Pebble should post $50 billion bond for future damages or end its project

I have a strategy that I believe would benefit Mr. Tom Collier and the Pebble Partnership in their struggle to permit and establish the Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay. The roiling argument is whether or not an open-pit mine can coexist with the biggest wild salmon run on earth. To date, no open-pit mines have accomplished operations which are not guilty of environmental destruction and pollution, to either a small or a catastrophic degree. Pebble backers continue to reassure us that they can do it, and are firmly committed to doing so.

Science backs up the argument that the mine would put the fishery at extreme risk, while the ever-vigilant Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), the Trump-restructured Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and our own Gov. Mike Dunleavy, are pretty excited about the prospects. Weighing a 10,000-year-old subsistence lifestyle and a hugely valuable renewable resource that has come back for thousands of years, they seem eager to gamble this to provide short-term revenue to a foreign mining company. One has to ask: Why?

The old maxim “put your money where your mouth is” occurred to me, and if you take numbers from highly respected Gunnar Knapp and his report on the economic importance of the Bristol Bay salmon industry in 2013, the economic return is roughly $1.5 billion/year.

Now the mine, if approved and constructed, will have to protect this environmental gem for perpetuity, which translates into a pretty long time. I don’t think we need to be unrealistic and shoot for the moon. Let’s just say that if the Pebble Partnership took that $1.5 billion and multiplied it by a laughably small span of time, say 20 years, and then put that $30 billion into a trust fund to repay damages for the lost wages and destroyed resource they have assured us will not happen, then our confidence in them will increase significantly. To round out the compensation picture further, BP paid about $20 billion for natural resource damages in the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, beyond any lost wages. So let’s say $50 billion is a realistic amount to be put into a bond or trust fund.

And again, let’s give them an easy out and say they only have to avoid destroying Bristol Bay for 100 years, not forever, as the mine has the potential to do, and to which standard it will be held.  By then, it will be a new crop of environmentalists and business tycoons fighting over Mother Earth anyway. Will we care? Will Mr. Collier and the Pebble Partnership care? Only our great-great-grandkids and far-off generations will be around by that time.

So, Mr. Collier and Pebble, what do you say to backing up your claim that fishing and mining can coexist, as shown by the USACE and EPA’s “rigorous permitting and review processes?”  I challenge you to put your money behind what some say are empty promises. If they are valid, that money will come back to you after 100 years. And Alaskans would see that you truly believe in your oft-repeated promises to them. It’s a win-win situation, right?

Dan Strickland has been in Alaska for 49 years, and has been a commercial fisherman for more than 30 of them. He lives in Palmer.

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