EPA Vetoes Pebble Mine & Chooses China Over America

January 31, 2023

The Environmental Protection Agency announced that Alaska’s massive Pebble deposit wouldn’t be allowed to discharge tailings or mine waste into a 300-square mile area of the state, effectively eliminating the project’s opportunity for development for now.

The extraordinary measure – used only three times by the EPA in the last 50 years – was quickly cheered by radical environmentalists and anti-development groups; the same ones who consistently rally for increasing ‘green’ energy, that Pebble would have been a major source of copper, molybdenum and rhenium for.

Laying aside a clean Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS), which was completed and announced by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2020, when the Corps said – without hesitation – that the mine wouldn’t harm the Bristol Bay salmon fishery, the EPA instead chose to implement its own non-science-based actions to thwart the mine’s potential development.

The next step in the process – and to be clear, there are several steps left before Pebble’s coffin is sealed shut – is litigation. Both the State of Alaska (the project’s landholder) and Northern Dynasty (Pebble’s owner) appear to have solid cases to overturn the veto.

Power The Future has been a Pebble advocate since we entered Alaska in 2019.  We’ve seen first-hand the mine plans, met with people in the region and understand the truth behind the project; not the fear-over-facts narrative pushed by anti-Pebble forces.  We won’t stop championing the hundreds of generational, life-changing jobs Pebble would bring to the region, nor the effects for state, local and federal sources developing the trillion-dollar deposit would bring.

Pebble is the right mine, in the right place, regardless of what the EPA might say.