Sage and Sand: Public Lands Tempest

A romp through the chaos of the resource extraction boom laying siege to our Western public lands

Welcome back to Sage and Sand; and please forgive my lengthy absence. Hiding out from the public eye for a while was good for the soul, but the moment demands our full attention. So here I am, back in the saddle, ready to charge into battle, not going gentle into that good night, etc. Join me now as we survey the lay of the land in the resource extraction boom playing out on our Western public lands.

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Whither Goes Public Land During the Era of Unbridled Extraction?

Here on the frontlines of the extinction crisis in the Great American West, the ground is shifting beneath us, in multiple directions. So many currents and cross-currents in public lands and energy policy, conflicting political and economic factors converging in some of the most remote, undeveloped, untouched, sunbaked, windswept, hyperarid, godforsaken, bountifully (if sporadically) aquatic, beloved, reviled, ignored, cherished, and contested lands in the country.

During the Biden administration, it was common to say that public lands were at a crossroads, will we preserve biodiversity or will we commit them over to the energy transition? Public lands are no longer at a crossroads. Crossroads imply an orderly decision space – do we turn this way or that way?

No, public lands are now in a maelstrom. An epic vortex of spinning currents and counter-currents, extractive industry and brutal economics, policy pendulums swinging every which way, a public buffeted by the social media algorithms that control their thought, all the while with the dark menace of the climate crisis looming overhead. Like, we can have all of these debates and bemoan the future, but as we do so the question remains: who will win the climate change lottery today and have their town wiped off the map by flooding, fires, or searing heat? One cannot overlook the tension and the chaos that climate disasters are injecting into this tempest.

We have entered a dangerous new phase of public lands management in the American West. Forces beyond our control are stripping away the bedrock environmental protection laws that keep public lands public and ensure that the government doesn’t allow corporations to ruin them. Tremendous new forces of extraction are bringing their economic and political might to bear, and only small handfuls of advocates and residents of these targeted places are pushing back. A little buckwheat and a little fish shouldn’t have to bear the burden of saving these places from annihilation, and yet that’s what we’re asking them to do. And how long will the Endangered Species Act last, when the machine realizes it’s one of the few spanners we have left to throw into the works?

A brief survey of these currents in land management and energy is a trip deep into the psyche of a civilization perched on the brink of collapse – the multi-headed capitalist beast belching and spewing swamp gas and gasping at spasms of pain in its gut after endlessly gorging on the candy and French fries of our modern consumerist society. At once driven by insatiable greed, conflicting ideologies, and an imperative from looming environmental catastrophe, the forces that are driving our public lands-energy policy are both at war with themselves but also working in some level of synchrony to advance the rapacious machine. So here goes:

Fossil Fuels

Even as predictions of peak oil come and go; even as the U.S. is already the leading producer of oil in the world; even as oil drilling has come to redefine whole swaths of the nation over the past decade and a half, Trump is still doubling down on fossil fuels. More coal, more oil, more gas. This will have profound effect on lands across the West including coal mining in the northern Great Plains, oil drilling in southern Utah and fracking for gas in New Mexico, and the continued, though once waning, political relevance of Western oil and gas producers.

Closer to home, BLM is proposing to lease 20,000 acres of public land in the beautiful White River Valley of eastern Nevada for oil drilling and fracking in March 2026. With an endangered endemic fish, the White River spinedace, and the beloved Sunnyside springs and ponds nearby, the fossil fuel industry continues to have an interest in the carbonate aquifer region of Nevada. While fossil fuels will never be a dominant factor influencing public land management in the Great Basin, as can be seen in Railroad Valley they can do a lot of damage to very sensitive ecosystems. We are prepping to fight this oil lease sale to make sure that White River Valley isn’t the next casualty.

Lithium

Due partially to the above, the fortunes of the lithium industry have fared quite differently from the oil and gas industry to which it is so closely tied. The price of lithium bottomed out a few months ago at around $8,000 per lithium carbonate equivalent ton, off from a peak of about $80,000 per back in late 2022. You may recall that at that time, lithium mining was exploding across the Great Basin like a rapidly replicating virus, with a hundred projects staked, packaged, and put up for sale or development just in Nevada alone.

Why the decline? There are a number of factors. Electric vehicle adoption did not increase at the same rate analysts have predicted, causing the demand curve 10 years out to slacken. You can trace the price of lithium, and overall EV demand for that matter, inversely to the level of Elon Musk’s political activity, and I’m not kidding. Correlation not causation, but there’s something there. The slackening of EV demand also coincided with the return of Trump and the decline of Joe Biden, who was so closely associated with EVs.

