Alaska

wow, 1st content 1/14?

see murkowski

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Lauren Windsor @ Zeteo: The Right’s ‘War on Woke’ Is a Cash Grab on State Treasuries

Derek Kreifels led a decade-long crusade against ‘woke’ corporations. Now, he’s getting state business for his Christian finance firm. Read Lauren Windsor’s year-long corruption investigation at Zeteo.

AN 8 26

President Donald Trump's political movement, Make America Great Again (MAGA), heavily relies on Christian nationalists who ignore the Founding Fathers' secularism to argue the United States was founded as an explicitly Christian country. Yet according to a groundbreaking new report, Christian nationalists are engaging in self-dealing on a massive scale — and through connections with American government entities.

"Ballrooms, slush funds, jumbo jets. Worship services in the Pentagon, electioneering in churches, the Ten Commandments in schools," reported Zeteo's Lauren Windsor on Wednesday based on over a year's worth of reporting. "Conflicts of interest and Christian nationalism have been hallmarks of Donald Trump’s second presidency. The epic flood of corruption swamping Washington isn’t just overwhelming American politics – it’s also obscuring the grift occurring in red states across the country, as officials work to put public investment funds under the control of their friends at Christian finance firms."

Windsor added, "A major conduit for that corruption is the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF), a small but powerful nonprofit that convenes Republican state treasurers and auditors, right-wing activists, and Christian finance executives to strategize over how to defeat liberals and weaponize state treasuries against allegedly woke corporations, while steering state treasury money to their ideological allies. Much of their “War on Woke” consists of boosting the fossil fuel industry and crushing efforts to mitigate climate change, under the notion that corporate safeguards are bad business."

Although Windsor's report briefly mentioned the state of affairs in Kentucky, she focused on Alaska, including a character named Derek Kreifels.

"Derek Kreifels was the CEO of the State Financial Officers Foundation for more than a decade," Windsor wrote. "He resigned from this role in the fall of 2024, but he remains an SFOF board member, and his wife serves as one of its top executives. Now, Kreifels is lobbying SFOF treasurers to put public retirees’ savings and other funds they oversee into faith-aligned financial products and services offered by his firm, Prospr Aligned, and its affiliates in the Christian finance industry."

Windsor added, "Kreifels’s firm has already won business from the Kentucky auditor’s office, which is led by a member of the State Financial Officers Foundation’s leadership team, as I can report for the first time. Another state Kreifels has targeted heavily is Alaska, where he has friends in former Revenue Commissioner and ex-SFOF Vice Chair Adam Crum and Alaska Permanent Fund Chair Jason Brune."

She also said that in an interview with her in Anchorage last year, "Brune defended Crum and his collaboration with Kreifels as efforts to promote resource extraction in the Arctic – arguing that he and Crum, as members of the governor’s cabinet, 'are pimping for the state.'"

Describing one event, Windsor reported that "in the weeks leading up to the event, SFOF honored Crum, naming him its vice chair for 2025, and Kreifels announced he was resigning as CEO to embark on a private business venture he would soon reveal.

She added, "'I have been called to a new mission,' Kreifels declared. The Anchorage summit presented great synergies for Kreifels. He could, using nonprofit money, convene right-wing finance officials and industry executives who lobby them – while lobbying those officials himself on the services offered by his new business venture and celebrating his tenure at SFOF with friends and family in an exotic locale. According to emails from Kreifels that I obtained, SFOF covered travel costs for public officials and their staff."

The State Financial Officers Foundation has also helped support Kreifels’s private business ventures. According to state travel disclosures, SFOF paid for at least one treasurer’s travel to the New York Stock Exchange launch party for Prospr’s Alaska investment fund, reports Windsor, adding that SFOF also arranged for a special speaker: longtime ally Paul Atkins, who as chairman of the Trump Securities and Exchange Commission regulates the Prospr fund."

IRS rules prohibit self-dealing and private benefit from nonprofit money, Windsor said.

