America’s infrastructure needs gold and copper, with the needs for electronics and our power grid particularly acute.

Alaska’s proposed “Pebble Mine” would unleash new sources of these essential metals, but today’s Green anti-capitalists never met an essential project they didn’t hate.  Green gadflies have been obstructing the project, raising bogus claims that it would harm local salmon fisheries.  They stood in the way with the Obama Administration’s active assistance.

Bonner Cohen reports at CFACT.org that this important project has just taken a big step forward:

The nearly two-decades-old controversy surrounding a proposed gold and copper mine in Southwest Alaska entered a new phase July 24, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps), reversing an Obama-era finding, and concluded that the project “would not be expected to have a measurable effect on fish numbers” in the Bristol Bay watershed, which supports the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery. Bristol bay is the easternmost arm of the Bering Sea, which lies between Alaska and Russia.

In its environmental assessment, the Corps found that the mine would affect up to 2,261 acres (less than four square miles) of wetlands and up to 105.8 miles of streams but that there would be “no measurable change in the number of returning salmon.”

Bonner further reports that the usual suspects are livid, and are bringing further bogus arguments to bear:

Taryn Kiekow Heimer, who heads the Natural Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC) campaign to stop the mine, was delighted to play the race card.

“It’s especially embarrassing for the government and appalling given the current social context we are in,” she told The Washington Post (July 25), referring to the Trump administration’s accelerated approval process. “It’s just another example of the entrenched and systemic racism that this government is showing people of color and indigenous people in particular.”

Alaska’s pebble mine will not harm salmon, and has nothing to do with race.

The Green’s cannot demand that we expand the nation’s power grid to include widespread, inefficient wind and solar installations, and at the same time deny us the copper it takes to do so.