Duluth News Tribune
Editorial Board

Twin Metals has been working for 10 years and has invested $450 million-and-counting to develop a better way, a safer way, and an environmentally friendly way to extract the strategic minerals the world needs and is getting now via sometimes-dangerous and too-often-unscrupulous means.

“We have the potential to reignite industry (in the Ely area, providing) opportunities for people to stay here, to raise families here, and to fill up the schools again. So it’s really important to us,” said Dean DeBeltz, Twin Metals’ director of operations and safety. “It’s a very significant economic-development project not only for this area but for Minnesota as a whole.”

Once operational, the mine will have to continue to convince regulators and the public of its ability to operate responsibly and safely. Unlike elsewhere in the world, in Minnesota and in the U.S., modern mining is one of our most tightly regulated industries.

That is part of the reason why such mining can be welcomed here rather than in places where children are lowered into holes to paw at the earth with their fingers. No one’s smartphone is worth that.

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