I’m also a small-time part-time jeweler, and will let my supplier know how I feel, and if they’re not able to satisfy me that they will not make a similar pledge I’ll take my business elsewhere.

It’s a good cause that I feel passionate about but requiring a street address is wrong IMHO. I guess I could lie but how stupid and hypocritical is that?! I will call a jeweler in my area when we get through this latest crisis.

I took some time and did a little looking around, I am hadicapped in not being able to download big pdf files and such but there is a fair amount of easily obtainable information, enough to get started.

Wikipedia has a fairly good article on the pebble mine here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_Mine

In it, the current reserve estimates are cited and they are quite revealing.
This mine is a copper/gold/moly porphyry. I’ll cut to the chase, the main resource is of course the copper as is the case in all such mines. The gold and moly are about equal value byproducts. Taken all together the measured, indicated and inferred reserves of this mine total a net present value of approximately $395 billion. Annual revenue from the mine once developed and at full scale operation would average $8,784,000,000 for around 45 years. Roughly half of that revenue would come from copper alone, with gold and molybdenum accounting for 24% and 26% respectively. So effectively the company could stockpile all the gold produced without selling a single ounce of it, and still earn revenues of over $6 billion a year.

Over the life of the mine, at the current tax rates for hard rock operations, the State of Alaska stands to earn a paltry $150 million per year.

Current projections are that development of the mine will maintain approximately 2,000 jobs for 3 years or so declining to 1,000 long term jobs over the life of the mine. If the average annual pay of mine workers is $100,000 per year, (very unlikely) that would be a contribution of $100 million per year to the Alaska economy over the long term. Since the present population of Bristol Bay is less than 2000 people, most of those jobs which require specialized skills would go to people who migrated to the mine site.

Housing and infrastructure for all of those people and their families would have to be provided which would have further impact on the mine locale’s environment. Taken together, the impact of the mine might calculate out to a net negative overall for the state in the current circumstances when it is considered that the services the state normally delivers would have to be provided or the company would run everything itself.

To put the size of the players in some perspective it is worth noting that the annual revenues of Tiffany & Co. are about $2.9 billion per year whereas the
annual revenues of Anglo American are more than $26 billion per year. Anglo could buy Tiffany with ease. When production comes on line at the Pebble mine, Anglo’s annual revenues will increase to over $30 billion. For their share in the ownership of Pebble, Anglo has pledged to invest nearly $2 billion in infrastructure. This year’s budget for Pebble mine development has recently been increased from $59 million to $70 million.

With potential reserves of nearly $400 billion at stake Anglo would probably be willing to spend over a billion dollars to defend its right to mine.

This is what confronts the stop Pebble mine movement.

It gets worse. Gold is trivial stuff both in terms of this mine and in terms of world economics, for the most part. In ten years it may be worth 50% less than it is now, or it may be worth 50% or 100% or 500% more, but its value is determined strictly by speculation, not demand. Copper on the other hand is valued based on demand almost exclusively, there will be copper speculators in the future, it is guaranteed, but for now, the price of $2.70 per pound is mainly driven by how much is bought from the dwindling supply. Over the life of a mine such as Pebble, it is not at all unreasonable to speculate that the price of copper would double. More likely it will increase by an even greater factor, say 6 or 10. So the good people at Anglo have every reason to believe that their projections for the profitability of this mine over its lifetime will increase substantially.

Now let’s look at the opposition to the mine.

http://www.greenandsave.com/green_news/green-blog/big-stakes-pebble-mine-nrdc-launches-bristol-bay-biogem-campaign-5190
http://www.stoppebblemine.com/
http://www.renewableresourcescoalition.org/pebble_mine.htm
http://hooknbullet.org/study.htm
http://www.mine-aid.org/predictions/

are all web sites opposing the mine’s development. This is just a top sample from a google search, there may be hundreds of others buried deeper, I can’t be sure, however I can be sure of one thing having looked at all of these sites. The response is feeble and ineffectual. Compared to the money that Anglo alone could throw at this issue, these efforts are, well, frankly, pathetic. I am not saying that I disagree with them, I am just saying tthat compared to the political power of Anglo’s money, they don’t have a chance in hell of defeating this mine.

I think this has already been demonstrated in Alaska with the defeat of the clean water proposition last year. The fact that the governor campaigned in favor of defeat is an interesting side note to the whole issue but it seems more than a little plausible that she was paid off handsomely for taking a partisan stance against the overall interests of the state in that regard.

I have gone on too long already and since I have no opportunity to review my posts in context here Iwill go ahead and submit what I have so far after a read through hoping to spot gaffes. But before leaving it is appropriate to point out what I think are the greatest weaknesses of the Pebble mine plan as points of attack that might give some traction to the opposition despite the enourmous discrepancy in resources.

The main weaknesses I see are fairly simple but involve a great deal of technical effort and legislative activism to bring about. The mine proposal as I read it is essentially to construct two huge earthen dams to impound the upper watersheds of two rivers to form huge settlement basins for the mine waste which will be fine grained crushed rock with a high sulphur content and residual levels of primary ore. It should be noted clearly and unambiguously that this is the cheapest possible solution to the disposal of an long term containment of the mine’s waste. Given that the discrepancy between the mine’s revenues and its payment to the state in taxes is so vast, why pray tell should they not be held to a much higher standard of environmental protection? Earthen dams are not impermeable, therefore acid wastes will propagate into the downstream watersheds in virtual perpetuity. If a copper content of 1 part per billion is sufficient to disrupt the spawning behavior of fish, then even if the so called protections enacted to slow the dispersal of heavy metals into the watershed work, ultimately the salmon runs will be destroyed.

Given the obscene profitability of the mine, why is not a completely different criterion for containment of mine wastes applicable? Why not require the mine to dehydrate all of its waste and sequester it in landfills that cannot directly impact surface watersheds instead of building huge dams that only contain the wastes until such time as some failure occurs which sterilizes the downstream watershed for decades, or perhaps centuries?

Several legislative initiatives could be mounted to counter the implementation of this mine that would make sense. The most obvious and clearly required would be the posting of a bond, say of 10% of the overall value of the resource, that would be about $39 billion to clean up whatever mess is made as a result of the mine. That might make Anglo think twice about pushing ahead.

There are a myriad of questions that can be broached as well, it is already known that the region in which the mine occurs is subject to periodic major earthquakes. In general, earthen dams do not resist major earthquakes very well, so why not require the developers to construct better containment if in fact they still want to do the development given the increased costs?

I could go on and on about the factors involved here, but what my real point is is simply this, opposition to the project as portrayed is up against a juggernaut of money and influence.

There may well be an environmentally sound and responsible way to develop the Pebble mine. The passage of time alone will determine different priorities. For the present, however, it is obvious that the mining companies have been given a huge gift by the lack of responsible legislation and oversight on the part of the State of Alaska to protect its interests for all citizens.

So my ultimate suggestion is to petition your representitives in the legislature. Raise the tax on hard rock mining revenues to 20% on par with those levied for petroleum products, and enhance the EP laws to include proven and well developed methods of waste treatment from large mines instead of allowing the creation of vast lakes of impounded toxic wastes that might at any time be released by unforeseeable seismic events.

I hope my post stimulates a vigorous discussion and even more so, vigorous action to engage and influence the lawmakers, that I think is the only hope there is to either stop this project in its tracks, or at least mitigate it to the point where the profiteers will not laugh up their sleeves at how they have fooled the rubes.