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The Oscar-winner and El Capitan free solo-er talks to Heatmap about solar panels, fatherhood, and his new docuseries, Arctic Ascent.
In 2017, rock climber Alex Honnold went on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to promote Free Solo, the then-new documentary about his unassisted climb of Yosemite’s El Capitan. “Is there anything bigger than that?” Kimmel prompted as a closing question.
“I mean, there are technically some bigger walls in the world,” Honnold said. “But they’re in very remote places — like Greenland.”
Five years and an Oscar later, Honnold was scrambling off a boat at the base of Ingmikortilaq, a crumbly sea cliff that towers nearly 1,000 feet higher than El Cap over an iceberg-ridden fjord in eastern Greenland. His intended first ascent was the culmination of a six-week adventure across ice fields and glaciers.
This time, Honnold wasn’t alone. The Greenland expedition included two other legendary climbers, Hazel Findlay and Mikey Schaefer, as well as Aldo Kane, who provided safety and technical support; Adam Kjeldsen, a Greenlandic guide; and perhaps most surprisingly, Heïdi Sevestre, a Frenchglaciologist who helped set up or run 16 different studies to collect data for scientists around the world.
The team’s adventure is captured in Arctic Ascent with Alex Honnold, a three-part docuseries that premieres on Hulu and Disney+ on February 5. Ahead of its release, I spoke separately with Honnold and Sevestre about the expedition, the importance of climate science, and their respective climbs. (While Sevestre, previously a non-climber, didn’t attempt Ingmikortilaq, she did scale a 1,500-foot rock face known as the Pool Wall while drilling rock cores for samples.) Our conversations have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Unlike a lot of other outdoor sports like mountaineering or skiing or even surfing, rock climbing doesn’t seem as obviously imperiled by climate change. How did this become the cause you wanted to devote your time and money to?
Oh, I think climbing is more imperiled by climate change than most other sports. I mean, you’re right that maybe it’s not as impactful as to skiing, but it’s way more impactful than almost every other sport.
You’re still in the mountains. Wildfire smoke every summer — that’s now a thing that just didn’t exist when I was growing up climbing. Even if you’re just rock climbing, you’re always approaching in the mountains. Nowadays, most couloirs [chutes between rocks that might typically fill with snow in the winter] have melted out. Stable snow fields that have existed for generations are now melted out. Piles of teetering rubble are falling down mountainsides, and also a lot of routes are just less safe. The mountainsides themselves are collapsing, like the Aiguille du Midi gondola in Chamonix. Which, actually — one of the things we were installing in Greenland were temperature sensors on one of the cliffs, related to studying how rocks thaw out, what happens when permafrost melts. I would say that climate change is still incredibly relevant for us.
Your way into climate was through your climbing, then?
A big part of my environmental awareness in general is because of the experiences I’ve had outdoors as a climber. But long before [the Greenland expedition], I started a foundation in 2012 where I’ve been supporting community solar projects around the world and caring about the transition to renewables. I’ve cared about climate change forever. I think this was just the first opportunity to do it on mainstream television.
I saw that Arctic Ascent purchased carbon credits to compensate for production emissions. I was hoping you could talk about that decision, and how else you might have minimized your impact on the expedition, since I don’t think people are aware of how energy intensive film and TV productions can be.
In this case, other than the obvious expense of all of our flights getting to Greenland, we had a relatively low carbon footprint because we were camping the whole time. I think you’re right that a lot of television is kind of insane when you have all the RVs and everyone’s in their own thing and there’s hair and makeup and it’s just crazy with, like, a million cameras. In this case, it was basically a bunch of people camping on a glacier for six weeks, so it’s not quite the same as a Hollywood set.
But yeah, I think the idea to purchase offsets was the obvious bare minimum for a project like this. If you’re going to be doing a whole story around sea level rise, you have to do something.
The Honnold Foundation focuses on bringing solar panels to vulnerable communities, but these are fairly small projects compared to the expansive solar farms we might more traditionally think of. Why did you choose to focus your time on something that might seem, at least on paper, to be of a smaller scale than, say, electrifying the grid?
It’s a totally fair question. In 2012, it wasn’t totally clear that the world was transitioning to renewables at all. It seemed like it was inevitable, but you’re never really sure — you know, back then people were into hydrogen and you’re like, “Oh, maybe we’re going to have hydrogen cars, or maybe battery electric really takes off,” blah, blah, blah. Anyway, now it seems totally clear that the world is transitioning to renewables. Within some timeframe, like 20 to 50 years, the world will be 100% renewable.
The thing is, we currently live in a world where something like a billion people don’t have access to power, and transitioning to renewables will still leave us in a world where a billion people don’t have access to power. [Editor’s note: The number of people living without electricity today is actually closer to 760 million.] As the system changes, there are so many people who are left behind. What the Honnold Foundation tries to do is find that sweet spot in helping with the transition, helping the people who are being left behind.
Part of that is just by necessity — I’m a professional rock climber, I’m not a tech billionaire. So the small-scale grants just make more sense to some extent, but they also have the biggest impact on human lives because when you do these small-scale projects, you can fundamentally change the way people live. That’s a huge impact.