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an 10 25

'Perfect storm': Alaska Democrats flip GOP seat for the first time in 10 years

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pension plan akin gump

politico

Former Rep.Lamar Smith(R-Texas), meanwhile, who also joined Akin Gump after leaving Congress in January, reported lobbying for four clients. They include HerdX, a ranching logistics company; Otis Eastern Service, an oil-and-gas pipeline company; Pebble Limited Partnership, which is trying to develop an open-pit mine in Alaska; and Pfizer, the giant pharmaceutical company.

https://www.ecowatch.com/national-forest-trump-logging-tongass-2645476974.html

A federal judge in Alaska ruled late Wednesday against a Trump administration plan to open 1.8 million acres of America's largest national forest to logging.

The Forest Service plan targeted part of the Tongass National Forest on Prince of Wales Island. It would have been the largest sale of national forest timber in 30 years, Earthjustice pointed out, permitting 164 miles of new roads and clearing an area of forest three times the size of Manhattan, more than half of it old growth. But U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason ruled that the plan violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) because the agency did not take all of its potential impacts into account, The Hill reported.

"The magnificent, ancient forests of the Tongass just got a reprieve from the chain saws," Randi Spivak, public lands director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), said in the Earthjustice press release. "We're thrilled the court agreed that the Trump administration broke the law when it approved cutting thousands of acres of old-growth trees. It's critical to protect our remaining old-growth forests to have any chance of stopping the extinction crisis and slowing climate change."

CBD was one of eight conservation groups that challenged the plan with representation from Earthjustice, according to fellow plaintiff the National Audubon Society. The groups, also including Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, Alaska Rainforest Defenders, Defenders of Wildlife, Sierra Club, Alaska Wilderness League and the Natural Resources Defense Council, argued that it violated NEPA, which allows people to weigh in on major infrastructure projects that will impact their community. Prince of Wales Island is an important location for subsistence hunting and fishing, but the Forest Service did not say in its plans where logging would take place, which meant it was impossible for the local community to meaningfully respond to the plans.

Judge Gleason agreedwith this assessment of the project, arguing that the service did not state where logging and road building would occur, according to Courthouse News Service.

"By not developing actual site-specific information, the Forest Service limited its ability to make informed decisions regarding impacts to subsistence uses and presented local communities with vague, hypothetical, and over-inclusive representations of the project's effects over a 15-year period," Gleason wrote.

Gleason also ruled that the plan violated the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which requires federal agencies to determine how projects on public lands will impact those who use the lands for subsistence, according to The Audubon Society.

The ruling comes as the Trump administration is proposing changes to NEPA that would drastically weaken the landmark environmental law by, among other things, limiting the length of the review process, exempting certain projects from any review and allowing federal agencies to ignore a project's climate impacts.

Alaska Wilderness League conservation director Kristen Miller said that Wednesday's ruling showed the importance of NEPA.

"The Prince of Wales project would've been the largest logging project that we have seen anywhere in our national forests in decades, and it would have destroyed thousands of acres of irreplaceable old-growth forest in the Tongass National Forest," Miller said in the Earthjustice release. "Today's ruling is a win for Southeast Alaska's billion-dollar fishing and tourism industries, and a reminder as the Trump administration tries to significantly weaken the National Environmental Policy Act of the critical role NEPA plays in allowing the public to meaningfully weigh in on issues impacting their public lands."

The ultimate fate of the Forest Service project is not yet known, as Judge Gleason did not yet decide on a legal remedy for the plaintiffs' suit. The service did not respond to requests for comment from either Courthouse News Service or The Hill.

conservation logging trump administration national parks forests public lands climate change

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/how-a-historic-ruling-in-alaska-could-provide-a-roadmap-to-defeating-citizens-united/

Eoin Higgins / Common DreamsNovember 5, 2019

A ruling in a court in Alaska Monday could open the door to imposing more restrictions on super PACs and possibly reversing the infamous 2012 Citizens United by the U.S. Supreme Court that in 2012 upended the nation’s campaign finance laws.

