standard Procedures for Effective Consultation with Tribes (RESPECT) Act—bills led by Reps. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Donald McEachin (D-Va.)—strengthen existing environmental, civil rights, and tribal consultation laws “to help ensure our government listens to frontline communities and empowers them to hold our government accountable.”

Originally published at Commondreams.org.