Mining News: Beluga whales may have to freeze in the dark

Federal regulators roll out restrictive environmental policies that likely will strip protections from Alaska’s mining industry

J. P. Tangen

For Mining News

While resource development issues other than those offered in conjunction with the availability of affordable energy have gotten very little play during the presidential campaign, a few sub-rosa developments are taking place that shouldn’t escape the attention of those who would mine in Alaska.

First, it is fair to say that neither U.S. Interior Secretary Kempthorne nor his predecessor, Gale Norton, made substantial progress in facilitating mineral development. Among the bad decisions made in recent years was the dissolution of the minerals division within the Alaska State Office of the Bureau of Land Management and the conversion of the U.S. Geological Survey to a secret extension of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Now, as we come to the end of the empire, it is useful to think about the transition.

Typically, when the presidency changes, all manner of bottled up regulatory changes suddenly appear like cicadas on a summer night.

Unlike past Republican administrations, the offerings emerging from the waning Bush administration are anti-development in nature. Two in particular are going to hit Alaska miners particularly hard. The first is the determination that, despite demonstrated population stability, the Cook Inlet Beluga whale is somehow endangered. They may have been at risk when people were throwing harpoons at them, but since that practice has been circumscribed, there is no evidence that our happy local pod is in jeopardy; yet the Bush administration apparently doesn’t want to take any chances. The recent extension of ESA protection to polar bears was likewise fatuous because their population is actually increasing, and polar bears, which biologists tell me are little more than a variety of brown bears, can readily adjust their diets to terrestrial mammals if their preferred marine prey is not readily available.

The second regulatory time bomb to emerge from the dusk of the Octennium is the determination by the Environmental Protection Agency to start down the road toward regulating carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act as a global warming culprit. I am guessing that hundreds, if not thousands, of board feet of timber were used to produce the volumes of back-up documentation required to support the conclusion that carbon dioxide is a bad thing. I am further guessing that the reports do not contain a single reference to the fact that the trees that were sacrificed to make those reams of paper had been busily sucking carbon dioxide out of the air before their demise.

These 11th-hour decisions will, in due course, cause a great deal of agony for miners and others. ESA classification for local Belugas necessarily means that all local development will be affected. Tidewater facilities of all stripes will have to be scrutinized to ensure that they will not adversely impact the habitat. The costs of preserving an isolated population will undoubtedly slow or stop growth at a time when Anchorage in particular and the greater Cook Inlet metropolitan area in general are struggling to accommodate modernization.

EPA’s determination to regulate carbon dioxide will of course have much more far-reaching implications. It will affect everything from reindeer flatulence to mine-mouth power plants, and the displacements will not be pretty. If the means of production for electricity come under stress now, regardless of how the carbon dioxide regulatory scheme unfolds, those stress factors are going to increase.

One can only wonder at the motivation of those who would save the planet by stifling our domestic lifestyle. I am not among those who are terribly upset if the people of Tuvalu or Bangladesh or Manhattan will have to relocate to higher ground sometime in the next millennium. The idea that global warming causes populations of Canada geese to increase doesn’t offend me. Until recently I would have thought that to be a good thing.

The short-term threat to mineral production, availability and, by extension, to national security is far greater than any long-term danger to either the Beluga whale or the arctic ice pack. Development of Beluga coal is far more beneficial to our prosperity than any imagined insult to the Cook Inlet cetacean. Likewise, additional restraints on the ability to develop low-cost power at Cook Inlet may stifle the evolution of mining projects in Southwest Alaska.

These closing shots from Bush 43 are wholly unwelcome. Tragically, however the election is decided, there appears to be no commitment to mitigate these regulatory errors. The orientation of our present and future leaders appears to involve making it more and more difficult for those who would develop domestic resources to survive. One can only hope that perhaps one day soon there will be a listing under the ESA for “miners, Alaska subpopulation” and we will finally get the protection we need.