Anchorage Superior Court Judge William F. Morse ordered the state to impose limits on donations to political groups in Alaska, saying in the ruling (pdf) that the Alaska Public Offices Commission (APOC), which handles election enforcement, “should reinstate enforcement of the contribution limits at issue.” The decision is expected to head to the Alaska Supreme Court.

In a statement, election reform group Equal Citizens founder Lawrence Lessig said that the decision in favor of three Alaskan citizens contesting the unlimited donations was “historic.”

“This decision gives Alaskans and all Americans a chance to revisit those destructive decisions,” said Lessig, who helped develop the legal strategy for the case. “And it will allow us to continue to make our case that the Framers did not wish to see super PACs. Just the opposite: they would have despised the kind of corruption we have seen recently, and the Constitution gives states the power to eliminate it.”

...

hmmn, handoff to bad co?

great

BP’s exit from Alaska is apparently just the first step in a remarkable corporate strategy shift.

CEO Bob Dudley announced this week that the oil major “plans to sell some oil projects and curb the development of others,” reports Bloomberg,“to align its business with the Paris accord.”

It’s “the latest sign climate concerns are starting to impact the investment decisions of the world’s largest fossil fuel producers.”

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/28082019/bp-hilcorp-sale-alaska-oil-gas-pipeline-prudhoe-bay-safety-concerns

With Amazon in flames, Trump moves to open 16.7 million-acre Alaskan Rainforest to corporate exploitation

Jake Johnson / Common Dreams

“If the planet could talk, it would be screaming in agony or weeping in despair. Maybe both.”

guk 719

Alaska’s governor is trying to destroy its universities. The state may never recover

Cas Mudde dunleavy 41% cut

5/19

Don Wiener and Arn Pearson — The Kochs’ political astroturf operation sponsored, paid for, and restricted the terms of attendance for Governor Dunleavy’s “Statewide Discussion for a Permanent Fiscal Plan.”

Battle to Protect 50 Million Forest Acres May Finally Be Won After 16 Years

By Jessica A. Knoblauch

A decades-long fight over a landmark rule protecting wild forests nationwide took another successful–and possibly final–turn last week after a U.S. district court threw out a last-ditch attack by the state of Alaska against the Roadless Rule.

Adopted in the closing days of the Clinton administration, the Roadless Rule prohibits most logging and road construction in roadless areas of national forests. These lands, today equaling about 50 million acres or about the size of Nebraska, are some of the wildest places left in America.

Upon its passage, the rule was overwhelmingly popular with the American people, including those who like to hike, camp, fish and recreate among the trees in wild, unmarred areas. The Forest Service also liked the rule, since, at the time, the agency had a multibillion-dollar backlog on maintenance for more than 400,000 miles of existing roads, and it wasn't eager to add even more to its workload.

Yet, despite its popularity, state political leaders with ties to the logging and timber industries hated the new rule. Even before President Clinton left office, they began their attack. The Bush administration, which took office just eight days later, failed to come to the rule's defense.

"It created this vacuum," said Earthjustice attorney Tom Waldo, one of the legal architects of the organization's Roadless Rule strategy. "So Earthjustice stepped in."

...

http://www.alternet.org/environment/alaska-decides-its-fine-kill-endangered-wolves

http://www.alternet.org/print/environment/what-happened-govt-scientist-whose-findings-stood-way-big-oils-plans-arctic-drilling

In February 2011, Charles Monnett, an Arctic marine biologist who in 2006 published the first observations of a decline in the polar bear population of the Arctic due to melting sea ice, was interviewed by Eric May and Lynn Gibson from the Department of Interior’s Office of the Inspector General. The conversation was perplexing. May and Gibson, criminal investigators with the IG, began by suggesting that Monnett was being investigated for scientific misconduct, but early on in the conversation they admitted that neither of them had any training in science and biology.

From there, the transcript [3] of the conversation, a document released by Monnett’s legal representation,Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER),becomes murkier. May and Gibson’s line of questioning shifts several times, making it increasingly unclear what aspects of misconduct were being investigated. Monnett explains that his findings, published in Polar Biology, were peer-reviewed; May responds by asking how Polar Biology got involved. Monnett painstakingly takes May and Gibson through the calculations and observations underlying his data, but they seem dissatisfied and change tacks.

