Beware the hot Tafoyan wind
This is almost old news now, but it will be a recurring theme.
Michele Tafoya, Republican candidate in her own mind for U.S. Senate to replace Tina Smith — chortle (which is a word made up by Lewis Carroll, by the way) — waxes ignorant about copper sulfide mining. The story continues below the bloviating post on X by Tafoya.
Two things can be true at once: we can develop our natural resources and protect the Boundary Waters. With modern technology and strong oversight, Minnesota can set the gold standard for clean, responsible mining while preserving what makes our state special.
This is an… https://t.co/wbLh1gC4nw
— Michele Tafoya (@Michele_Tafoya) April 17, 2026
Yes, two things can be true at the same time. Tafoya can both be clueless about sulfide mining and a poisonous fabulist simultaneously!
Readers here know that sulfide mining touts simultaneously claim that Minnesota’s mining laws are tough and will protect the environment — they don’t — while working the Minnesota Legislature, the Department of Natural Resources, and the Pollution Control Agency to weaken mining law. It’s shameless, really.
But this isn’t our first rodeo. We’ve heard the same song and dance from another foreign mining company, Glencore, in trying to get the PolyMet sufide mine open. For almost twenty years. You can read about it in Fourteen Years of Bullshit. (The linked story is now about six years old.)
One of my favorite chapters in that saga was when Glencore, in a last-ditch effort to get its mine permitted, proposed to line a leaky old tailings impoundment that PolyMet/Glencore bought for a song (it had belonged to the bankrupt taconite miner, LTV) with Bentonite, better known as kitty litter. A consultant to the DNR said a version of “You’re kidding, right?” But if the regulators had been left to their own devices, it probably would have been approved. You can read about that here:
Why did a Court of Appeals Judge ask if PolyMet’s dam was a Hail Mary?
Antofagasta apparently proposes a different method of tailings storage, but the skulduggery principle is the same.
Without the heroic efforts of environmental nonprofits, a terrible mine proposal, now dead in the water, would have gone through.
We didn’t buy the bullshit then; we shouldn’t buy it now.
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