I live in Las Vegas, and you see huge solar farms around the desert. It’s great; the grid is going 100% renewable. I’m into that. But realistically, the only difference it makes in most people’s lives is maybe a small change in their utility rate. Really, the people that benefit are the utility shareholders — it’s some Warren Buffett-owned utility in my case, NV Energy. That really isn’t that inspiring. This is my long rant to say that the Honnold Foundation is trying to help the humans who need it the most.
Did you get a chance to use solar panels on the Greenland expedition?
On this trip, no, because they were running a generator for production and it was charging, like, 50 batteries.
It’s funny because we did an expedition in Antarctica where we made a little climbing film as well. And on that trip, they planned to take a generator and then somebody just forgot the fuel. So we got there and we were like, “Oh, no,” and we wound up doing the whole trip off solar and it totally worked.
This was your first expedition since becoming a father. You’ve worked on the climate cause for a long time now, but I’m curious if your perspective has changed at all since your daughter June joined your family — and I know you have another daughter on the way!
Yeah, soon! No, I don’t think my perspective has changed too much. I’ve always cared about these kinds of issues. The bigger change is in the way that I spend my time. Having a family forces me to be a little bit tighter about the choices that I’m making, what expeditions I choose to go on. That makes a trip like this even more worthwhile, where you get to do great climbing and there’s a real purpose behind it, and you get to share important knowledge about things that matter.
Can you tell me a little more about the decision to bring Heïdi on board? I heard her version of the story earlier this week but I’m curious about how you found her and roped her in.
Isn’t she so amazing?
She was delightful!
That’s the thing with Heïdi. Because when you spend time with her, she just makes you care about about ice. And I don’t even like ice. It’s not my thing; I like rocks. But she made me much more knowledgeable and much more caring about that type of world.
Do you consider yourself an optimist when it comes to climate change?
I think so, which is weird because I’m optimistic despite all the data to the contrary. I understand the predictions, but there’s so much to gain. So far it’s been 20 years that I’ve been reading environmental nonfiction and we haven’t really chosen to make anything of this opportunity, but we still have this incredible opportunity to build a better world to live in, a cleaner world. We can still choose that at any point. And I just keep thinking that at some point, we’re going to choose it. You can’t keep ignoring the obvious thing forever.
How did you get involved in the Arctic Ascent expedition?
This was an absolute dream come true for me — I felt extremely lucky to get a call from the team. It is extremely challenging to go to that one remote location, one of the least studied places on Earth. But Alex, as you know, is a firm believer in the scientific work. The planets really aligned. It took about a year prior to the expedition to design the work we could do with boots on the ground.
I wanted to know what it was like to put together scientific objectives for an expedition like this. It’s a little bit unconventional because there’s a film crew and there was climbing involved.
I think it was extremely brave and extremely daring of the entire team to have the willingness to invite the scientists on board. Because not only did we have the best climbers in the world climbing in a very challenging and hostile environment, we’re also filming a series of documentaries and we have to do some of the very best possible science. So it’s not that easy! But what we did is, we took it step by step. We contacted all the universities and labs and institutions interested in data from this part of the world — and also interested in training me on how to collect this data. Because I really felt — it’s what I was thinking the whole time — I really felt like I was an astronaut on the ISS. I was the only one, and I had to do the best possible work.
We ended up with 16 different protocols to do on this expedition, so it was really major. And, you know, we worked with NASA, we worked with research institutes in Denmark, the University of Buffalo, and the University of Kansas, for example. So it was challenging but a dream come true to be trusted by the scientists.
Your first big polar expedition was actually to Greenland, back in 2011. Had you been back to the island between that research trip and this one?
I had spent a tiny bit of time — not so far in the field as East Greenland, but around the coastlines. But what I was doing there was mostly science communication with people who wanted to learn about the impacts of climate change on the Greenland ice sheets. So I hadn’t been on a big research expedition to Greenland since 2011. And the changes were absolutely massive.
That was going to be my question!
The Arctic is one of the fastest-warming places on Earth. Everything that’s taking place in Greenland is impacting the rest of the world, so I felt that we had a duty and a mission — on top of climbing these incredible monoliths, we actually had to bring something back to society.
In the series, you talk about how remote and understudied East Greenland is by climate scientists. But during the expedition, you were being assisted by support helicopters and by boats. So why aren’t expeditions like this one happening all the time? Is it an issue of funding or a lack of scientific interest in this particular region?
It’s crazy to think of how little data we have from the ground [in East Greenland]. We have satellites — we have as many satellites as we want. But it is very tricky to get there. What you have to understand about this place is that for 10 months of the year, there is sea ice blocking access to this field. Ten months of the year! So the rest of the year — yes, we can access by plane, we can access by boat, but it’s very expensive.
What was great about this project is that we had in mind, “How can we lower our carbon footprint?” This is why, for example, we worked with fishermen who had boats from a nearby village at the entrance of the field. It was very important for us to use local means of transportation. Of course, we had to use helicopters every now and then, because there was no other way. But it’s remote, it’s expensive, and on top of everything, it is extremely hostile.
Oh my gosh, the bashing you get when you go there! This is something that we really wanted to show in the series — how powerful nature can be. And climate change is accelerating and making these changes even more violent. So I think it’s important to show that when nature starts to be a bit destabilized, it can get very angry.
There was a paper in Nature that came out earlier this month that said nearly every glacier in Greenland has thinned or retreated over the past few decades. In the series, there’s a bit of good news, which is that the Daugaard-Jensen Glacier is a little bit more stable than you were anticipating. Do you have any insight into why that might be?