What happened after isn’t murky at all. Soon after the interview, Dr. Monnett’s hard drive and notebooks were seized. In July 2011, Monnett found out from his employer, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE), that he had been put been put on administrative leave, barring him from speaking to his colleagues or continuing his research.

The investigation had turned in to a virtual witch-hunt—but when the IG finally released its report toward the end of 2012, its only allegations were of an administrative nature. Monnett subsequently filed a whistleblower complaint [4] against BOEMRE, alleging that the official harassment had impeded him from doing his job and that the Interior Department was violating its own scientific integrity policies intended to protect federal scientists from political interference. In November 2013, Monnett reached a $100,000 settlement with BOEMRE.

The tale of Dr. Monnett is now a few years old, but instructive. Both Monnett and PEER have maintained that Monnett was harassed and essentially eliminated from the ranks of BOEMRE because he represented a threat to the financial stakes of oil companies like Shell hoping to open up the Alaskan Arctic for offshore drilling projects, and that suppressing scientific research was seen as necessary for Shell’s permits to go through. At the time, BOEMRE had been reviewing Shell’s plans to drill in the Arctic. It approved those permits in 2012, and again, in a highly contentious decision by the Obama administration, earlier this year.

Now, years after the debacle, Monnett says he has complex feelings about the dynamics of the science done in federal agencies, given how overbearing the oil industry is and its pervasive influence on the government.

The Bush administration, Monnett recalls, had “created an environment where the managers [of BOEMRE] were very hostile and aggressive towards some of the scientists…which led to a number of people leaving the agency. These people were being actively attacked by managers, screamed at in hallways, threatened with all sorts of actions. Some of them were even being threatened with legal action. The agency just wasn’t receptive to honest analysis.”

“Because of pressure from industry and the administration…certain timelines had to be met, and those timelines weren’t long enough to allow [scientists] to do complete analysis. Management was dictating the outcomes…which is against the law in my view.”

The Bush administration’s agenda from the very beginning was pro-drilling, and therefore invested in fast-tracking Shell’s permits for the Arctic. During the administration’s tenure, there was a mass exodus [5] of scientists from BOEMRE—at the time known as the Minerals Management Service—who were under pressure to overlook the overwhelming environmental concerns of Arctic oil drilling in their analyses.

But Monnett’s investigation began in 2011, not during the Bush administration but during the Obama administration, foretelling Obama’s climate legacy of paying lip service to climate change while fast-tracking [6] Shell’s offshore drilling plans all the same.

On Monday morning, President Obama arrived [7] in Alaska to shed “a spotlight on what Alaskans in particular have come to know: climate change is one of the biggest threats we face, it is driven by human activity, and it is disrupting Americans’ lives right now.” The trip, mere weeks after the final approval [8]for Shell’s summer plans to drill in the Chukchi Sea, is likely to be seen in retrospect as illustrative of the schizophrenic energy policy the Obama administration has long espoused.

The Limits of Academic Freedom

Scientific suppression and the loss of many scientists to BOEMRE during the Bush administration have been well-documented [5], but as Dr. Monnett’s case reveals, something similar, if not worse, has been underfoot during the current administration. As the case of Professor Rick Steiner demonstrates, the influence of oil goes well beyond federal agencies in Alaska.

A tenured professor of marine conservation at the University of Alaska, Steiner spent a large part of his career in the Arctic and then Anchorage, Alaska. Steiner had been a vocal opponent of offshore oil drilling since the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 and a staunch defender of marine conservation—positions that got him in to trouble multiple times during his career.

