How so? Are you saying you could easily argue that the US owns the work force? Or the private land?
Very few other industries take place on public land, the only other one I can think of is cattle grazing and they make a huge deal out of charging them for the use.
In practice everyone will usually try to come to terms to avoid the legal headaches but if you don't own the mineral rights you are negotiating from weak position when this happens.
Somebody stakes a claim on US land and once they mine they pay a relatively small NSR fee to the government and keep everything else, less their extraction costs.
If your local community has, say, $64 billion in copper within its boundaries, a Canadian or Australian company can pay 1.5% of that value to the US government and take the rest.
Your local community gets nothing, save the chance to lodge an environmental or other protest.
Maybe some jobs, but it's not guarenteed.
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...
before it was sold on to the US Standard & Poor.
In general, globally, pre mine arrival local communities get a crapshoot.
They might get jobs, they'll usually get environmental issues, they often get a dedicated "company town" built, they may or may not see money from miners spill over into their community.
They might see their town bulldozed and moved on, they might get flooded with "off peak" miners gambling, chasing women, starting fights.
Sometimes they'll get jobs, and money - but not always. Mining companies tend to feed and house their own workers on many mining projects.
1.5% of $64 billion is not 98.5% is it?
You may notice I use neutral language and the question you might like to ask yourself is why might your local community give away 98.5% of $64 billion to people who were allowed to hammer four sticks in the ground and file some paperwork.
Personally I'm for it, as an Australian I have shares in various transnational proposed mining projects and will get a good return from Australian mining companies extracting resources from US soil with little return to US citizens.
Rio Tinto is certainly talking up the benefits of this to local communities:
https://resolutioncopper.com/cultural-heritage/
https://resolutioncopper.com/land-exchange/
and they're absolutely got a track record in respecting cultural heritage ( /s ):
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/may/26/rio-t...
> In general, globally, pre mine arrival local communities get a crapshoot.
Is your comment relating only to the exploring for minerals phase ? Or are you talking about when the mine is actually built.
Generally speaking, royalties (in the case of oil for instance) go to the federal government, still bypassing the local community.
So what is the solution: small royalties that go directly to the mining communities ? Ability for the local community to tax the company ?
> your local community give away 98.5% of $64 billion to people who were allowed to hammer four sticks in the ground and file some paperwork.
These lands are owned by the federal government and not the local community. So the local community is not "giving away" these lands to anyone. Of course, the government has a responsibility to give back a portion of the benefits that are accruing to it (via taxes on profits etc.) to the local communities that live near the mines.
That was poorly phrased, I wanted to distinguish between communities local to mines from before the mine was established as opposed to communities established after a mine arrives.
Long term locals can often get fully sidelined, especially indigenuous and or otherwise minority communities.
> These lands are owned by the federal government and not the local community.
Globally?
I suspect things vary in detail as you travel about the world. Still, in the case of a Federal government that represents the entire population of a country it might be asked why that body is essentially giving away a resource within the territory of the people it represents for very little in return.
Cattle grazing fees are less now than they were in 1981. Not "less after inflation", just less. It's $1.35 for 2023, while in 1981 it was $2.31. https://www.hcn.org/articles/south-public-lands-whats-gettin...
There are still extremists who refuse to even pay that nominal amount https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff
Also harvesting trees in National Forests.