What’s so great is, it keeps part of the mystery! I like that we still don’t totally understand what’s taking place.
The scientists we’ve been working with have told us — this is a bit technical — but it has to do with the shape of the bedrock. It seems that the glacier is resting on a little ridge that might be holding everything together. This might be the reason why the glacier is still stable; also, this part of Greenland still receives a lot of snow.
But we’ve seen some cracks in this perfect picture. You know, the NASA float [that we launched on the expedition] has told us that the temperature of the water in the fjords is increasing. So it’s not all perfect. The environment around it is definitely changing, but it seems that it has some advantages.
Were there any findings from the expedition that you are particularly excited about?
All of them! But science takes a very long time, so at the moment, we’re still waiting on a lot of the results from these different protocols. But what I want to share is something that is very simple: Greenland holds a lot of ice, and if we lose the ice, it means 6 to 7 meters of sea-level rise. As you saw in the paper that was published by Nature, at the moment, Greenland is losing 30 million tons of ice per hour. What is crucial to understand is that every action we conduct back home to reduce our carbon footprints and to preserve our climate helps Greenland and helps our collective future. All this data will help us to prepare for the things to come.
Last question: Have you taken up rock climbing?
I’ll be honest: no. I think I’m a bit traumatized in a good way. I think I needed a minute to recover. But I really want to start climbing again — now, with the launch of this series, I know that it’ll be my mission for this year. Otherwise, I think Alex and Hazel will never forgive me.
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Any EV is better for the planet than a gas-guzzler, but size still matters for energy use.
A few Super Bowls ago, when General Motors used its ad spots to pitch Americans on the idea of the GMC Hummer EV, it tried to flip the script on the stereotypes that had always dogged the gas-guzzling SUV. Yes, it implied, you can drive a military-derived menace to society and still do your part for the planet, as long as it’s electric.
You don’t hear much about the Hummer anymore — it didn’t sell especially well, and the Tesla Cybertruck came along to fill the tank niche in the electric car market. But the reasoning behind its launch endures. Any EV, even a monstrous one, is a good EV if it convinces somebody, somewhere, to give up gasoline.
This line of thinking isn’t wrong. A fully electric version of a big truck or SUV is far better, emissions-wise, than a gas-powered vehicle of equivalent size. It’s arguably superior to a smaller and efficient combustion car, too. A Ford F-150 Lightning, for example, scores nearly 70 in the Environmental Protection Agency’s miles per gallon equivalent metric, abbreviated MPGe, that’s meant to compare the energy consumption of EVs and other cars. That blows away the 20-some miles per gallon that the gas F-150 gets and even exceeds the 57 combined miles per gallon of the current Toyota Prius hybrid.
In terms of America’s EV adoption, then, we’ve come to see all EVs as being created equal. Yet our penchant for large EVs that aren’t particularly efficient at squeezing miles from their batteries will become a problem as more Americans go electric.
Big, heavy cars use more energy. This is how we worried about the greenness of cars back in the days before the EV: Needlessly enormous models such as the Ford Expedition and the Hummer H2 deserved to be shamed, while owning a fuel-sipping hybrid or a dinky subcompact was the height of virtue.
This logic has gotten a bit lost in the scale-up phase of electric vehicles going mainstream. We talk at length about EV sales and how fast their numbers are growing; we rarely talk about whether the EVs we buy are as energy-efficient as they could be. As a new white paper from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy points out, though, getting more miles out of our EV batteries would save drivers money and reduce the strain on the grid that will come from millions of people charging their cars.
The simplest way to measure an EV’s fuel efficiency is to know how many miles it travels per kilowatt-hour of electricity. Popular crossovers like Tesla’s Model Y and Kia’s EV6 achieve a pretty-good 3.5 miles per kilowatt-hour. Look at bigger, heavier vehicles and you’ll see a major fall-off. InsideEVs found that Rivian’s R1S gets between 2.1 and 2.4 miles per kilowatt-hour. The hulking Hummer EV scores just 1.5, according to Motor Trend’s testing. The EPA’s MPGe data is another way to see the same story. The 60-some miles per gallon equivalent of an electric pickup like the Rivian R1T or Chevy Silverado EV crushes the mileage of petro trucks, but pales next to the 140-plus MPGe that an electric sedan from Hyundai or Lucid can claim. (Those EVs can deliver 4 or more miles per kilowatt-hour.)
Even modest gains in EV efficiency could cause beneficial ripple effects, the ACEEE says. Drivers who own a 3.5 miles per kilowatt-hour car would save hundreds of dollars on fuel annually compared to those whose vehicles get 2.5 miles per kilowatt-hour. More efficient cars should be less expensive, as well. Huge, inefficient EVs need to carry enormous batteries just to reach an adequate range, and the bigger the battery, the bigger the cost. Whereas a Model Y’s battery capacity ranges from 60 kilowatt-hours for standard range to 81 kilowatt-hours for long range, a Rivian’s runs from 92 to 141.5 kilowatt-hours. ACEEE calculates that the jump from 2.5 to 3.5 kilowatt-hours could shave nearly $5,000 from the cost of making a car because it would need so much less battery.