In December 2007, soon after Monnett’s polar bear paper was published, there was a federal proposed rule to list polar bears under the Endangered Species Act. At the time, Gov. Sarah Palin publicly stated that Alaska state marine mammal biologists (ADFG) disagreed with the rule, but Steiner was unsatisfied. After much resistance from the ADFG, he obtained the state review through a federalFreedom of Information Act request. The review, underscoring the dishonesty of the Palin administration, showed that marine mammal scientists overwhelmingly agreed that polar bears should be classified as endangered. This move, and many others, put Steiner on the radar as a staunch advocate of marine conservation and opponent of the pervasive influence of the oil industry in Alaska.

In 2008, when the federal government began to consider an expansion of oil development projects in Alaska, Steiner continued to raise major environmental concerns. Written records released by PEER chart out what happened next: the University of Alaska and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration terminated the grant funding for Steiner’s research work. The documents [9] demonstrate how pressure from NOAA led university officials to cut Steiner’s funding: federal officials wrote that they “had an issue with Steiner” and that his environmental advocacy could “cause problems nationally” for the agency. PEER called [10] this one of the first instances where a university and federal agency admitted to removing a faculty member’s funding because of their environmental positions.

Steiner filed multiple internal grievance claims which were all rejected by the university, and in February 2010, Dr. Steiner resigned from the university faculty on principle. Soon after, he was told by a friend who had been in a meeting with university officials that oil executives had met with university officials, telling them point blank that as long as Steiner continued to oppose the oil industry, the university would not get a dime of its money. The University of Alaska, like many public institutions in Alaska, is funded largely by oil revenues.

Like Monnett, Steiner says his experience taught him the limits to academic and scientific freedom in a place like Alaska. “It is a systemic problem far beyond BOEMRE,” he explains. “It’s in all the agencies, the universities. It’s state and federal and a broad systemic problem in Alaska.

“[The University] felt I was being too much of an advocate for marine conservation which is in contradiction to their professed goal of being in favor of academic freedom.”

And indeed, the brazen nature of the university’s statements on Steiner’s case is deeply shocking. In the recommendation to cut Steiner’s funding, Dean Wiesenburg of the University of Alaska noted [11] that Steiner “regularly takes strong public positions on issues of public debate.” Steiner, he said, “has chosen to be a maverick and work independently.”

To Steiner, what this means is clear. “There is an unwritten orthodoxy in Alaska,” he explains, “that dissenting opinions regarding unsustainable economic and political paradigms here need to be suppressed and silenced. Everybody knows that. There’s a very strong political dynamic where agencies and public institutions like the university are captured by the oil industry because it pays 95% of the state budget. Federal agencies bend over backwards for the oil industry and tend to marginalize voices that threaten that dynamic. If you criticize oil, you will have hell to pay.”

“There aren’t very many dissenters. The whole point of making an example of me and Charles [Monnett] was to suppress people from doing that in the future. People have learned that if they want to keep their job and their pay check, and their pension and their benefits, they need to keep their head down.”

A Handy Guide to Scientific Suppression

The cases of Charles Monnett and Rick Steiner have dire implications for how we view Shell’s offshore drilling plans in the Chukchi Sea this summer, and the lengths to which they went to acquire the permits. Much of this can only be guessed at. Steiner talks about the prevailing culture where federal agencies and universities begin to eliminate scientists who do not conform to the pro-oil agenda by not granting promotions or incentive awards, or giving them inadequate annual performance reviews. Another tactic, he says, is overwhelming staff scientists with trivial tasks, pulling them off projects for which they are qualified.

Jeff Ruch, executive director of PEER, an organization that seeks to protect scientist whistleblowers, can add to this list. “The range of things we see,” he says, “range from attempts to terminate, suspend, crippling internal investigations. In one case involving a lab director, the funding for his graduate students was jeopardized so he lost a lot of his research capacity. Preventing publications has no limits—in one case, a scientist was raising issues and her email privileges were taken away. We were left scratching our heads wondering how that could have happened.”

One possible remedy is scientific integrity policies that protect whistleblowers, but as Ruch explains, they are far from satisfactory. “Industry puts pressure on government agencies, and government agencies are the instrument of retaliation,” he explains. “For the most part, scientists have few legal protections. These scientists are not covered by whistleblower laws, because they’re not disclosing violations of law, fraud, or abuse. They’re disclosing suppression of research, or watering down of methodologies or the omission of key findings.”

