The Green Mine Paradox

In January 2023, the Bureau of Land Management issued its Record of Decision approving the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Humboldt County, Nevada. The project, operated by Lithium Americas Corporation and backed by General Motors, would become the largest lithium mine in North America. It would produce approximately 40,000 metric tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent per year, enough to supply batteries for roughly 800,000 electric vehicles annually.¹

Seventeen months later, the U.S. Department of Energy finalized a $2.26 billion loan to the project, the largest loan the agency had ever issued to a mining company.² As part of the arrangement, DOE received equity warrants: a 5 percent stake in Lithium Americas and a 5 percent stake in the joint venture operating the mine itself.³ General Motors committed approximately $1 billion in total investment and holds a 38 percent asset-level stake.⁴

The federal government, in other words, is simultaneously the environmental regulator that approved the project, the lender financing its construction, and an equity investor in its commercial success. It has a fiduciary interest in the mine’s profitability and a statutory obligation to evaluate whether the mine should have been approved in the first place.

This is not an oversight. It is the structure.

The site

Thacker Pass sits in the McDermitt Caldera, a collapsed volcanic formation in northern Nevada near the Oregon border. The caldera contains one of the largest known lithium deposits on Earth, formed roughly 16 million years ago when volcanic eruptions produced clay sediments rich in lithium-bearing minerals.

The landscape is high desert, characterized by sagebrush steppe, seasonal creeks, and the kind of open, spare terrain that reads as empty to people who do not know its history. But the site is not empty. It is, by multiple measures, one of the most culturally significant and ecologically sensitive locations on which the federal government has ever approved a major mining operation.

The Bureau of Land Management’s own cultural resource surveys documented 923 Native American cultural sites within the project area and its surroundings.⁵ These include lithic scatters (concentrations of worked stone indicating long-term habitation), rock shelters, pictographs, and sites associated with traditional practices that continue to the present day.

The site is also Peehee Mu’huh in the Northern Paiute language, meaning “rotten moon.” The name refers to an event in September 1865 when United States Army cavalry and civilian volunteers attacked a camp of Northern Paiute people at the location, killing an estimated 30 to 50 men, women, and children.⁶ The massacre is documented in Army records, oral histories, and the work of historians. It is part of the broader pattern of violence that accompanied settler expansion across the Great Basin in the 1860s.

For the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe, People of Red Mountain, and other affiliated tribal communities, Thacker Pass is not a potential heritage site. It is an active one. Tribal members have described the caldera as a place of ongoing cultural practice, spiritual significance, and connection to ancestors who lived and died there. The bones of massacre victims remain in the ground that Lithium Americas proposes to excavate.

The consultation

Federal law requires agencies to consult with tribal governments before approving projects that may affect cultural resources or sacred sites. The legal framework for this obligation includes the National Historic Preservation Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, and Executive Order 13175 on tribal consultation.

The Bureau of Land Management’s tribal consultation for the Thacker Pass project consisted of three mailings sent to three tribal offices.⁷ The mailings were sent during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many tribal offices were closed, many tribal members were experiencing disproportionate health impacts, and the capacity of tribal governments to respond to federal requests was severely constrained.

No in-person meetings were held. No extended comment periods were provided. No effort was made to accommodate the pandemic conditions that were plainly affecting tribal participation.

A February 2025 report by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union examined the Thacker Pass consultation process in detail. The 133-page report found that the consultation fell far short of federal legal requirements and international standards for indigenous rights, including the principle of free, prior, and informed consent.⁸ The report documented the inadequacy of the mailing-based consultation, the failure to identify and engage all affected tribal communities, and the absence of any meaningful opportunity for tribal input to influence the project’s design or approval.

The BLM’s environmental impact statement acknowledged the presence of cultural resources but concluded that the project’s benefits, specifically its contribution to domestic lithium supply and the energy transition, outweighed the impacts. This is the standard framework: costs and benefits are weighed, and the agency determines whether the balance favors approval. The framework does not ask whether certain costs (the destruction of a massacre site, the disruption of ongoing cultural practices, the excavation of ancestral remains) are categorically different from other costs (traffic impacts, dust emissions, habitat fragmentation) and might therefore be incommensurable with any set of benefits.