Making EVs more efficient would mean faster charging stops, too, since drivers wouldn’t need to cram so many kilowatt-hours into their batteries. It would ease demand for electricity, making it easier for the grid to keep pace with an electrifying society. But convincing Americans to buy smaller, more efficient vehicles has been an uphill battle for decades.
Earlier this summer, Ford CEO Jim Farley called for a return to smaller vehicles as more of the U.S. car fleet turns over to electric. Yet it was Ford that just a few years ago quit making cars altogether (outside of the Mustang) because it reaped so much more profit on the pricier crossovers, SUVs, and pickups that Americans have voted for with their wallets. And not long after Farley’s speech, the company scaled back its EV ambitions, clearly struggling to find a way to sell electric vehicles profitably.
The issue is not only carbuyers’ preference for big, heavy vehicles. ACEEE points out that public policy doesn’t punish big electric cars. “The EPA standard treats all EVs as having zero emissions. It therefore provides no incentive to improve EV efficiency since inefficient and efficient EVs are treated the same for compliance purposes,” the paper says.
That is why ACEEE floats the idea of a policy change. For example, its paper suggests the fees some states levy against EVs (ostensibly to make up for the lost revenue from those cars avoiding the gas tax) could be tweaked to charge more for inefficient EVs. Rebates for purchasing an EV could be changed in the same manner.
It was, after all, regulatory loopholes and misplaced incentives that helped big gas guzzlers conquer the roads in the first place. With better rules about big EVs, perhaps we could avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
On new heat records, Trump’s sea level statements, and a super typhoon
Current conditions: Torrential rains flooded the streets of Milan, Italy • The U.K. recorded its coldest summer since 2015 • The temperature in Palm Springs, California, hit 121 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday.
Summer 2024 was officially the warmest on record in the Northern Hemisphere, according to new data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Between June and August, the average global temperature was 1.24 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the 1991-2020 average, beating out last summer’s record. August 2024 tied August 2023 for joint-hottest month ever recorded globally, with an average surface air temperature of 62.27 degrees Fahrenheit.
C3S
“During the past three months of 2024, the globe has experienced the hottest June and August, the hottest day on record, and the hottest boreal summer on record,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S. “This string of record temperatures is increasing the likelihood of 2024 being the hottest year on record. The temperature-related extreme events witnessed this summer will only become more intense, with more devastating consequences for people and the planet unless we take urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
During a speech at the Economic Club of New York yesterday, former President Donald Trump said that because of climate change, “the ocean is going to go down 100th of an inch within the next 400 years,” and dismissed this as “not our problem.” This appears to be a warped variation of his repeated claim that “the ocean is going to rise one eighth of an inch over the next 400 years.” He’s said this many times, occasionally subbing in “200 to 300 years” for 400 years. Either way, he’s incorrect. “Trump’s numbers are orders of magnitude off the mark,” wrote Heatmap’s Jeva Lange in her epic historical fact check of Trump’s various climate statements. “The oceans are on track to rise 3.5 feet to 7 feet along America’s coastlines by 2100,” Lange said. Back in 2022, Michael Oppenheimer, director of the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment at Princeton University, called Trump’s sea-level calculation “so far from accurate as to appear to have been entirely fabricated.”
The U.S. and China had “excellent discussions” during climate talks this week in Beijing, climate envoy John Podesta said today. The two nations came closer to being on the same page about climate finance and greenhouse gas emissions cuts. “Notwithstanding some friction in our bilateral relationship, we can find places to collaborate for the good of our people and the good of our climate,” Podesta said. As Bloombergnoted, this is likely the last opportunity for the world’s two biggest emitters to try to find common ground ahead of the U.S. presidential election and the COP29 climate summit in November.
Ford reported some interesting August sales figures yesterday. The company saw a 50% jump in hybrid sales last month compared to a year before, and a 29% rise in electric vehicle sales, with F-150 Lightning sales up 160% year over year. But internal combustion engine cars still made up 86% of total monthly sales. The automaker recently scrapped its plans to build a three-row EV crossover and instead plans to make that vehicle as a hybrid, and will double down on producing more hybrid models.
China evacuated 400,000 people from some of its southern provinces in anticipation of Super Typhoon Yagi. Schools are shut down, flights have been canceled, and Hong Kong’s stock market is closed. The storm struck the Philippines earlier this week but has doubled in strength since, and now packs wind speeds of about 140 miles per hour, giving it the power of a Category 4 hurricane. It made landfall on the popular tourist island of Hainan this morning and is expected to hit Guangdong, China's most populous province, before churning toward Vietnam’s historic Ha Long Bay. It is the strongest typhoon to strike China’s southern coast in 10 years, and according to NASA, it has been supercharged by unusually warm water in the Northwest Pacific Basin.
“Everybody’s getting drunk and having a good time: ‘Oh, look at the gift they brought us!’ But at night, they’re going to sneak out of that horse, and they’re going to leave an environmental disaster.” –A long-time resident of Superior, Arizona, ponders the promise and perils of mining the town’s copper deposits, one of the largest remaining in the world.
The raw material of America’s energy transition is poised for another boom.
In the town of Superior, Arizona, there is a hotel. In the hotel, there is a room. And in the room, there is a ghost.