“The law generally treats these as a matter of opinion and in these cases, the chain of command generally wins over the staff scientist.”

In his experience, Ruch says “scientific integrity policies operate within the Department of the Interior—those were weakened in December to make it even more difficult to sustain a complaint. Up until that time, there had been 2 instances out of 14 where the scientist involved faced multiple suspensions and the responsible managers escaped punishment altogether. It’s difficult to advise scientists in good conscience to file complaints under their own name because they’re unlikely to resolve in anything good.”

Early in 2009, Obama released [12] a presidential directive to develop policies that restore scientific integrity to federal actions, including providing federal scientists better whistleblower protections. At the time, this was hailed as a huge leap in the right direction.

Ruch feels not much has changed. “The agencies in the Interior have largely ignored the presidential directive,” he explains. “Some policies claim protections but have no mechanisms by which that protection is implemented, which makes it empty protection.”

Environmental groups argue that this scientific suppression, and overlooking the enormous environmental risks, has been key to the Obama administration’s approval of Shell’s permits this year. Much of the information detailing the safety and reliability of Shell’s operations has not been released to the public, despite multiple FOIA requests by groups like Greenpeace and PEER. A recent FOIA request by PEER, directed at the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), seeks to release information on how Shell’s plans for certified by third-party observers, as well as information on the deployment of capping stack and containment domes in the event of an oil spill. BSEE has not responded. PEER has now filed [13] a lawsuit in a federal district court to bring these details to light.

As President Obama continues his trip in Alaska to highlight the dangers of climate change amid overwhelming opposition from environmental and indigenous groups, it begs big questions about the administration’s overarching legacy with federal scientists and the oil industry. Ruch feels strongly about this: “In terms of the actions inside these agencies, there has been no discernible difference between those under George Bush, who was an oil man, and Barack Obama, a constitutional law professor who when his own Commission on the Deepwater Horizon spill met with him, one of the very first questions he asked was about Arctic drilling.”

“It has been clear that Arctic drilling is part of the ‘all-the-above’ energy strategy and the same sort of suppression and the same suite of issues have never really been analyzed.”

For an administration pretending to conduct a dramatic push toward mitigating climate change, that is a shameful record.

http://ecowatch.com/2015/06/19/alaska-fires-glaciers-melting

Climate change has caused Alaska’s glaciers to melt so quickly that a one-foot thick layer ofwater could completely cover the entire state of Alaska every seven years, according to a newstudy.[nice animation)

Alaskan glaciers have lost 75 billion metric tons of ice every year from 1994 through 2013, *The Washington Post*′s Chris Mooney reported from the study, which was recently accepted for publication in the peer-reviewedGeophysical Research Letters,a journal of the American Geophysical Union. Mooney also reported that the Columbia Glacier (see GIF above) alone has been sending 4 billion metric tons of water into the oceans every year.

Alaska’s melting glaciers are “punching far above their weight” when it comes to contributing to sea level rise, CBS News‘s Michael Casey pointed out, referring to how Alaska only holds one percent of the Earth’s glacial ice volume, with most of the Earth’s ice found in Antarctica and Greenland’s ice sheets.

But as the authors of the new study explained, “Despite Greenland’s ice covered area being 20 times greater than that of Alaska, losses in Alaska were fully one third of the total loss from the ice sheet during 2005-2010.”

For the study, a University of Alaska Fairbanks and U.S. Geological Survey research team analyzed surveys of 116 glaciers in the Alaska region across 19 years to estimate ice loss from melting and iceberg calving, according to a news release.

“Thinking about the future, it means that rates of loss from Alaska are unlikely to decline, since surface melt is the predominant driver, and summer temperatures are expected to continue to increase,” said Chris Larsen, a research associate professor with the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and lead author of the study.

“There is a lot of momentum in the system, and Alaska will continue to be a major driver of global sea level change in upcoming decades,” he added....

