Mining companies would be able to buy public lands without proving there's anything worth mining under a bill approved by the U.S. House Committee on Resources Wednesday.

The vote was 24-16 in favor of passage, with U.S. Rep. Barbara Cubin, R-Wyo., voting for the measure.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., also includes opening the northern coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to energy production, granting more control of off-shore energy production to coastal states including California and Florida, and massive leases for oil shale development in Wyoming, Colorado and Utah.

While the bill no longer includes language that would allow sale of national parks for mining - as an earlier version had proposed - conservationists decried the measure as "a gift to Western developers."

The Earthworks Minerals Center, a conservation group which advocates reform of the General Mining Law of 1872, estimates that the Interior Department would be required to put much over 200 million acres of federal lands up for sale, at $1,000 an acre or fair market value, whichever is higher.

For the past 10 years, Congress has barred selling government-owned land for mining, which had been allowed under the 1872 law that set prices at $2.50 to $5 per acre. In 1995, President Clinton ordered a moratorium on mining patents on 19,000 acres of federally owned land near Yellowstone National Park.

According to Michael Scott, executive director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, Pombo's proposed federal land sales would not be limited just to Interior lands, but would also include Forest Service properties. The Forest Service is an agency within the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

"You must remember that the secretary of Interior is responsible for administering the 1872 Mining Law," Scott said.

If Pombo succeeds in getting his budget reconciliation language through Congress and to the president's desk, it would mean a massive sale of federal lands to mining companies, Scott said.

"This is a gift to Western developers and has nothing to do with making it easier to mine," Scott said. He predicted that passage of the Pombo bill would spark a feverish level of speculation, as mining companies would rush to file patents - not to mine, but to create valuable inholdings within public lands that they could then sell to real estate developers.

Luke Popovich, spokesman for the National Mining Association, said the mining industry supports Pombo's bill, because it would give companies greater certainty about land tenure, thus greater certainty for investments.

Efforts to reach Cubin's office for comment were unsuccessful Wednesday.

Evan Green, administrator of the Abandoned Mine Land division of the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality, estimated that the state has 1,500 to 1,600 old mining sites that pose a public safety risk or hazard. Green said there must be thousands more old mining claims in the state. Under the Pombo bill, any or all could be sold off to mining companies, with no requirement that they actually be mined.

According to the Earthworks group, some 353,000 acres in Wyoming would qualify under the Pombo bill to be sold to mining companies.

Currently, a mining company must convince a federal land agency that there is a valuable mineral deposit under federal property before the company can obtain a mining patent, Scott said. Pombo's proposal allows mining companies to secure this right to mine by merely filing claims with the Bureau of Land Management and paying a small fee.

The Earthworks Mineral Center said that by Pombo's own estimate, the resultant land sales would raise less revenue in five years ($155 million) than a fair royalty similar to what all other extractive industries pay. For example, an 8 percent royalty on hardrock mining could generate $350 million over five years, the group estimated.

Earthworks also said that the proposal would undercut budget deficit reduction by prohibiting the federal government from imposing royalties on minerals and metals removed from public lands.

Pombo's bill would also result in a major windfall for foreign and domestic mining interests whose mining claims now cover more than 5.5 million acres of federal land. Last year alone, more than 45,560 new mining claims were recorded by the Interior Department covering up to 910,000 acres of federal public lands in the West - a fourfold increase since 2001. Mining analysts say this surge in claim staking is fueled by recent high prices for gold and other metals, and is expected to continue.

"This is highway robbery," said Cathy Carlson, policy advisor to Earthworks. "And the victims are the nation's taxpayers and millions of Americans who hunt, fish, hike and make a livelihood from federal lands in the West."

Lauren Pagel, legislative coordinator for Earthworks, said opponents hope to defeat Pombo's bill on the House floor next week. She said there's nothing like the Pombo bill in the Senate - so that's another opportunity to defeat it, perhaps in conference committee.

Parks for sale?

The National Parks Conservation Association sounded the alarm among conservationists on Tuesday. The group's vice president for government affairs, Craig Obey, said that "Pombo has shifted his focus from selling off 15 national park sites, to offering the mining industry access to national park lands in approximately 12 states that have mineral deposits."

Among the potential targets would have been Yellowstone National Park, Obey said.

"For example, while Canadian mining companies recently agreed not to mine for gold outside of Yellowstone National Park, this language would appear to allow those same companies to now seek the right to mine inside the park," he said.

Pombo partially backtracked over the mining in national parks issue. He offered an amendment himself on Tuesday afternoon to remove national parks, wilderness, wildlife refuges and other conservation areas from the directed sale of federal lands.

Obey said Wednesday that while the national parks dodged the bullet in Pombo's bill, his group expects more threats to national parks to emerge in this Congress.

"While I'm relieved this time around, we can't let our guard down," Obey said.