Henry Muñoz’s father owned the building in the early 1980s, back when it was still a boarding house and the “Magma” in its name, Hotel Magma, referred to the copper mine up the hill. One night, a boarder from Nogales, Mexico, awoke to a phantom trying to pin her to the wall with the mattress; naturally, she demanded a new room. When Muñoz, then in his fearless early 20s, heard this story from his father, he became curious. Following his swing shift at the mine, Muñoz posted himself to the room with a case of beer and passed the hours until dawn drinking and waiting for the spirit to make itself known.
Muñoz didn’t see a ghost that night, but he has since become well acquainted with others in town. There is the Mexican bakery, which used to sell pink cookies but now opens only when the late owner’s granddaughter feels up to it. There’s the old Magma Club, its once-segregated swimming pool — available one day a week to Hispanics — long since filled in. Muñoz can still point out where all the former bars were on Main Street, the ones that drew crowds of carousing miners in the good years before copper prices plunged in 1981 and Magma boarded up and left town. Now their dusty windows are what give out-of-towners from nearby Phoenix reason to write off Superior as “dead.”
“What happens when a mine closes, the hardship that brings to people — today’s generation has never experienced that,” Muñoz told me.
Superior is home to about 2,400 people, less than half its population when the mine was booming. To tourists zipping past on U.S. 60 to visit the Wild West sites in the Superstition Mountains, it might look half a step away from becoming a ghost town, itself. As recently as 2018, pictures of Main Street were used as stock photos to illustrate things like “America’s worsening geographic inequality.”
But if you take the exit into town, it’s clear something in Superior is changing. The once-haunted boarding house has undergone a multi-million-dollar renovation into a boutique hotel, charging staycationers that make the hour drive south from Scottsdale $200 a night. Across the street, Bellas Cafe whips up terrific sandwiches in a gleaming, retro-chic kitchen. The Chamber of Commerce building, a little further down the block, has been painted an inviting shade of purple. And propped in the window of some of the storefronts with their lights on, you might even see a sign: WE SUPPORT RESOLUTION COPPER.
Resolution Copper’s offices are located in the former Magma Hospital, where Muñoz was born and where his mother died. People in hard hats and safety vests mill about the parking lot, miners without a mine, which is not an unusual sight in Superior these days — no copper has been sold out of the immediate area in over two decades. And yet just a nine-minute drive further up the hill and another 15-minute elevator ride down the deepest mine shaft in the country lies one of the world’s largest remaining copper deposits. It’s estimated to be 40 billion pounds, enough to meet a quarter of U.S. demand, according to the company’s analysis.
That’s “huge,” Adam Simon, an Earth and environmental sciences professor at the University of Michigan, told me, and not just in terms of sheer size.
“Copper is the most important metal for all technologies we think of as part of the energy transition: battery electric vehicles, grid-scale battery storage, wind turbines, solar panels,” Simon said. In May, he published a study with Lawrence Cathles, an Earth and atmospheric sciences researcher at Cornell University, which looked at 120 years of copper-mining data and found that just to meet the demands of “business as usual,” the world will need 115% more of the material between 2018 and 2050 than has been previously mined in all of human history, even with recycling rates taken into account.
Aluminum, used in high-voltage lines, is sometimes floated as a potential substitute, but it’s not as good of a conductor, and copper is almost always the preferred metal in batteries and electricity generation. Renewables are particularly copper-intensive; one offshore wind turbine can require up to 29 tons. What lies in the hills behind Superior, then, represents “millions of electric vehicles, millions of wind turbines, millions of solar panels. And it’s also lots of jobs, from top to bottom — jobs for people with bachelor’s degrees in engineering, mining, geology, and environmental science, all the way down to security officers and truck drivers,” Simon said. He added: “The world will need more copper year over year for both socioeconomic improvement in the Global South and also the energy transition, and neither of those can happen without increasing the amount of copper that we produce.”
Muñoz insisted to me that the promises of jobs and a robust local economy are a kind of Trojan horse. “Everybody’s getting drunk and having a good time: ‘Oh, look at the gift they brought us!’” he said of Superior’s support for Resolution Copper. “But at night, they’re going to sneak out of that horse, and they’re going to leave an environmental disaster.”
For now, though, the copper has just one catch: Resolution isn’t allowed to touch it.
If not for a painted sign declaring the ground HOLY LAND, there would be nothing visible to suggest the 16 oak-shaded tent sites over Resolution Copper’s ore body were anything particularly special. The Oak Flat campground is less than five miles past Superior, but at an elevation of nearly 4,000 feet, it can feel almost 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler. On the late June day that I visited with Muñoz, Sylvia Delgado, and Orlando “Marro” Perea — the leaders of the Concerned Citizens and Retired Miners Coalition — the floor of the East Valley was 113 degrees Fahrenheit, and the altitude offered only limited relief.
Directly below us and to the east of the campground, beneath a bouldery, yucca-studded desert, lies the copper deposit. At 7,000 or so feet deep, extracting it would require an advanced mining process called block caving, in which ore is collected from below through what is essentially a controlled cave-in, like sand slipping through the neck of an hourglass.
Muñoz, a fifth-generation miner, prefers the metaphor of going to the dentist. “They drill out your tooth and refill it: that’s basically traditional cut-and-fill mining,” he told me. “Block cave, on the other hand, would be going to the dentist and having them pull out the whole molar. It just leaves a vacant hole.” In this case, the resulting cavity would be almost two miles wide and over 1,000 feet deep by the time the ore was exhausted sometime in the 2060s.
Even four decades is just a blink of an eye for Oak Flat, though, where human history goes back at least 1,500years; anthropologists say the mine’s sinkhole would swallow countless Indigenous burial locations and archeological sites, including petroglyphs depicting antlered animals that Muñoz and Perea showed me hidden deep in the rocks. Even more alarmingly, the subsidence would obliterate Chí'chil Biłdagoteel, the Western Apache’s name for the lands around Oak Flat, which are sacred to at least 10 federally recognized tribes. The members of the San Carlos Apache who are leading the opposition effort, and use the location for a four-day-long girlhood coming-of-age ceremony, say it is the only place where their prayers can reach the Creator directly.
Mining and Indigenous sovereignty have been at odds in Arizona for over a century. “The Apache is as near the lobo, or wolf of the country, as any human being can be to a beast,” The New York Times wrote in 1859, claiming the tribe was “the greatest obstacle to the operations of the mining companies” in the area. Three years later, the U.S. Army’s departmental commander ordered Apache men killed “wherever found,” the social archaeologist John Welch writes in his eye-opening historical survey of the region, in which he also advocates for using the term “genocide” to describe the government’s policies. That violence still casts a shadow in Superior: Apache Leap, an astonishing escarpment that looms over the town and backs up against Oak Flat, is named for a legend that cornered Apache warriors jumped to their deaths from its cliffs rather than surrender to the U.S. Cavalry.
As the Apache were being forced onto reservations and into residential boarding schools during the late 1890s, a treaty with the government set aside Oak Flat for protection. The land was later fortified against mining by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, with the federal protections reconfirmed by the Nixon administration in the 1960s. (The defunct Magma Mine that fueled the first copper boom in Superior is located just off this 760-acre “Oak Flat Withdrawal Area.”)
In 1995, the enormity of the Oak Flat ore body — and the billions it would be worth if it could be accessed — started to become apparent. The British and Australian mining companies Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton formed a U.S. subsidiary, Resolution Copper, which bought the old Magma mine and began to lobby Arizona politicians to sign over the neighboring parcel of Oak Flat. Between 2004 and 2013, lawmakers from the state introduced 11 different land transfer bills into Congress, none of which managed to earn broad support.
Then, in December 2014, President Barack Obama signed a must-pass defense spending bill. On page 1,103 was a midnight rider, inserted by Arizona Republican Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake, which authorized a land transfer of 2,400 acres of Tonto National Forest, including Oak Flat, to Resolution Copper in exchange for private land the company had bought in other parts of the state. (Flake previously worked as a paid lobbyist for a Rio Tinto uranium mine, and the company contributed to McCain’s 2014 Senate campaign.)
Heatmap Illustration / Esri, TomTom, Garmin, FAO, NOAA, USGS, © OpenStreetMap contributors, and the GIS User Community
The senators’ rider also included an odd little twist. While the National Environmental Policy Act requires the Forest Service to conduct an environmental impact statement for a potential mine, the bill stipulated that the land transfer to Resolution Copper had to be completed within a 60-day window of the final environmental impact statement’s release, regardless of what the FEIS found.
After six years of study, the FEIS was rushed to publication by President Donald Trump in the final five days of his term, triggering that 60-day countdown. President Biden rescinded Trump’s FEIS once he took office in 2021, pending further consultation with the tribes, but the clock will begin anew once a revised FEIS is released, potentially later this year. (The new FEIS was expected last summer, but the Forest Service has since reported there is no timeline for its release. The agency declined to comment to Heatmap for this story, citing ongoing litigation.)
A spokesperson for Resolution Copper told me that the company is “committed to being a good steward of the land, air, and water throughout the entirety of this project,” and described programs to restore the local ecology and preserve certain natural features, including Apache Leap. “At each step,” the spokesperson said, “we have taken great care to solicit and act upon the input of our Native American and other neighbors. We have made many changes to the project scope to accommodate those concerns and will continue those efforts over the life of the project.”
Meanwhile, Apache Stronghold — the San Carlos Apache-led religious nonprofit opposing the mine — filed a lawsuit to block the land transfer, arguing that the destruction of Oak Flat infringes on their First Amendment right to practice their religion. The lower courts haven’t agreed, citing a controversial 1988 decision against tribes who made a similar argument in defense of a sacred grove of trees in California. Apache Stronghold, joined by the religious liberty group Becket, is now asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its case, a decision that is expected any day now. Nearly everyone I spoke with for this story, however, was pessimistic that the Justices would agree to hear the battle over Oak Flat, meaning the lower court’s ruling against Apache Stronghold would stand.
If Mila Besich could have it her way, Biden would visit Superior. He’d marvel at Apache Leap and Picketpost Mountain, visit the impressive new Superior Enterprise Center — paid for partially with money from his 2021 American Rescue Plan Act — and maybe wrap up the day with a purple scoop of prickly pear ice cream from Felicia’s Ice Cream Shop. And, most importantly, he’d hear her pitch: that “Superior and the state of Arizona have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to be the leader in advancing your green energy strategy.” She says Superior — and America — needs this mine.
Superior is a blue town, and Besich, its mayor, is a Democrat, which means she has found herself in the awkward position of defending Resolution Copper against colleagues like Congressman Raúl Grijalva of Tucson and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who have introduced unsuccessful bills in Congress to prevent the land transfer. There is something of a bitter irony, too, in seeing her party tout the economic upsides of the energy transition while standing in the way of Superior’s mine, which would employ an average of 1,434 workers per year and add over $1 billion annually to Arizona’s economy during its lifespan, according to the FEIS.