8/14

new study, funded by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA), says growing acidification of Alaska’s waters, particularly those off the southern coast, threatens the state’s whole economy—largely dependent on the fishing industry.

kate s

Salmon Gold Mining Pebble Mine Project Copper Mining Bristol Bay Mining Gina McCarthy Bristol Bay Environmental Protection Agency Sockeye Salmon Pebble Mine Alaska Pebble Mine Alaska Fisheries EPA Pebble Mine Green News

WASHINGTON –- The Environmental Protection Agency announced Friday that it is beginning a process that could block a massive proposed gold mine in Alaska from being built.

The Pebble Mine is a proposed open-pit copper and gold mine that could be up to 2 miles long, a mile and a half wide, and 1,700 feet deep -- the largest of its type in North America. The proposed site for the mine is at the headwaters of the Nushagak and Kvichak rivers, which feed into the Bristol Bay. It is the largest sockeye salmon fishery in the world, producing nearly half of the world's wild sockeye.

The EPA said Friday that it is invoking Clean Water Act protections that would stop its construction, citing concerns about the threat it poses to the bay and the fish that depend on it. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said that the agency is taking the step to "ensure that the world's most productive salmon fishery is safe from the risks it faces from what could be one of the largest mines on Earth" in a call with reporters Friday afternoon.

McCarthy cited threats to the region's multimillion-dollar fishing industry, as well as to native cultures that rely on the bay. The agency released a scientific assessment of the bay and proposed mine in mid-January, which McCarthy said provided "ample reason for EPA to believe that a mine of the size and scope of Pebble Mine would have significant and irreversible impacts on Bristol Bay."

This is only the beginning of a process that is expected to take a year to finalize. It doesn't mean that the EPA would ultimately reject the permit application, as it explained in a letter to the Pebble Mine Limited Partnership, which is seeking to build the mine. But it sets up a process by which the agency could eventually do that. There will be public hearings and a comment period before the agency issues a final decision.

Invoking protection under Section 404(c) of the Clean Water Act is rare; the agency has only used it 13 times since 1972. The EPA has invoked its 404(c) authority before a company formally applied for a permit only one other time. "This is not something that the agency does very often, but the Bristol Bay fishery is an extraordinary resource and is worthy of out-of-the-ordinary agency action to protect it," said McCarthy.

Both McCarthy and EPA Region 10 administrator Dennis McLerran emphasized that the Bristol Bay situation is "unique" and "extraordinary."

For groups that petitioned the EPA to block the mine, Friday's announcement was a big win.

"This is a great day," said Shoren Brown, executive director of Bristol Bay United, a coalition of Alaska native, commercial and sport fishermen. "I'm shocked and, at the same time, this is the way the system is supposed to work. The EPA did the science and came to a clear conclusion that Pebble Mine is going to have huge and long-lasting impact."

Bristol Bay is home to 190 species of birds, more than 40 species of land mammals and 35 species of fish, including sockeye, Chinook and pink salmon.

The bay's famous salmon fishery produces around 46 percent of the sockeye salmon consumed throughout the world; commercial harvests average 27.5 million fish a year.

Its salmon industry provides jobs to 14,000 workers and supports the traditional subsistence lifestyle of more than 4,000 Native Americans, for whom salmon is the "foundation for their language, spirituality, and social structure," according to the EPA.

Backed by Northern Dynasty Minerals, the proposed mine would be dug at the headwaters of the Bristol Bay salmon fishery at the Pebble deposit, which is rich in copper, gold and molybdenum, according to an EPA fact sheet.

The area could produce 11 billion metric tons of ore, which would make it the largest North American mine of its kind....

http://www.alternet.org/print/news-amp-politics/copper-mine-could-destroy-worlds-largest-wild-salmon-run

Alaska

great

With Amazon in flames, Trump moves to open 16.7 million-acre Alaskan Rainforest to corporate exploitation

Battle to Protect 50 Million Forest Acres May Finally Be Won After 16 Years

MORE: