The worst part is that most of number 3 is self imposed by the ridiculous amount of environmental review and litigation delays surrounding that process. Sure, cost of labor is some of it, but really it's not very much in comparison.
The acid is natural btw just from things leeching out of the rock walls.
That has ALREADY been tried, and it was an absolute disaster, killing people, wrecking lives, and wrecking vast areas of ecosystems including driving species to extinction. You clearly were not around when rivers literally caught fire or when pollution required entire areas of cities and towns to be evacuated and dug up (look up Superfund Sites), costing taxpayers hundreds of $Billions.
A billion dollar mining operation is not a quick trip to a bar, and it is not putting personal liberties at risk to require planning.
It is far better to PLAN ahead and AGREE on the requirements up front so the company and investors can make sound profit projections and the ecosystem is protected. It is far worse for everyone to let them cause irreparable damage then hit the company/investors with crushing legal actions after the fact.
Yes, I agree that such reviews need to be expedited, the delay does no one any good. But doing the reviews is crucial.
Please read some history and lookup Chesterton's Fence before whinging about topics of which you are clearly ignorant
Because, surprise, we do not want more Superfund sites. Like, the Silicon Valley is the US' biggest cluster of Superfund sites by far.
At the same time, it is very convenient that there are lots of piss poor countries that have very difficult/dirty to mine resources... be it China, Congo or whatever. These countries didn't have the luxury to think decades into the future, and capitalism doesn't have built-in ethics, and this is how we ended up here.
The EU tried to introduce supply chain laws aiming at cutting back at this kind of exploitation, but the pressure from industry was immense.
Source? My understanding was that NJ was the worse.
Wikipedia shows 94 SF sites in CA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_Cal...
And 115 in NJ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_New...
And of course, CA is _much much_ larger. If we look at the entire bos/wash corridor, it's huuugely than CA.