“Every mayor wants more jobs in their community,” Besich told me simply. But, she also pointed out, “Copper is critical to the green economy, so if we want the green economy, we should want to be mining American copper.”
Superior, of course, isn’t just any town. “Everybody here either worked in the mines or had family that worked in the mines,” James Schenck, a former employee of Resolution Copper who supports the mine and serves as the treasurer for Rebuild Superior, a nonprofit working to diversify the local economy, told me. “They understand the downsides, and some of them, for a while, were having a hard time understanding how this is different than what went on before.”
Though everyone seems to be on cordial terms — at one point during my visit, I was having lunch with Muñoz and Delgado when Besich walked in, and everyone smiled politely at one another — there are still clear factions. A Facebook group for locals warns against “posts concerning DRAMA, POLITICS, RELIGION, and MINING,” presumably the same topics to be avoided at family Thanksgivings.
The critical mineral experts I talked to for this story, though, said Schenck is largely right on that point. “Mining in 2024 is radically different than mining in 1954 or in 1904,” Simon told me. “It is really surgical.”
Muñoz is one of those in town who still isn’t buying it, and has converted his garage into an interpretive center for exposing the perceived infiltrators. As soft classic rock played over the speakers and a fan whirred to keep us cool, he showed me the 3D model he had commissioned of the Oak Flat sinkhole, with a miniature Eiffel Tower subsumed in its crater for scale. Laid out on a table on the other side of the room was a row of six dictionary-thick, spiral-bound sections of the FEIS, their most pertinent sections bookmarked. On the walls, Muñoz had hung pictures of comparable tailings sites in other parts of the world — cautionary tales of the hazards posed during the long lifespan of mines. (Including the water demands, no small concern in a place like Arizona, which opens a whole other can of worms).
“I use my experience to educate the people,” Muñoz said. “This isn’t what it’s made out to be. They’re going to play you.”
Muñoz was employed at the Magma Copper mine until 1982, when he was 27. “One day they said, ‘We’re shutting down.’ They folded up just like a carnival does on Monday morning,” he recalled. The abrupt departure devastated Superior: In These Timesdescribed the following years as an “economic cataclysm” for the town. By 1989, the median household income was just $16,118 compared to $36,806 in Queen Creek, the nearest Phoenix suburb just a 45-minute drive away.
“I witnessed grown men cry,” Muñoz said. “Men who’d been in the mines pretty close to 30 years — they never knew nothing else.” His father, the former boarding house owner, was among them: “He had limited writing abilities and what have you. He was 58. People lost their homes here. They lost their cars. There were divorces. Some people committed suicide. The drinking, the drugs. It was a bad time.”
Muñoz went on food stamps and unemployment. “This generation that is coming up, they’ve never experienced that,” he said. “They’ve never experienced a repossession note in the mail from the bank. They’ve never experienced a disconnection notice hanging from your front door knob. And they’ve never experienced calling up the utilities and saying, ‘Hey, can you wait until Friday when my unemployment check comes in?’”
Superior’s story isn’t unique; Arizona’s Copper Triangle is a constellation of hollowed-out company towns. Like many other out-of-work Magma miners, Muñoz eventually found a job at San Manuel, a BHP-owned block cave mine about an hour south of Superior. Then, in 1999, copper prices stuttered again, and by 2003, it shut down, too.
Muñoz had just returned from a car show in San Manuel when we met in his garage, and he reported it was still a sorry sight. “The main grocery store is closed, the Subway, all the buildings are boarded up, and the schools are shut down,” he said. The mine “just abandoned that town.”
Even as Muñoz and the Concerned Citizens and Retired Miners Coalition work with Apache Stronghold and national environmentalist groups like HECHO, the Sierra Club, and the National Wildlife Federation try to block Resolution Copper’s mine, there is a distinct feeling in Superior of its inevitability. Schenck, the treasurer for Rebuild Superior, told me he suspects just “10% or 15%” of people in town are “against the project.”
“My personal belief is this copper deposit is going to be developed at some point,” Schenck said. “It’s too important.”
Besich, the mayor, gave this impression too. “What people need to understand is, this ore body is not going anywhere,” she said. “Someone will mine it in the future.” She views Superior and the copper industry as partners in an “arranged marriage,” and her job as mayor is helping them “figure out how to get along.”
From the outside, though, Resolution Copper looks more like a sugar daddy. To date, Rio Tinto and BHP have spent more than $2 billion combined pursuing the Oak Flat mine, including pumping money into the Chamber of Commerce building, the Enterprise Center, and the fire department. When the town of Kearny, downstream of the mine’s proposed tailings site, needed a new ambulance, Resolution Copper offered to help foot the bill. Local high schoolers and tribal members can even apply for Resolution Copper scholarships.
Critics say Resolution Copper is buying political and social influence in the Copper Corridor, a modern-day iteration of the propaganda tactics that swept aside the Apache in the late 1800s. Rio Tinto and BHP “remain committed to influencing U.S. government decisions about the use of public lands and minerals, regardless of additional harms to those lands, to Native Americans, or to National Register historic sites and sacred places,” the archaeologist Welch wrote in his Oak Flat study.