The surveillance

Opposition to the Thacker Pass mine has taken several forms: administrative challenges through the BLM’s protest process, litigation in federal court, and physical protest at the site, where activists established a camp near the proposed mining area beginning in early 2021.

In July 2025, ProPublica reported that the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force had conducted surveillance of individuals involved in the Thacker Pass protest camp.⁹ The surveillance included monitoring of social media activity, the tracking of individuals’ movements, and the collection of information on protest organizations and their members. The investigation was conducted under domestic terrorism authorities.

The use of counterterrorism resources to monitor environmental and indigenous rights protesters is not unprecedented. Similar surveillance has been documented at Standing Rock during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, at protests against the Mountain Valley Pipeline, and at numerous other sites where resource extraction projects face organized opposition. The pattern is well established: federal agencies approve extractive projects, citizens protest, and federal law enforcement monitors the protesters using authorities designed for counterterrorism.

The effect, whether or not it is the intent, is suppressive. When people know that attending a protest may result in their inclusion in a federal surveillance database, some of them do not attend. When organizations know that their communications may be monitored, some of them moderate their activities. The surveillance does not need to produce arrests to produce compliance. Its existence is sufficient.

In the context of Thacker Pass, the juxtaposition is notable. The federal government approved the mine, financed the mine, took an equity stake in the mine, conducted what tribal leaders and human rights organizations have described as inadequate consultation, and then surveilled the people who objected.

The law of 1872

The legal framework governing hardrock mining on federal land in the United States is the General Mining Law, enacted on May 10, 1872.¹⁰ The law was signed by President Ulysses S. Grant. It was designed to encourage mineral exploration in the western territories by granting prospectors the right to stake claims on public land, extract minerals, and in many cases obtain title to the land itself for nominal fees.

The law has been amended in minor ways over the past 153 years. Its fundamental structure has not changed. It does not require the payment of royalties to the federal government for minerals extracted from public land. It does not give federal land managers the authority to deny a mining permit based on a determination that a particular location is too environmentally sensitive, too culturally significant, or too ecologically valuable to mine. It establishes mining as the highest and best use of public land wherever valuable mineral deposits are found.

Under this framework, the BLM’s role in evaluating a project like Thacker Pass is constrained. The agency can impose conditions on how the mine operates. It can require mitigation measures. It can conduct environmental review. But it cannot, under most interpretations of the law, simply say no. If the mineral deposit is there and the company has filed the proper claims, the law presumes that extraction will proceed.

This means that the environmental review process, however extensive, is fundamentally asymmetric. The question is not whether the mine should be approved. The question is under what conditions it will be approved. The consultation with tribal governments, however conducted, takes place within a framework that has already presumed the outcome.

Every major effort to reform the 1872 Mining Law has failed. The mining industry opposes royalties and enhanced regulatory authority. Western-state legislators oppose any change that might be perceived as limiting economic development. The law persists, governing 21st-century resource extraction under 19th-century assumptions about the relationship between the federal government, public land, and private profit.

The energy transition’s demand curve

Lithium is not optional for the clean energy transition as currently conceived. It is the elemental basis of the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles, grid-scale energy storage, and consumer electronics. Global lithium demand is projected to increase by a factor of five to seven between 2023 and 2035, driven primarily by the electrification of transportation and the expansion of renewable energy storage.

The United States currently produces a negligible share of global lithium supply. The dominant producers are Australia (hardrock mining), Chile and Argentina (brine extraction), and increasingly China (both domestic production and processing of imported material). China controls approximately 65 percent of global lithium refining capacity, a concentration of supply chain control that has generated bipartisan concern in Washington about strategic vulnerability.

Thacker Pass is, by the metrics that policymakers use, exactly the kind of project the United States needs. It would be the largest domestic source of battery-grade lithium. Its projected C1 operating costs of approximately $6,238 per tonne of lithium carbonate equivalent would make it competitive with South American brine operations.¹¹ It would reduce dependence on Chinese processing. It would support the domestic manufacturing base that the Inflation Reduction Act is designed to build.

