For years, the left has denounced Republicans as the villainous “party of the rich” while they’ve been the virtuous champions of the working class. But somewhere along the way—it may have been to that second viewing of Hamilton or coming home from Whole Foods, but regardless it was in a hybrid car—Democrats got lost and didn’t realize that they’d become the party of the rich.
Leading the shift has been environmental NIMBYism. Whether it’s President Obama forcing monuments upon states over the objections of their leaders or Hillary Clinton promising to put coal miners out of work, wealthy leftists have sacrificed the prosperity of millions on their altar to environmentalism. While it’s important to care for the environment, the practice typically translates into federal takeovers in poor, red-state communities rather than wealthy, blue ones. (How about a windfarm off the coast of San Francisco? It might ruin the views for some of those $1 million homes, but we need renewable energy, right?)
At the tip of the spear for resolving environmentalism-caused unemployment will be Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt, whom Trump has appointed to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Something that should appear at the top of Pruitt’s doubtlessly long to-do list is reopening the Pebble Mine project.
Located in southwest Alaska, Pebble Mine could be the largest copper and gold mine in the United States, as long as it’s allowed to be. A report from IHS Global Insight shows the project could yield 80 billion pounds of copper, 107 million ounces of gold, and 5.6 billion pounds of molybdenum, an element used in metallurgy. The economic benefit would include 2,500 new construction jobs, $1.2 billion per year in capital investment and wages, between $136 and $180 million in new revenue for Alaska, and a 600-percent increase in revenue for the local economy.
Despite these positives, Obama’s EPA took the unprecedented action of rejecting the project before an application was even submitted. Normally, the application process for this kind of project is led by the Army Corps of Engineers, and the EPA evaluates the merits of the proposal based on input from the corps and others. But internal agency documents show that EPA personnel were in constant contact with activists who opposed the mine. One of them was Phil North, an EPA biologist, who began work on a sham environmental assessment to reject the mine out of hand. North was caught using private email to communicate with anti-mine activists in order to avoid disclosure laws and hide his tracks. After Congress began investigating, North’s hard drive “crashed”, and he fled the country as the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform sought to depose him.
Don’t just take my word that this collusion was fishy. A report from former senator and Clinton administration appointee William Cohen concluded that the behavior demonstrated by EPA personnel “raise[s] serious concerns as to whether EPA may have orchestrated the ecological assessment process to reach a predetermined result, had inappropriately close relationships with anti-mine advocates, and was not candid about its decision-making process.”
The EPA’s brazenly political actions have drawn criticism. The Washington Post editorial board said, “Given the potential economic value of the mine, they should hear the companies out.” The Wall Street Journal called the EPA’s rationale “sham science.”
Pruitt’s overturning his predecessors’ bad decision would be great for Alaska and an important boost to parts of the country that’ve been bowled over by coastal elites for too long. This could be the small pebbles that start the avalanche, unlocking billions of dollars of investment and creating thousands of new jobs.
