Posted on 05/04/2016 9:23:42 AM PDT by rktman
The Navajo residents of Page, Ariz., have gotten to the point where they openly worry their modest rush hour may end altogether.
The rush hour consists of only a few hundred cars carrying 520 people out to the Navajo Generating Station (NGS), heading down a windy road to the coal-fired power plant, which is dramatically positioned on a ridge a mile from the shores of Lake Powell, the second largest man-made reservoir in the United States.
The Navajo coal plant’s lease is set to expire in 2019, pending complex negotiations aimed at extending operations until 2044. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations have complicated the plant’s future through so-called Regional Haze regulations, which were crafted to improve visibility and not curb pollution. In essence, the Navajo Nation and the region could lose a key source of economic prosperity to slightly improve tourists’ view of the Grand Canyon.
“Historically power plants and mines have been some of the best jobs for those in the nation, but the plants do more than just provide high paying jobs they have allowed the Navajo Nation to preserve its unique cultural identity.” says Arizona state Sen. Carlyle Begay, himself of Navajo heritage.
Begay recently switched his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican and is running for Congress in Arizona’s 1st District, in part because of his frustration over the role the EPA plays in the region. He’s frustrated EPA’s threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of Navajos in the name of a regulation that won’t improve public health — it’s purely there for aesthetics.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
“Indian reservations are self governing in many ways aren’t they?”
Up for debate. A tribe in Kansas refused to recognize state authority and started issuing their own license plates...lawsuits ensued, and I really don’t know how it turned out.
It has what is probably the cleanest air the the country, but the EPA is worried about it. You can see 60 miles or more, no trouble, but the EPA is concerned. I’d guess the damned idiots in DC have never been to the 4 corners area...
That’s why is said NFW. Which is where it is in the middle of.
Enemy of the
People of
America
The air and environment there are among the best anywhere. However the poverty of the families will only get worse under Hillary. These people have their problems but they are very good people and don’t deserve the pain and hunger the progressives and Hillary will inflict on them.
FUEPA!
This article is several weeks old, but useful to show administration actions to shut down efficient power plants in favor of non-fossil fuel sources to the detriment of local employment, in this case Navajos.
I drove past that mine a few years ago. There was an enormous excavator out there doing its thing. Coal mining equipment is amazingly large.
The EPA is another entity that needs to be obliterated, along with the IRS and BLM. And probably many more useless make-work departments. *sheesh*
Still trying to rape the Native Americans...
Sometimes the Indians are their own worst enemy. I knew people who were building that plant back in 1974, I also remember when there were two more power plants scheduled to be built, on the Reservation, near Burnham NM. The radical Indians threw a waul eyed fit and got them stopped.
If you will remember, the American Indian Movement was making inroads into the Reservations back then with the Fairchild Corp takeover at Shiprock. They also tried to take over some of the gas wells in that area.
Other plants in Utah scheduled to be built at isolated coal fields were stopped by the Government and Bill Clinton then turned their areas into “National Monuments” to prevent further development.
Meanwhile APS at Hogback (Waterflow, NM ) is still in operation, and there was a nice streak of brown in the atmosphere leading right back to that plant when I was there last year. The APS plant was a nasty plant when I lived there forty years ago.
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