The following column was originally published in the Timberjay newspapers of Ely, Tower-Soudan and Cook-Orr. For more than three years, advocates for copper-nickel mining have pointed to the study produced by Jim Skurla, of the Labovitz School of Business at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, as a key justification for moving forward with this new type of mining.
The study, first released in 2009 and updated in 2012, touted huge impacts from planned new mining projects, in terms of jobs and new tax revenue to the state and local areas.
We’ve all heard the numbers from Skurla’s report cited by mining proponents — as many as 5,000 new jobs in what they term the “strategic mining sector” if all the proposed projects move forward as planned. To supporters, such numbers portend an economic renaissance for our region.
While some economists have taken issue with Skurla’s report, I don’t have any reason to believe that his conclusions are in error, at least within the context of economic modeling in general, which is typically about as accurate as your average weather forecast. The bigger concern, in my mind, is that his conclusions are widely misunderstood.
While the media bears much of the blame for failing to delve into the details of Skurla’s analysis, the study itself is somewhat confusing because it masks the relatively limited economic impacts of planned nonferrous mining projects identified by Skurla by combining them with the much more significant proposed developments within the iron mining industry.
It’s the kind of inappropriate lumping of data that is unhelpful by nature. For example, if you combine my annual income and Warren Buffett’s annual income, we’re talking about billions of dollars a year. But that doesn’t tell you very much about my annual income, does it?
It’s the same thing with Skurla’s report and nonferrous mining.
Remember those 5,000 new mining jobs by 2016 touted in his report? They’re in there. His report projects 5,029 new jobs to be exact. But those are in the iron mining industry, a long-established and far less controversial form of mining.
Permanent new copper-nickel mining jobs? 427
So how many permanent new mining jobs does Skurla project in the copper-nickel sector, by 2016? A total of 427. It’s true that Skurla’s report also projects about 1,000 temporary construction jobs, but most of those jobs last less than two years.
For the rest of this article, click here: http://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2014/03/skurla-studys-mining-boom-would-be-due-almost-entirely-taconite