Which do you sacrifice, Big Green, with its billionaire clout, or the struggling Navajo, Hopi, and an indispensable coal-fired generator that keeps Arizona’s central water supply flowing?
The Democrats face a test of character next Tuesday in a life-or-death congressional hearing on that question.
Two subcommittees of the House Natural Resources Committee have called an unusual joint hearing titled, “Protecting long-term tribal energy jobs and keeping Arizona water and power costs affordable: The current and future role of the Navajo Generating Station.”
At issue: Environmental Protection Agency regulations are ready to shut down the Navajo Generating Station, which is the sole source of pumping power for the Central Arizona Project.
The CAP is America’s largest irrigation system, 336 miles of canals feeding Colorado River water to a million agricultural acres, supplying municipal water for Phoenix and Tucson, while also providing flood and sediment control, plus recreation and conservation benefits.
The EPA is set to impose emission controls so expensive — $1.4 billion — that they will price the Navajo Generating Station out of existence.
The water disaster this EPA shutdown would create is obvious and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is already fighting back as a co-sponsor of legislation to eliminate the EPA and fold it into the Department of Energy.
But the Indian disaster will not make headlines or produce outraged legislation. The voice of the Navajo and Hopi can’t compete with Big Green’s influence over the EPA.
Worse, the Democratic “friends” of the Navajo Nation and Hopi Tribe are doing nothing in Congress to defend them, even betraying them by bringing in subcommittee hearing witnesses from the foundation-funded Black Mesa Trust to demand the coal mines and power-generating plant be shut down.
This store-bought “traditional” trust has received $650,000 in ideologically anti-coal foundation grants since 2000 and its president is paid more than $55,000 a year to be traditional, according to IRS Form 990s.
Ben Shelly, Navajo Nation president, saw the desperate situation. He told the EPA, “The Navajo Generating Station is located on Navajo land and provides hundreds of skilled jobs on the Navajo Reservation, which suffers unemployment approaching 50 percent.”
Leroy Shingoitewa, chairman of the Hopi Tribal Council, told the EPA, “Coal jointly owned by the Navajo Nation and Hopi Tribe is mined at the Peabody Western Coal Company’s Kayenta mining complex and carried by a dedicated rail line to power the NGS. The Tribe’s economic security is fundamentally tied to the ongoing operation of the plant.”
Why is EPA shaking a $1.4 billion stick at the Navajo and Hopi? To stop haze in the Grand Canyon.
However, the prevailing winds blow the wrong direction to blame the Navajo Generating Station, which is near Page, Ariz., for the haze, which, according to a 2009 Salt River Project Report, is mostly caused by auto emissions from Los Angeles and smoke from uncontrolled forest fires.
Dan Kish, senior vice president for policy at the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Energy Research, was senior adviser to Rep. Don Young when the Alaska Republican was chairman of the Resources Committee. Young is now chairman of one of the hearing’s sponsoring subcommittees, Indian and Alaska Native Affairs.
Kish drew from his long experience dealing with EPA, saying, “This haze-visibility issue is a patently invented justification to shut down another coal-fired power plant for Lisa Jackson’s own ideological allegiance to Big Green.
“Power plants contribute a tiny fraction of haze in the Grand Canyon. The huge threat in EPA’s proposal is typical of this runaway agency, which has a history of corruption, inventing horrible new dangers to justify expanding its power and control. It will destroy us if we don’t dismantle it and put the functions under adult supervision.”
Indians or Big Green? It’s a test of character.
Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
