Pebble Mine: Emblematic of EPA Tyranny

by Dave Blount | May 13, 2014 12:34 pm

The most malevolent ideology conceivable would by one holding the human race to be inherently bad and human activities inherently harmful. The full implementation of such an ideology would make fascism, Islam, and even communism seem downright benevolent by comparison. This is why the more power Obama grants to the Environmental Protections Agency to implement his agenda, the scarier it gets. The latest horror story from resource-rich Alaska:

The EPA inspector general’s office last week announced it will investigate the agency’s February decision to commence a pre-emptive veto of the Pebble Mine project, a jobs-rich proposal to develop America’s largest U.S. copper and gold mine in southwest Alaska. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy says her decision to strike down Pebble before it received a hearing shouldn’t worry other developers because Pebble is a “unique” threat. She needs to say this because the truth might chill billions of dollars in investment in the U.S.

The IG is looking into internal EPA documents that we’ve also obtained that show agency officials were maneuvering to kill Pebble more than five years ago, and that EPA’s main concern was building a façade of science and procedure to justify it.

That’s the purpose of science now: to provide justifications for the federal government’s hard left agenda. That’s why federal funding is reducing science to Lysenkoism. This goes beyond global warming malarkey to everything Big Government’s tainted money touches.

The Army Corps of Engineers has the power to evaluate projects and issue permits according to the 1972 Clean Water Act. But the EPA preempted it, just as it preempted the right of the people trying get at Alaska’s wasted wealth to have a hearing before the ruling.

The EPA was laying plans to block the mine before the developers applied for a permit, and before conducting even pseudoscientific review. The justification: fill material would go into a swamp. Swamps I mean “wetlands” are sacred to moonbats, possibly because they are breeding grounds for pestilential creatures like mosquitos and locusts, both of which closely resemble liberal bureaucrats in their behavior.

An EPA memo from 2010 lists the pros and cons of preemptively deep sixing the project rather than strangling it in red tape by “traditional” (i.e., legal) means:

Listed under the many “pros” of ignoring the law is that a pre-emptive Pebble veto can serve as a “model of proactive watershed planning.” So much for Ms. McCarthy’s claim that this veto is a one-timer.

Only after all of this did EPA concoct its sham watershed study that provided the scientific cover for its veto. That study invented a hypothetical Pebble mine, then assumed outdated mining practices to predict environmental harm. The study included contributions from obvious opponents of the mine…. The EPA’s own peer-review experts ridiculed the study; one pronounced its key sections “pure hogwash.”

As with the Keystone XL pipeline, we may never know how much wealth — and consequently how many jobs — would have been created if the Feds, enemies of all constructive endeavor in this country, had not once again gotten in the way.

By a remarkable coincidence, too much wealth and too many jobs hurt Democrats electorally by undercutting their class warfare rhetoric and making fewer people dependent on their coercively financed handouts.

Before America is again a free country, the malignant and tyrannical EPA will have to be abolished.

On a tip from Varla. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.