Agreed, your comment made me look into the practice a bit more and I guess it is fairly common? Bunch of horseshit imo, the public needs to be able to have transparency into this sort of thing before it reaches final approval.

https://thehill.com/business/3255648-advocacy-groups-push-for-ban-on-ndas-tied-to-government-subsidies/

I mean I hope the lawsuit is shut down, more people voting is always a win in my book

Hope this ends up getting shut down by the courts

Feels like since Covid there has been a general trend to be more mindful about drinking habits in general.

Partnership between Talon Metals headquartered in the British Virgin Islands and Kennecott Exploration Company which is a subsidy of British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto. The fact that both of these companies are based outside of the USA makes me highly suspicious that they will follow through on their cleanup proposals.

They really don’t have any incentive to clean up the site once they are done or manage the site safely while the project is active. What can the state / federal government do if they don’t? They are based outside of the US so they can walk away without any real consequences.

What will end up happening is the taxpayer will be responsible for the cleanup while these companies walk away with all of the profit. We need to establish a domestic supply chain for EV batteries, but we also need to be sure that the people profiting from it are properly maintaining the environment while doing so.

Maybe requiring new mines in Minnesota to put cleanup funds into escrow before the project starts might help?

This is already a big issue in the US and Canada, lets not add to it, see:

• https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-spend-725-mln-this-year-abandoned-coal-mine-cleanup-2022-02-07/

• https://www.ctvnews.ca/climate-and-environment/canada-s-top-five-federal-contaminated-sites-to-cost-taxpayers-billions-to-clean-up-1.6170513

Looks like there is a tentative agreement on the contract just announced.

https://mape.org/news/contract-ta-media-statement

I created one, come join us! https://midwest.social/c/minnesota

Make sure you reach out to the community if it becomes too much, both in time or cost!

It was passed, more information here: https://www.axios.com/2023/05/24/minnesota-passes-public-option-plan

The public option piece is not funded yet, what passed was to do an actuarial analysis which is due in 2024, in theory this should estimate the cost to the government to actually implement the public option. From how I understand it we will still need to pass a funding bill after this analysis is done, and even after that we won’t see a public option until 2027.