The upshot is that projects which once seemed viable, even if just as a stock play, now look pretty unappetizing with the price of lithium in the tank. Ironically, some of the older projects like Thacker Pass and Rhyolite Ridge actually did their financials back before the huge lithium price spike, so their projects still theoretically pencil out at $8,000 per ton, buckwheat notwithstanding, and far less attractively than they would have penciled out a couple of years ago. Good thing the billions of dollars that Joe Biden shoved at these projects has not been rescinded by Trump. I guess he doesn’t hate lithium and EVs after all, he just loves mining.

Meanwhile, we continue our vigilance. We are of course still up to our eyeballs in litigation over the Rhyolite Ridge Mine and our beautiful, vulnerable friend Tiehm’s buckwheat. Due to the above mentioned factors, the biggest investor in that extinction mine pulled out earlier this year, leaving project financing high and dry. Tiehm’s buckwheat had a bad year – drought suppressed both vegetative growth and flowering. But all is still quiet at Rhyolite Ridge as our litigation proceeds – the buckwheat still stands.

Rover Metals recently decamped from Ash Meadows and reformed as a Brazilian gold miner (if only life were so easy!). I guess they took the hint when Joe Biden proposed withdrawing the entire area from mining in reaction to their project. But their mining claims are still there, waiting to be sold to the next intrepid lithium impresario with money to burn. I harbor no illusions that we are done with lithium at Ash Meadows – it’s just gone into torpor. Ash Meadows is literally surrounded by mining claims, many for lithium. This won’t be the last fight over it.

The other major region we are tracking lithium is in Railroad Valley, and there fortunes appear a little different. 3PL (aka 3 Proton Lithium), those wild men who submitted an application for one of the largest water appropriations in Nevada history for their lithium project, and were profiled as charlatans in Vice Magazine a few years ago, actually got approval from Trump to conduct exploration activities in Railroad Valley. Interestingly, they are now framing their project as exploring for lithium, boron, tungsten, sodium, potassium, and phosphate. Plausible deniability for Trump so as not to seem to be promoting EVs? As I said, there is no ideology with these people. It’s just power and money and maintaining appearances for the 4Chan circle jerk that has become the Republican Party.

So, the public lands of Nevada wait in limbo. Will the price of lithium shoot back up? Will these dozens of possible lithium mines pan out? Or will battery tech move on to something different and the lithium boom will be looked back on as yet another flash in the pan in the history of Nevada mining? Hard to say. But lithium is far from the only pressure facing these landscapes…

Big Solar

The solar industry is in turmoil at the moment. The Biden administration, especially at the end, was bonanza times for the public lands solar industry, with approvals coming faster than we could even keep track. But the halls of bureaucratic power are long and winding, and the dizzying maze of our current permitting-regulatory system governing energy on public lands are such that not even the most determined of red-tape cutters can sweep enough of it away to impose their will rapidly without descending into autocracy. Like, in some ways Trump has gotten more done in 7 months than Biden did in 4 years because, despite my concerns with their energy-public lands agenda, the Biden administration, for the most part, followed the law. Trump abjectly does not.

Point being that while Biden approved a lot of public lands solar projects, and by authorizing the Western Solar Plan set the stage for a hell of a lot more, even more projects than got approved were still in the queue when Trump’s second inauguration day came. And those projects are now in suspended animation, with signals coming loud and clear from the administration that finalized project approvals for solar projects on public lands will not be forthcoming. First they tightened the noose by saying all such projects would need to go across the Secretary’s desk for approval, creating an enormous logjam. And a week or two later, they kicked out the stool from beneath big solar’s feet at the gallows, ordering a new “energy density” analysis which favors energy forms that have a lower acreage per megawatt. The problems with using that analysis for making energy policy decisions are so numerous that it’s hardly worth cataloguing them all here, but it's sort of a simpleton’s approach to making an erstwhile ideological decision sound like it was driven by science. Whereas in reality it is an ideological decision driven by economics and power, not science or even ideology.

And because of the nature of markets and investment cycles and technology cycles, suspended animation may be the wrong term for the status of these projects now. Projects propped up by cash from investors looking to make a quick buck are like fish – they need to swim to breathe. Suspended animation is a form of death for these projects. For instance, there are three projects in southern Nevada – Copper Rays, Purple Sage, and Bonanza – which are all simply awaiting their Record of Decision, the final step for approval from BLM. Those RODs are not forthcoming, maybe not for three and a half years. What then? Do the project developers simply sit on their laurels for three and a half years, hoping against hope that a.) we still have elections; b.) the candidate who they think will approve desert solar projects wins that election; and c.) that technology has stood at a standstill and it still seems economically viable to pave the desert with solar panels. That doesn’t even get into regulatory questions like: are their baseline biological surveys still relevant years later? Are the ESA Section 7 consultations still valid, or has the status of the species concerned changed such that analyses which permitted these projects to move forward in 2024 seem outdated and need an overhaul in 2029. It’s almost certain that a new President won’t just come in, wave a magic wand, and the dozens of solar projects stuck in the queue all of a sudden get RODs and get to move forward. No indeed, the more likely scenario is, it takes until 2033 just to get through the backlog created by Trump 2.0.

