On May 18, the Environmental Protection Agency took sides with opponents of Pebble Partnership, a company exploring a copper deposit, some 200 miles west of Anchorage, Alaska. Pebble is probably the largest accessible aggregation of copper-bearing minerals in North America.
The Obama Administration has been under relentless pressure to stop Pebble—much more of the pressure emanating from hordes of bicoastal environmentalists as opposed to citizens of sparsely populated Alaska. EPA’sAssessment of Potential Mining Impacts on Salmon Ecosystems of Bristol Bay, Alaska is designed as the first step to do just that, before the Pebble developers have even submitted one permit application.
All of this has very little to do with the welfare of Alaskans. It has much more to do with the President pleasing his environmental base. In fact, it seems that the less that one has been to Alaska, the more one knows what’s best for it. The dinosaur media, especially in northeastern cities, is particularly exercised about the stretch of desolate Alaska that is Pebble—land that was traded by the federal government to the State for mineral development, in exchange for the some land that became Lake Clark Park and Preserve.
EPA’s Assessment ignores this history and the positive economic impact $7 billion of new infrastructure would bring to a place without a diverse economy. The Assessment is designed to be used for regulation based upon the “precautionary principle”. This darling of the global left states that “if something has the potential to cause harm, it shouldn’t be done”. The UN’s a big fan and reports are that they have been sniffing around parts of Bristol Bay looking for a way to get in on the Pebble issue. In fact, its Framework Convention on Climate Change—the scaffold upon which the failed Kyoto Protocol on global warming was erected-is based on the precautionary principle, noting that a lack “full scientific certainty” should not provide grounds to preclude regulation.
No comments:
Post a Comment