Rep. Pete Stauber is fond of regurgitating, ad nauseum, that, in his persistent support for foreign corporations pursuing potentially destructive sulfide mining projects in Minnesota, he is “protecting,” “defending,” and “fighting for” “our way of life.”

Nonsense. A recent major study in the journal Science by an interdisciplinary team of scholars at the Colorado School of Mines found it unnecessary to build new critical-mineral mines such as those championed by Stauber. As the authors put it, “Ninety percent recovery of by-products from existing domestic metal mining operations could meet nearly all US critical mineral needs.”

In other words, we don’t need to jeopardize the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and our local watersheds to enrich rapacious corporations. New sulfide mining should be a last resort, not the first.

To the best of my knowledge, Stauber has never responded to this game-changing finding, which appeared not just in the flagship journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science but was synthesized in a powerful op-ed in the Washington Post. Nor should we realistically expect him to. Stauber has staked his legislative career on opening up our fragile wilderness areas to toxic mining, including, most recently, with legislation passed by the Republican House majority. This study completely undermines his insistence on its necessity.

But let’s be real: No member of Congress who repeatedly opposes all efforts to meaningfully address the gravest threat facing humanity today, the climate crisis, can seriously claim to be protecting “our way of life.”

Yet it’s not just Stauber’s refusal to act. It’s his cheerleading for the Trump administration’s determination to consign future generations to a world marred by climate horrors. Just a few weeks ago, when what is supposed to be the Environmental Protection Agency — an agency created, it’s worth remembering, by Republican President Richard Nixon — announced it was removing the government’s ability to limit greenhouse-gas emissions, Stauber celebrated what he called “the largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.” The repeal of the so-called “endangerment finding,” Stauber wrote, “will save American taxpayers over 1.3 TRILLION and save American families $2,400 for a new vehicle!”

Stauber, President Donald Trump, and the president’s MAGA minions are fond of throwing around large numbers that have no basis in reality. Remember when Trump said he won the 2016 popular vote but only appeared to lose it because “millions” of people “voted illegally?” Then there’s his risible claim that his tariff policies have culminated in “a record-breaking $18 trillion dollars of investment into the United States.” More recently, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ridiculouslyasserted that immigration agents “arrested over 10,000 criminal illegal aliens who were killing Americans, hurting children, and reigning terror in Minneapolis.” Or how about Stauber’s proud but bogus insistence that the deeply unpopular One Big Beautiful Bill Act he supported would increase the take-home pay of a typical Minnesota family of four “by as much as $13,800?”

We need to understand Stauber’s claim of $1.3 trillion, which is contradicted by the EPA itself, as a similar lie. Even if they could credibly identify such taxpayer savings, which they can’t, it goes without saying that Stauber and the Trump administration failed to account for the substantial costs to public health or the costs of future climate disasters (more intense floods, wildfires, droughts, etc.).

And these are huge. According to the government’s own calculations of billion-dollar weather and climate events, their total cost from 1980 to 2024 exceeded $2.915 trillion. Not all of that was attributable to global warming, but we know that, with the heating planet, such disasters are only getting worse. The 73 major events from 2022 to 2024, for example, cost $461.6 billion and resulted in 1,534 deaths. I would cite figures for 2025, but the Trump administration, in its anti-science zeal, forbade their publication.

So, no, Stauber is not defending “our way of life.” On the contrary, he seems hellbent on destroying it.

Scott Laderman teaches history at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. He is on Substack at scottladerman.substack.com. He wrote this exclusively for the News Tribune.