“There are sufficient safeguards in place to avoid endangering the toad,” he wrote June 6 in comments to USFWS. Ormat Vice President Paul Thomsen said the emergency listing overstates the potential impact of the project on the toad partly because it makes false assumptions about underground faults in the geothermal reservoir it intends to tap. “It was not a surprise to BLM that Fish and Wildlife felt that way.” “Fish and Wildlife has a different opinion,” Melton said. The emergency listing of the toad doesn’t change the bureau’s position that the project will have no significant impact on the tribe or the toad, she said. The Justice Department lawyer representing the bureau, Michelle Melton, said federal law required the bureau to consider USFWS’s criticisms but it wasn’t bound by them.
The three-judge panel at the 9th Circuit that heard oral arguments on the geothermal case in June said they couldn’t consider the April listing of the toad because it came after the appeal was filed in January.īut the judges acknowledged USFWS had raised similar objections in earlier opinions, warning about the likelihood the geothermal plant’s operations could push the toad to the brink of extinction. “Indeed, these are complex, large-scale projects that require a robust public process,” he wrote in an email July 12 to the AP in response to a request for comment. “Catalyzing the clean energy economy and seeing renewable energy projects through to completion is no small task,” said Tyler Cherry, press secretary for Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. And the ongoing legal battles underscore the difficulty of turning Biden’s vision of a cleaner energy future into reality.Īdministration officials insist they’ve known all along that implementing their plans to slow the warming of the Earth wouldn’t be easy. The government hasn’t responded yet, but the case continues in district court on a parallel track with the appellate court.
The big deposit bordering Oregon where Lithium Nevada plans to begin construction in December is “vital to our national security and nation’s need for lithium to support green energy development and achieve climate change objectives,” the company said in recent court filings. Worldwide demand for the lightest metal on Earth is projected to increase six-fold by 2030 compared to 2020. Ramped up domestic production of lithium is key to Biden’s blueprint for a greener future, a critical element for electric vehicle batteries. “And we just ignorantly praise new technology, new technology.” “Everything seems to be in the hands of the mining company,” Sarah Wochele, a mining justice organizer for the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, said at last month’s appeal hearing. More generally, they still accuse regulators of rubber-stamping industry plans without a thorough review of the potential harms. Specifically, the Great Basin Resource Watch and others say the lithium mine will produce toxic waste. Whether it’s tapping hot underground water to generate electricity with steam-powered turbines or extracting lithium to make electric car batteries, the operations still must comply with laws designed to protect wildlife habitat, cultural and historical values, and guard against pollution or other degradation of federal lands.ĭuring a recent failed attempt to overturn a Nevada water permit for a mine near the Oregon line above the biggest known lithium deposit in the nation, opponents raised some of the same concerns leveled four decades ago about some of the largest gold mines in the world. Renewable or not, the actual mining of the resources faces many of the same regulatory and environmental hurdles the government has encountered for decades when digging for coal or drilling for oil. The conflicts put a spotlight on an emerging reality as the Biden administration tries to meet its goal of having the U.S. gold-mining state are under attack from conservationists, tribes and others who otherwise generally support Biden’s efforts to expedite the transition from fossil fuels to renewables. Two lithium mines and a geothermal power plant in the works in the biggest U.S. (AP) - Opposition from friends, not foes, is creating potential roadblocks to President Joe Biden’s green energy agenda on federal lands in the blue-leaning, Western swing state of Nevada.
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