Beating the Pebble Mine in Alaska is no small feat. It’s been going on for more than 10 years now. Big money and big politics are involved. But recent setbacks make the prospects of opening the mine very dim. And it’s a great lesson in strategies for beating Rise Gold and the proposed Idaho-Maryland Mine in Grass Valley.
1) Force them to prove they will do no harm. If they can’t, you win. Knowing the law matters.
“The Army Corps of Engineers on Wednesday denied a permit under the Federal Clean Water Act for the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska, likely dealing a death blow to a long-disputed project that aimed to extract one of the world’s largest deposits of copper and gold ore, but which threatened breeding grounds for salmon in the pristine Bristol Bay region… In a statement, the Army Corps’ Alaska District Commander, Col. Damon Delarosa, said the mine, proposed for a remote tundra region about 200 miles from Anchorage, would be “contrary to the public interest” because “it does not comply with Clean Water Act guidelines.”
2) Look for and expose dirty business.
"In September, the future of the multibillion dollar project appeared in doubt when secret recordings of company executives suggested that they were planning for a much larger mine, and one that would operate far longer, than what had been proposed to the Corps. The recordings were obtained by an environmental advocacy group, with two members who were posing as potential investors in the project meeting by video with two project executives. The executives described how the mine could operate for 160 years or more beyond the proposed 20 years, and how its output could double after the first two decades. In the fallout from the recordings, one of the executives, Tom Collier, chief executive of the Pebble Partnership, resigned."
Read the full article here.