Lisa Reimers
The Hill
8/31/2012
Today in Alaska, there’s a political battle raging over a proposed copper mine, the Pebble Project. Not many in Washington, D.C. know about it, but it’s time people start paying attention. That’s because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is about to lock some of America’s poorest communities into a permanent economic depression as a favor to national environmental groups. If the EPA succeeds, what happens in Alaska won’t stay in Alaska – there will be huge economic and employment consequences for the rest of the country.
The Pebble Project is a proposed copper mine about 15 miles from my hometown of Iliamna in southwestern Alaska. The Pebble deposit contains one of the world’s largest discoveries of copper, and if the proposed mine secures more than 60 different regulatory approvals from about a dozen state and federal agencies, the project would create about 2,000 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent positions. For permitting, the developers will have to prove to regulators the project will not harm the surrounding environment, including Bristol Bay’s sockeye salmon population.
The Pebble Partnership has invested $120 million so far on environmental and socioeconomic studies that will be used to develop a formal permit application, which regulators will spend three to five years reviewing. But that’s not good enough for the national environmental groups who oppose the Pebble mine. Instead, they want the EPA to take the unprecedented and probably unlawful step of using Section 404 of the Clean Water Act to preemptively veto the project before any permit applications can be filed. The EPA appears to be following those marching orders, because in May the agency issued a draft report stating that a copper mine in the Bristol Bay Watershed would likely harm salmon populations. If the draft report is finalized, the EPA could then veto all mining activity in the region…
…When the long winter comes, the seasonal industries leave, and the economy of southwestern Alaska shuts down. The region’s per capita income is $15,000 a year. Worse, our remote location results in sky-high living expenses – gasoline is $8-9 a gallon and milk costs even more – so the poverty rate exceeds 20 percent. The teen suicide rate is devastatingly high, and our villages are slowly dying as more of our young people move away…
The complete article is at The Hill.
H/T Joe Miller