And meanwhile, what has happened to the project developers in the intervening 3.5 years? People move on. Companies move on. Priorities change. Those projects are unlikely to just get restarted, awakening from their Trump-induced slumber in January of 2029 and picking up right where they left off. It’s unclear what will happen, but Trump has almost certainly done permanent, long-term damage to the public lands solar industry. Which I’m not losing any sleep over.

Transmission

Greenlink North. Greenlink West. Cross-Tie. Southwest Intertie Project (SWIP) North. GridLiance. Western Bounty [PDF]. There is a transmission line boom in the Great Basin desert, and most likely, one is poised to destroy some place that you hold dear. They are already destroying places I hold dear, with Greenlink West being bulldozed through the Amargosa Desert just a few miles up the River from my house here.

And with transmission, there are some ways in which Trump is showing his hand. Trump is not driven by ideology, Trump is driven by money and the moneyed interests who give him money. The whole anti-wind, anti-solar thing isn’t because he’s just a conservative and likes fossil fuels – it’s because the fossil fuel industry props him up and keeps him in power. So when the administration said they weren’t going to authorize transmission lines intended to transmit solar power, we all thought wow – that means he won’t approve Greenlink North, right? That transmission line, poised to blast a hole with a 12-guage right through the heart of the Great Basin, is designed exclusively to open up previous undevelopable remote landscapes to solar energy. So – no Greenlink North, right? Wrong.

Trump isn’t an ideologue, he’s just serving his masters. And he has no bigger masters than Wall Street and large multi-national investment conglomerates. So then we hear that, oh no, they’re not approving gen-tie lines for individual solar projects, but they will permit large transmission lines. What’s the difference? Berkshire Hathaway wants to build Greenlink North. Trump doesn’t mind blowing off some solar developers, but he’s not going to blow off Warren Buffet. So mainline transmission line Greenlink North actually will be approved (ROD coming September 30^th!), and yet the solar projects that make the transmission line pencil out economically won’t be approved. So we have the prospect of NV Energy either a.) getting approval for the line and sitting on it for 3.5 years or until a President comes along who will permit solar projects; or b.) they actually build the damn line, destroy a bunch of sage-grouse habitat and spend billions in ratepayer money, and then it sits there, waiting for someone to build a solar project to put electrons on it, like a bride waiting at the altar. They are literally letting some of their grooms go off running, as there is a new proposal to let projects exit the Greenlink North queue with no penalty.

If BLM and the Forest Service approve the line they proposed this summer they’re going to get sued. And maybe, maybe, hope against hope, we prevail and stop that hideous boondoggle from ruining central Nevada. The bottom line is, a hell of a lot of these transmission lines are already approved and are already being built, and it is already driving a transformation of the Great Basin. Don’t believe me? Drive Highway 95 from Las Vegas to Reno and tell me what you see.

Gold Mining

Lest we think the lithium slowdown has affected the mining industry writ large… au contraire. Mining is in boom times, especially gold, and let’s be honest, that is not a new development.

The price of gold is countercyclical with the economy – it is seen as a “safe” investment, so when broader economic indicators show a downturn, or when people lose confidence in the stability of current economic conditions, they turn to gold. The price of gold began its steady increase when Trump got elected in 2016, juiced up during the pandemic, and it has never come back down to Earth in the years since. When I was in high school (25 years ago for Christ’s sake!), weed at $300 per ounce was more valuable than gold. At latest spot check this morning, gold is at $3,429.50 per ounce.

This of course has spurred a modern day gold rush in Nevada, the 4^th largest gold mining constituency in the world, producing some 5% of total global supply. Trump 1.0 permitted gold mines like they were going out of style, but to be honest so did Joe Biden. It would be a fun project to scour ePlanning and figure out who approved more gold mines, Trump 1.0 or Biden, but it would be very, very close. And now that we are in Trump 2.0 and the price of gold has doubled in the past 3 years, the gold rush is cooking with napalm. Trump already approved two gold mining operations in Nevada and there are a half dozen more in the queue for approval in short order here.

