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The Army Corps of Engineers Alaska office plans to hold a conference call Monday with groups linked to the proposed mine to discuss the decision, three people familiar with the call told POLITICO. An administration official confirmed the call with POLITICO.
Corps officials will say outstanding technical issues with a key permit remain, the people said, adding that they expect Trump to follow up with a public statement opposing the project. People said they weren’t sure exactly what form Trump’s disallowance would take, although they said it would more likely result in a rejection of Pebble’s Corps water permits rather than one. veto the EPA, which said earlier this year it would. not exercise that power.
“There are people who have been told that there will be a [Corps] press event and that it will be positive, ”said a Washington-based person who works on anti-mine efforts and who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations.
White House spokesman Judd Deere directed POLITICO to the Corps.
“The White House is unable to comment at this time,” he said in an email. Neither the Corps nor the EPA immediately responded to requests for comment.
But Pebble Partnership CEO Tom Collier, who worked as chief of staff to Clinton-era Home Secretary Bruce Babbitt, denied the project was on the verge of stalling.
“We have worked with the Trump administration and the message we got from the Trump administration has been that this is a president who thinks there is no place in the clearance process for the political influence, ”Collier said.
“I don’t think he will revert to Obama-like interference in the authorization process. We have assurances that he will not do so,” he added.
Collier also said he was not aware of a conference call on Monday. “I think if there was a stakeholder call for Monday that Mr. Sabin was aware of, I would know, and I don’t.”
The pebble mine is planned to be built in the headwaters of Bristol Bay, home to the world’s largest sockeye fishery, which provides up to 11 percent of all wild salmon harvests.
“I have been there more than 10 times. It’s like nowhere on Earth, ”Chris Wood, CEO of Trout Unlimited, told POLITICO.
The administration’s about-face is probably more a signal of the problems with this specific mine than a radical shift in Trump’s overall support for big development projects. But with Trump supposed to let him die and his Democratic White House challenger Joe Biden opposing the project, Pebble Mine appears to have few options to move it forward despite more than a decade of planning, ownership changes and political battles.
At the end of July, the Trump administration appeared to be on track to approve the project as early as this month amid protests from environmentalists and Alaskan native groups opposed to the 8,400-acre open pit mine. .
Then, in early August, Trump signed the Great American Outdoors Act, which guaranteed nearly $ 1 billion a year for conservation work. “There hasn’t been anything like it since Teddy Roosevelt, I guess,” Trump said. Later that day, Trump’s son Donald Jr. publicly raised the issue of the controversial mine project, tweeting with Nick Ayers, former chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, urging Trump to dismiss Pebble.
The duo spoke of concerns from outdoor recreation groups that it threatens salmon fishing in Bristol Bay, which is commercially important and an increasingly popular destination for adventurous anglers.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson, one of the President’s favorite TV personalities who raised the issue in an Aug. 14 segment titled “The Alaskan Pebble Mine Case. Carlson and his guest, Bass Pro Shops founder Morris, invoked Theodore Roosevelt, whom Trump had just called “truly the great president of conservation” – and whom he suggested joining on Mount Rushmore.
Trump has been resolutely pro-mining, although this has largely focused on coal mining; Pebble is said to be mining a significant deposit of copper, gold, molybdenum and silver, so it has no direct connection to the issue of climate change.
“Maybe not all environmentalism is about the climate,” Carlson said on his show.
Long-standing skepticism about the mine on the part of many Alaskans should also provide Trump with blanket. The late Republican Senator Ted Stevens in 2008 dubbed him “the bad looks in the bad place”. And while she has yet to finally take a side, 2019 Energy and Natural Resources Senate Speaker Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in 2019 questioned Pebble’s environmental impacts.
Shortly after the Trump administration took office, she settled a lawsuit with the developer of the mine that called for the withdrawal of the Obama-era proposal to preemptively veto the mine. Instead, the mine would be allowed to continue with the permitting process at the Army Corps of Engineers.
As an advisory agency, the EPA criticized the Corps environmental study last year, Warning “substantial and unacceptable negative impacts” on fisheries. But the EPA in May indicated he was overturning those criticisms and not using his Clean Water Act power to veto the project’s permits.
The criticisms of the EPA were based on unique characteristics that ultimately succeeded in bringing environmentalists and Trump to the same side.
The mine, developed by a US subsidiary of Canadian company Northern Dynasty Minerals, has been proposed to mine a huge reserve on state land a few miles north of Lake Iliamna. The mining plan plans to produce an average of 70 million tonnes of copper, gold and molybdenum ore per year over 20 years, amounts that could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Opponents of the mine claim the company would eventually push to expand the mine to extract even more of the deposit.
The Corps determined in July that Pebble Mine “is not expected to have a measurable effect on fish numbers and lead to long-term changes in the health of commercial fisheries in Bristol Bay.”
But the commercial fishing industry, recreation groups, conservationists and local Native groups in Alaska have long complained about the destruction of waterways essential for breeding salmon and the danger of mine waste. contaminate the bay.
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