Laine Welch: Despite Mount Polley disaster, Senate hopefuls hammer on EPA in debate

[unhappycamper]

http://www.adn.com/article/20140811/laine-welch-despite-mount-polley-disaster-senate-hopefuls-hammer-epa-debate

Laine Welch: Despite Mount Polley disaster, Senate hopefuls hammer on EPA in debate
Laine Welch
August 11, 2014

Breached mine tailings dams be damned! As millions of Fraser River sockeye salmon head for spawning beds polluted by a brew of metal toxins oozing from the Mount Polley gold/copper mine disaster in British Columbia, Republican candidates vying for U.S. Senate want environmental regulators to butt out of Alaska’s mining development decisions.

The three men hoping to unseat Sen. Mark Begich faced off last week for a rural Alaska Republican candidates forum hosted by KYUK-FM in Bethel.

To questions posed by moderator Ben Matheson, candidates Joe Miller, Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell and Dan Sullivan all slammed the Environmental Protection Agency for its plans to impose strict water requirements aimed at blocking the proposed Pebble mine. Each candidate also agreed with legislation recently introduced in the U.S. Senate (by Sen. Lisa Murkowski and two other senators) that says the EPA cannot use its authority under the Clean Water Act “pre-emptively or retroactively.”

“To have the EPA come in and take power away from the permitting process is not necessarily going to solve the Pebble problem, and it’s going to hurt mines all over the state,” said Treadwell. “When I say ‘solve the Pebble problem,’ this is something that we just can’t say we’re not going to do the science, we can’t say we’re not going to look at a permit. This is a big piece of our state’s statehood bounty and we have to be able to make sure that we’ve got that capability.