We are confronting the global gold industry in Nevada in two locations. One is along my beloved Amargosa River, where South African miner AngloGold Ashanti, one of the largest gold mining companies in the world, is seeking to turn Beatty into a mining district, with as many as seven gold mines proposed surrounding town and the beautiful, vulnerable River. These mining projects pose a risk of extinction to the Amargosa toad and the Oasis Valley speckled dace, and really to the town of Beatty as we know it. We are fighting on all fronts to save Oasis Valley, filing Endangered Species Act petitions, filing water rights protests, submitting comments on NEPA documents, and generally raising our own particular brand of hell. If and when BLM approves the North Bullfrog Mine next year, keep an eye out for litigation.

Another spot is near Elko and a project called the South Railroad Project. This is notable because there are greater sage-grouse leks literally right in the middle of the proposed open pits – this would be a notable escalation in the mining industry’s war on sage-grouse, something never permitted by BLM or the state of Nevada before. Will they start now? The precedent would be devastating and something we will be fighting full bore.

(Editors Note: Because brevity is definitely my thing, I’ll spare you further explorations into geothermal energy, clay mining, water pipelines, and the goddamn satellite dish array in Spring Valley that we’re gearing up to fight. The situation is even worse than what I have space to describe here.)

A New Hope

A few things give me hope during these troubled times. The first is the overwhelming public response that ensued when Rep. Mark Amodei (R, NV-02) and then Sen. Mike Lee (R, UT) put forward successive proposals to sell off huge swaths of public lands across the West as a part of the budget negotiations earlier this year. People freaked the fuck out. Totally wigged out. One of the most overwhelming political responses to defend public lands we’ve ever seen. Public sentiment was so overwhelming that even champion public lands pillagers like Sen. Catherine Cortez Mining, errr… Sen. Cortez Masto, spoke out against the fire sale. The reaction to this showed that public lands remain as relevant as ever in the American West, and have a constituency that may be even louder and more vocal than ever, driven by those same social media algorithms that keep people complacent and stupid. But in this case, because there’s nothing a social media algorithm likes more than conflict, those same algorithms helped publicize the issue and bring vast new constituencies into the fold who had never thought about these issues before. The response to Mike Lee’s fire sale was so robust, so unexpectedly pervasive. Public lands defenders would be fools not to make every effort to build on this and catalyze those same people to push back against the extraction industrial complex that I’ve been describing in this missive.

The second thing that gives me hope is much more personal. We have expanded our team in the Great Basin – I’m now working with four, count them four, lawyers. This both expands our litigation capacity but also helps make our workload far more sustainable for the team as a whole, helping ensure that myself and our longtime Nevada attorney Scott Lake can have as long of a career as we want at the Center. Additionally, there are new leaders arising across these desert lands, young people who are making their voices heard and bringing in new constituencies, a new generation of people to care about these beautiful landscapes and the human nonhuman communities than inhabit them. I’m lucky enough to serve on three Boards of Directors now (good god) – at the Amargosa Conservancy, the Great Basin Water Network, and the Sierra Club Toiyabe Chapter – and the staff and boards of those organizations give me hope for the future.

The final thing that gives me hope is to take a long-term perspective. Nature bats last. Do you know how many mining ghost towns I’ve been to – places where thousands of people once lived, newspapers printed, multiple saloons and whorehouses, the works! – only to find that there is literally nothing left but a few rusty cans? I understand that a thousand foot deep open-pit mine is a very different thing from some clapboard shacks in the desert, but ultimately even the thousand foot deep open-pit mines will fill back in. Solar farms, with the panels hauled away for scrap, will eventually regrow. I have an old mining road behind my house that I’ve sealed off from further use by vehicles, which is already disappearing into the desert after just a few years of healing. The current extraction boom on public lands won’t last forever – at some point the machine will move on to the next extractive boom and places rich in lithium and sunlight will be left to their own devices, as they probably should be. And wildlife will slowly come back and the rains will fall and the sun will beat down and the bulldozers will rust and creak and collapse to dust and the waters will rush back in and the desert will be forever changed, but nothing will change.

“All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike. All is ephemeral—both memory and the object of memory. The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything; and the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you. Always reflect that soon you will be no one, and nowhere.”

- adapted from Marcus Aurelius’s The Meditations.

When one applies that quote to our current mad rush towards ecological and climate annihilation, it brings about a certain comfort. The comfort of oblivion. Each of us only has about 80 years on this Earth, if we’re lucky. Nature bats last.

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Thanks for re-joining me on this journey, friends. I can’t promise I’ll publish on any sort of regular schedule but I have a lot of ideas swirling around in the old Duder’s head, so I can promise there is more to come. I’m also, unfortunately, back on all of the social networks. Follow me on X, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bluesky, wherever the hell else. I’ll be posting on all of them. Luckily all that shit’s ephemeral too.

Keep on down that long and dusty trail,

-Patrick