"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 would be done by this side deal, it must be unequivocally rejected."
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."