Alaska mine ‘cannot be permitted,’ Trump administration rules in major reversal – By Zack Colman & Alex Guillen (Politico) / Aug 24 2020
Trump administration officials had been concerned for months that the project was unworkable, a person familiar with the plan told POLITICO.
The Trump administration threw up major hurdles for a planned copper and gold mine in Alaska on Monday, a move that could kill the project that had drawn opposition from environmentalists, recreational groups and prominent Republicans.
The current proposal for the Pebble Mine at Bristol Bay “cannot be permitted,” the Army Corps of Engineers said, and it called for a series of strict conditions the project’s developers would need to meet offset the environmental harms that the massive project would have on world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery.
The plan to block the project, which POLITICO first reported on Saturday, has been in the works for more than a year amid White House concerns that the mine would gravely damage a commercial fishery that spawns 11 percent of the world’s wild sockeye salmon. The administration had decided last year to allow the permitting process to proceed, but with the caveat that the Pebble developers would need to meet environmental standards that the developer would find difficult to satisfy, said a person familiar with the plan.
“That effectively is how the project is killed,” said the person, who requested anonymity to discuss the deliberations. “This one had a huge number of problems.”
Continue to article: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/24/alaska-mine-trump-administration-reversal-401183
