Alaska mine developers plan to fight EPA’s crippling restrictions

Canada Free Press ^ | July 21 2014 | M.D. Kittle

[PoloSec]

While the Environmental Protection Agency appears to be backing off its push to pre-emptively kill a proposed copper and gold mine in Alaska’s bush country, the agency is pitching an array of conditions that could stifle the project.

Friday’s proposed list of restrictions, subject of a public comment period through Sept. 19, could severely limit development of the proposed Pebble Mine project, an operation that developers say would create 1,000 direct jobs, and thousands more indirectly, and as much as $180 million in state revenue for Alaska.

Dennis McLerran, regional administrator for the EPA’s Region 10, said while the agency has opted not to invoke a provision under the Clean Water Act that would effectively shut down the mine before a plan is submitted, the dangers of even a smaller mine in the Bristol Bay region’s “fragile ecosystem” would be devastating.

He told reporters the EPA is trying to protect the world’s largest salmon fishery, where half of the world’s sockeye salmon population is said to live, from what would be “one of the world’s largest open pit mine developments ever conceived of.”

[theBuckwheat]

One of the roots of such wasteful, foolish, thuggish, and tyrannous government is the ease with which it can create almost unlimited amounts of money out of thin air. Near-infinite money buys near-infinite government, and a bureaucracy that is generously funded can entertain an open-ended dream about how to expand its realm.

Every day more people are coming to the judgment that a carefully organized effort to repair the constitution via the States’ power to propose and ratify amendments has less risk to our liberty and prosperity than the present trajectory of the federal government and especially the federal bureaucracy.

The first order of business of an Article V Convention must be to limit government’s ability to create and spend near-infinite amounts of money.