Rio Tinto is infamous even in the mining industry for its poor history of handling community- and heritage-related concerns. To pick a recent example, the company drew international condemnation for its 2020 destruction of the Juukan Gorge cave in Western Australia, a sacred site to the Aboriginal people that had evidence of continuous human occupation going back to the Ice Age. Though Rio Tinto had the legal right to destroy the 45,000-year-old caves, “it is hard to believe community engagement is being taken seriously” by the company, Glynn Cochrane, a former Rio Tinto senior advisor, said in a testimony in the aftermath. Archaeologists and sympathetic politicians have warned that the cultural and spiritual loss caused by mining Oak Flat would be like a second Juukan Gorge.
The San Carlos Apache are not a monolith, however, and the community has differing beliefs about the cultural importance of Oak Flat. Tribal members who support the mine or work for Resolution Copper are often cited by non-Native supporters as proof of Apache Stronghold’s supposedly arbitrary defense of Oak Flat. (Apache Stronghold, which is on a prayer journey to petition the Supreme Court, did not return Heatmap’s request for comment.)
Muñoz and his team are specifically worried about how Superior, the town, will make out. U.S. copper smelters are already at capacity, meaning Resolution Copper would likely send much if not all of the raw copper extracted at Oak Flat to China for processing. (Rio Tinto’s largest shareholder is the Aluminum Corporation of China.) The spokesperson for Resolution Copper told me that it’s the company’s priority to process the ore domestically, and Rio Tinto does have its own facility in the U.S., the Kennecott copper smelting facility in Utah. Yet it hasn’t committed publicly to processing the Arizona ore there, and it’s far from clear that it even has the capacity to do so.
For Simon, the University of Michigan professor, that shouldn’t be a deterrent: “If we mine more copper here and it just means we have to export it — who cares?” he pushed back. “If it has to go to China and they smelt it, then you send it to China and they smelt it. Climate is the prize, and if we want to mitigate our impact, we’ve got to do it. There are no ifs, ands, or buts.”
Oak Flat is also located outside of Superior’s town limits, meaning the community would only recoup about $500,000 in tax revenue, on the high end, from the mine annually, according to the 2021 FEIS — Schenek told me the town’s budget is around $3 million, so it’s hardly insignificant, though it is peanuts compared to the $38 million the state would reap. The FEIS additionally estimated that only about a quarter of the mine’s eventual employees would actually “seek to live in or near Superior;” many would choose instead to commute the hour or so from Phoenix’s Maricopa County.
Because of technological advances in mining and robotics, the mine also won’t bring back the physical jobs locals remember from the 1970s — by Resolution Copper’s own admission. Besich, at least, isn’t bothered by this detail: “In all reality, I don’t see my children and their peers wanting to do the manual physical labor that my grandfather, my father, and certainly my great-grandfather did,” she told me. “So the change in technique is good, and I think that it’s actually better for the environment in the long term.” She added that Resolution Copper’s investment in things like local infrastructure and worker training programs will compensate for the comparably insignificant tax revenue the town will otherwise receive, ensuring Superior gets a fair cut of the bonanza.
What supporters and opponents of the mine can agree on is that Superior must avoid the devastation of the 1980s if or when the Oak Flat mine is exhausted in 40 or more years. Besich and Schenck told me their vision is for Superior to be a town with a mine, not a mining town. But is such a thing even possible? In recent years, Superior has tried to position itself as an outdoor recreation gateway to the many climbing routes and hiking trails in the area. Yet I struggle to imagine anyone would want to vacation or recreate so close to a massive mining operation.
Muñoz believes Superior should throw itself entirely into tourism, which brings in three times as much revenue as the copper industry in Arizona. He dismissed arguments that losing the mine this far into negotiations and preparations would set the town back two decades, telling me about a conversation he had with Vicky Peacey, the president of Resolution Copper. “She said, ‘How do I tell my 300-plus employees that they don’t have a job?’” he recalled. “I said, ‘The same way BHP told the 3,300 in San Manuel they didn’t have a job. Magma Copper didn’t have a problem telling us we didn’t have a job in ‘82.”
Whatever gets decided about Oak Flat will reverberate far beyond Superior, though. “We’ve got to keep our eyes on the prize,” Simon told me. “And if the prize is mitigating human impacts on climate, and that requires the energy transition, and that requires copper, and we have a potential mine in Arizona that would provide 500,000 tons of copper every year for decades — we need to do that.”
At the end of my day in Superior, I went with Muñoz and Delgado, another former miner, to visit the haunted boarding house.
The renovated interior was surprisingly beautiful, decorated with period-appropriate details like iron bed frames, clawfoot bathtubs, and lace curtains that softened the harshness of the mid-afternoon light. Though even the FEIS warns that “mining in Arizona has followed a ‘boom and bust’ cycle, which potentially leads to great economic uncertainty,” it was with a pang that I imagined the building one day falling back into disrepair. It, and the town, had survived too much.
After peeking into Room 103, where Muñoz had passed his tipsy night all those decades ago, we asked the friendly woman working the front desk if she’d had any supernatural experiences herself — surely she’d seen the mattress-flipping phantom, or swinging chandeliers, or perhaps a white-boot miner who’d come down from the hills?
To our disappointment, she shook her head. For now, whatever ghosts there once might have been in Superior had gone.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include comment from Resolution Copper.