The following editorial appeared Tuesday in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The difference between drilling for oil and mining for gold can be summed up in a single word: royalties.

People and companies that drill for oil on public lands pay royalties of as much as 16 percent to the federal government. But since 1872 – when Ulysses S. Grant was in the White House, Yellowstone became the first national park and post-Civil War Reconstruction ended – hard-rock miners who dig for copper, silver and gold have not.

Most miners today aren’t big-shouldered men with big dreams and pickaxes; they’re multinational corporations with excavators and bulldozers. But the General Mining Law of 1872, meant to encourage American settlement of the West, still exempts them from paying royalties. It also contains other obsolete provisions, including one that allows the purchase of federal land for no more than $5 an acre. That may have been a fair price when the James Gang was robbing banks, but these days, the practice has more in common with Jessie’s line of work. Purchased at cut-rate prices, federal land has been developed commercially as ski resorts, condos and casinos.

Not only are taxpayers being robbed on the sale of land; we also get stuck for the cost of cleaning up mine sites after the gold, copper, uranium and other valuable minerals run out, leaving the areas polluted with toxic materials such as arsenic, which is used in the metal-extraction process.

A new bill sponsored by Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., and recently approved by a key congressional committee, would make significant changes to the status quo. Rahall’s bill would impose royalties – 4 percent of net revenues on exiting mines, 8 percent on new mines – and use the money to clean up abandoned mines. It also would end the sale of federal land at 19th-century prices.

And for the first time, the government would be asked to balance mining claims with competing uses for the land, such as protection of endangered species. Federal and state governments would be able to prevent mining around national parks and wilderness areas.

Rahall’s bill has support in the House, but it may face resistance in the Senate from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat. Nevada is the nation’s largest gold-mining state. Reid, the son of a gold miner, would be making a serious mistake; updating the law would be a windfall for taxpayers.

The old West disappeared long ago, and the General Mining Law of 1872 has long outlived its usefulness.