These are real considerations. The energy transition requires materials. Those materials must come from somewhere. And the geopolitical case for domestic production, while subject to reasonable debate, is not trivial.

The question is not whether lithium matters. The question is whether the way Thacker Pass is being developed, the speed at which approval was granted, the inadequacy of tribal consultation, the entanglement of regulatory and financial interests, the surveillance of opponents, reveals something about the character of the transition itself.

The economics of volatility

Lithium prices have followed a trajectory that complicates the narrative of inevitable profitability. From 2020 through late 2022, lithium carbonate prices rose dramatically, driven by surging EV demand and constrained supply. Prices peaked near $80,000 per tonne in late 2022, a level that made virtually any lithium project look attractive.

Then they crashed. By early 2024, lithium carbonate prices had fallen approximately 80 percent from their peak, dropping to levels that called the economics of numerous projects into question.¹² The decline was driven by a combination of new supply coming online (particularly from Australia and Africa), a slowdown in Chinese EV sales growth, and the inventory adjustments that characterize commodity markets coming off a price spike.

Prices have since recovered to a range of $17,000 to $22,000 per tonne, a level at which Thacker Pass’s projected economics remain viable but margins are far thinner than the peak-price projections suggested.¹² The $2.26 billion DOE loan was structured and approved during a period of elevated prices and intense optimism about lithium demand trajectories. Whether the project’s economics hold through a full commodity cycle, including periods of price weakness, remains an open question.

This matters because the DOE loan is taxpayer money. If Thacker Pass proves uneconomic, whether due to sustained low lithium prices, cost overruns, regulatory challenges, or some combination, the financial risk falls in part on the federal balance sheet. The equity warrants that DOE received provide upside participation if the project succeeds. They do not protect against losses if it does not.

The federal government has, in effect, made a leveraged bet on a single mining project in a volatile commodity market, while simultaneously serving as the project’s environmental regulator. The conflicts embedded in this arrangement are not hidden. They are structural features of how the United States has chosen to organize its energy transition.

The water question

Lithium extraction at Thacker Pass will require significant quantities of water. The mine’s process involves excavating lithium-bearing clay, mixing it with sulfuric acid in a processing facility on site, and extracting lithium carbonate from the resulting solution. Each stage requires water: for dust suppression during excavation, for the chemical processing itself, and for the management of tailings and waste streams.

The project’s water supply will be drawn from groundwater wells in the Kings River Valley, a hydrological system that also supports ranching operations, wildlife habitat, and the springs that sustain endemic species like the Kings River pyrg. The relationship between groundwater withdrawal and spring flow is not always immediate or linear. Drawdown effects can take years or decades to manifest, and by the time impacts become visible, the damage may be irreversible.

This is a recurring tension in arid-land mining. Water in the Great Basin is not abundant. It is allocated, contested, and ecologically essential. Groundwater systems that have developed over millennia can be depleted in years by industrial-scale pumping. The springs that depend on those systems, and the species that depend on those springs, have no market value that registers in the project’s cost-benefit analysis. They appear, if they appear at all, as mitigation requirements: conditions attached to the permit that may or may not prove sufficient to prevent the harm they are designed to address.

The ecological dimensions extend beyond water. The sagebrush steppe that covers the project area is habitat for greater sage-grouse, a species that has been the subject of decades of conservation planning and whose population has declined by an estimated 80 percent from historical levels. Sagebrush ecosystems are among the most threatened in North America, and they do not regenerate quickly. A sagebrush landscape disturbed by mining may take decades or centuries to recover, if it recovers at all.

The environmental impact statement addressed these concerns. It imposed mitigation measures. It required monitoring plans. But the fundamental question, whether the ecological cost of mining this particular site is justified by the lithium it will produce, is not one the legal framework is designed to answer. The 1872 Mining Law presumes that mineral extraction is the highest use of public land. The environmental review process can modify how extraction occurs. It cannot, in most circumstances, prevent it.

