House votes to revise Mining Law of 1872, require royalties, protect the environment

The U.S. House voted yesterday to make major changes in the Mining Law of 1872, "adding protections for the environment and, for the first time, requiring miners to pay royalties for the gold, silver, copper, uranium and other minerals they extract from public lands," reports Richard Simon of the Los Angeles Times.

"The White House has threatened to veto the bill but also signaled willingness to negotiate," Simon writes. "Driven by worries that mines are damaging the environment and complaints that private companies are shortchanging the government, the decades-old efforts to overhaul the law signed by Ulysses S. Grant have their best prospects in years for success." The last major attempts at reform were made in 1970 and 1994.

Key to the bill's future in the Senate is Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, "a gold miner's son from the biggest gold-mining state. He opposes a royalty on operators of existing hard-rock mines but has hinted he might allow royalties on new operations as a way to compromise on a priority of environmental groups, an important Democratic constituency," the Times reports. Environmentalists supporting the bill are opposed by such lobbies as the National Mining Association, which argues that it calls for "the highest royalty in the world" and would discourage domestic mining, making the U.S. more dependent on imports "for minerals critical to manufacturing," Simon writes.