PolyMet: Fourteen Years of Bullshit, the eBook
PolyMet Mining, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Army Corps of Engineers have been working on the issuance of permits to allow the penny-stock PolyMet to open the state’s first copper sulfide mine near Hoyt Lakes, Minnesota since about 2005. It’s been clear ever since that all of these parties, and many Minnesota politicians, too, really wanted to issue permits to PolyMet, including the DNR’s permit to mine, the mother lode, so to speak, in spite of serious environmental concerns raised by a number of parties.
LeftMN has been following this story of bumbling, dissembling, and soft-shoe artistry since the website was founded in 2012. Aaron Klemz, along with Tony Petrangelo and me, was a founder of LeftMN, and he wrote many of the early stories about PolyMet. (Aaron has gone on to work with environmental nonprofits in opposing PolyMet.) I wrote all but a few since then. Tony tells me there are over 100 stories about mining in general or PolyMet in particular. Mostly, these stories are commentary based on collected media and academic sources, but there is original reporting, too.
It was Tony’s idea that we should collect these stories, most of them anyway, into an anthology and publish it in eBook form. He’s done all the work on selecting and organizing the stories and formatting them into a book. Dan Burns, a contributor here, has been very helpful as a reader and editor of the stories.
The stories have been only lightly edited; they are like a book of newspaper columns with some discontinuity from one to the next. This is the First Edition; you may want to check back from time to time to see if there are updates. And we welcome your comments and identification of any errata that you may find.
PolyMet: Fourteen Years of Bullshit is available — it’s free — in ePub, azw3, and mobi formats and as a PDF, too, at this link. You can also find it at the platforms shown at the link.
There is a timeline to the PolyMet permitting saga in a LeftMN story that you can see here.
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