The pattern

Thacker Pass is not unique. It is the most prominent example of a pattern that is repeating across the American West and beyond.

Resolution Copper, a proposed copper mine in Arizona, would destroy Oak Flat (Chi’chil Bildagoteel), a site sacred to the San Carlos Apache Tribe. The project was authorized through a legislative rider attached to the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act, bypassing normal environmental review. Litigation continues.

Rhyolite Ridge, a lithium-boron project in Nevada, threatens the habitat of Tiehm’s buckwheat, a plant species found nowhere else on Earth. The Fish and Wildlife Service listed the plant as endangered in 2022, creating a legal conflict between the Endangered Species Act and the drive for domestic mineral production.

Twin Metals, a proposed copper-nickel mine near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota, was blocked by the Biden administration through a mineral withdrawal, then potentially revived by subsequent policy shifts.¹³

At Thacker Pass itself, a pending lawsuit under the Endangered Species Act concerns the Kings Mountain pyrg, a small snail species found in springs that could be affected by the mine’s water use.¹⁴ The case illustrates a recurring dynamic: the Endangered Species Act, designed in 1973, is being asked to adjudicate conflicts between biodiversity protection and energy transition infrastructure that its authors could not have anticipated.

In each case, the pattern is the same. A mineral deposit is identified. A company files claims. The federal government conducts environmental review under a legal framework that presumes approval. Indigenous communities, conservation organizations, or local residents object. The objections are processed through administrative and legal channels that are structurally tilted toward the project. If the project is deemed important to national economic or security interests, the tilt becomes steeper.

Executive Order 14241, issued in 2025, formalized this tilt by imposing 10-to-30-day deadlines on federal agencies for processing mineral project approvals.¹⁵ The order was framed as necessary for supply chain security and the energy transition. Its practical effect is to compress the already-inadequate timeframes for environmental review, tribal consultation, and public comment into windows that preclude meaningful analysis.

The structural contradiction

The clean energy transition is necessary. The scientific evidence for this is overwhelming, and the economic and geopolitical arguments reinforce the scientific ones. Reducing dependence on fossil fuels requires, among other things, a massive expansion of battery manufacturing, which requires a massive expansion of mineral extraction. This is not a choice between mining and not mining. It is a question of how mining is conducted, where it occurs, who bears the costs, and whether the process of transition reproduces the injustices it was supposed to address.

Thacker Pass clarifies what is at stake. The same government that invokes the urgency of climate change to justify accelerated mineral extraction is the government that approved a mine on a massacre site after sending three letters during a pandemic. The same government that touts domestic lithium production as a national security imperative is the government that surveilled the indigenous and environmental communities that objected. The same government that is supposed to evaluate whether the mine’s environmental impacts are acceptable is the government that holds equity in the mine’s commercial success.

These contradictions are not bugs in the system. They are the system. The legal framework (1872 Mining Law), the consultation framework (mailings during COVID), the financial framework (lender and equity holder as regulator), and the security framework (counterterrorism surveillance of protesters) all point in the same direction. They point toward a transition that replicates, in new materials and with new justifications, the extractive logic it was meant to replace.

Lithium is not coal. Electric vehicles are not diesel trucks. The climate case for the energy transition is real. But the question of whether the transition will be conducted justly, whether it will respect indigenous rights, protect biodiversity, and distribute costs equitably, is not settled by the rightness of the climate case. It is settled by the specific decisions made at specific sites, under specific legal frameworks, by specific institutions with specific conflicts of interest.

Thacker Pass is one such site. The decisions made there will not determine the fate of the energy transition. But they reveal its character. And the character, so far, looks familiar.

The caldera is 16 million years old. The massacre site is 161 years old. The mining law is 153 years old. The DOE loan is two years old. The mine has not yet extracted its first tonne of lithium.

There is still time to get this right. Whether the institutions involved have the capacity or the incentive to do so is a different question, and the evidence from Thacker Pass does not inspire confidence.