Posted on 09/24/2021 6:24:10 AM PDT by Kaslin
If resident Biden sees electric vehicles in everyone’s future, he ironically will have to rely on copper mines to get there.
Consider the current bipartisan infrastructure package, a $1.2 trillion mishmash of boondoggles and eco-centric priorities ostensibly designed to alleviate the “climate crisis,” while simultaneously starting another crisis, by putting hundreds of thousands of current American energy jobs at risk. The president’s “Build Back Better” plan is a brilliant one, if you want lower-paying solar and wind jobs to replace high-paying oil and gas ones, or if you want Chinese-owned companies to prosper while American manufacturers are priced out of the market. But I digress.
If the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package doesn’t grind your gears, the accompanying $3.5 trillion budget bill surely will. This monstrosity includes another laundry list of ‘green energy’ projects and demand. The simple fact is for every one of those projects, priorities, regulations, jobs and traditional energy transition plans, America will need to have copper. Just looking at electric vehicles (EVs) alone, the need is clear: the average EV contains three times the amount of copper traditional vehicles do – a whopping 183 pounds!
And it just so happens that my home state of Alaska has plenty of copper to support those initiatives, if Biden would just move forward with the Pebble Mine Project.
Unless Alaska is home, or you have seen the work-product of the tens of millions of dollars spent to fight the mine across the nation, you’ve probably never heard of Pebble. It is a massive copper, gold, molybdenum and rhenium discovery, located approximately 200 miles southwest of Anchorage, and over 100 miles away from Bristol Bay, one of the nation’s busiest fishing areas for ten weeks every year.
Despite what the well-financed environmental lobby would have you believe, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Final Environmental Impact Statement continually noted Pebble’s development would have no measurable impact on the fishing in Bristol Bay. Even if there is a catastrophic mine failure? No impact. That hasn’t stopped major environmental organizations from continuing to press for the Biden administration to permanently shut down the area from Pebble’s development.
So, unless Biden and his team are only joking about transitioning to “green energy,” they need Pebble open. Its potential deposit could yield as much as 56.9 billion pounds of high quality copper. With a 2016 study finding that the push to ‘go green’ will increase demand by as much as 350 percent by 2050, exhausting current reserves sometime between 2035 and 2045. And that study was written before Greta Thunberg and her Millennial militia started Tik-Tok campaigns on the urgency of doing something even more aggressive to combat the “climate crisis.” If you believe Greta, the Extinction Rebellion and others, without drastic change – including new copper development – that 2045 number looks exceptionally soon on the calendar.
Even overlooking the $1 trillion in estimated reserves and the $84 million Pebble would provide in royalties and taxes to the state of Alaska, with tens of millions more annually to local and federal governments, another reason America needs Pebble is for the jobs in the region. While the commercial fishing lobby touts the 14,000 full- and part-time work associated with the Bristol Bay fishery, most of the workers – and therefore, most of the money – is earned by those from outside of Alaska. According to a 2016 news article, over 80 percent of the Bristol Bay fishing permits are owned by non-area residents.
This region in my home state has some of the highest unemployment in the nation, and its indigenous population lacks opportunities to work near their lands. Without opportunities like Pebble, they are forced to move to larger cities and away from traditional and subsistence lifestyles. For all the talk from the Biden administration about systemic injustices against low-income and indigenous people, not aggressively moving forward with Pebble would show blatant hypocrisy. The mine has a local hiring requirement and would pay an average six-figure income for its nearly 1,000 person permanent workforce. In a borough with less than 2,000 residents total, Pebble would be a generationally changing job creator for my state.
Ultimately, the Biden presidency needs to realize that copper and other strategic metals are needed in much greater quantities in order to move its “green revolution” forward. It can either source them from America or from China, Russia, Afghanistan and its Taliban leadership and other unfriendly-to-the-US countries. Here’s hoping it sees through the rhetoric of the environmental left and the commercial fishing lobby and allows the Pebble Project to continue its path to development, economic opportunity and help for the “go green” movement.
In this case, Build Back Better aka BBB stands for Biden’s Blank Brain
Good luck at that. First thing Biden did in January was canceling permits for Oak Flat mine in Superior AZ.
The biggest coper deposits ever find on Earth!
And, by the way, if they let somebody mine the ore, it would have to be processed abroad. The existing smelters are booked for years to come and nobody would even try to open one new!
So instead of mining millions of tons of coal and oil, the Green kooks would have us mine millions of tons of rare earth metals, cobalt, and copper.
Some “green” transformation.
They have no intention whatsoever to make everything electric, we won’t need the copper. The Goal is, and always has been to abolish Oil for the masses and go back to horse and buggies, while the Ruling Class enjoys thier SUV’s and Jets
Oh, the really great geniuses will find some kind of superconductor medium that can conduct electricity at ambient temperatures, not just near absolute zero, and the distribution of power over long distances and within localities where it will be utilized will have absolutely minimal loss of the energy transmitted. Copper wires are one of the best metallic conductors of electricity, but even that element has a high percentage loss of energy compared to superconductors. Aluminum is a poor second behind copper, and most other metals have a far greater internal resistance.
But alas, ambient temperature superconductors, like perpetual motion and fusion power, shall remain far beyond the present level of technology.
So, go to the concept of many unconnected and diffuse power generation sources, powered by thorium-fueled molten salt reactors, and we shall have plentiful cheap power for centuries to come.
Oh, that is right, nobody wants cheap power, and certainly not plentiful. It has to remain scarce and expensive. Otherwise nobody will appreciate it.
I'll probably buy an EV next year, but only because I'm in a situation where it works for me. I don't recommend it for everybody. And I'll still put less demand on the grid because I've got a fairly large solar system. But again, a solar system isn't right for everybody. It's right for me because I have a metal roof (no need to remove the solar panels in 10 years to replace a shingle roof), I live in the south (lots of sunshine, and most of our power consumption is for A/C in the summer when we have even more sunshine), and my wife and I put around 200 miles per week on one car (not counting our every now and then use of a 2nd car when we run separate errands). Once I move my two gas appliances to electric, and 200 miles per week of our driving to electric, I estimate that our solar system will produce a little over 50% of all of our power consumption.
And even if you're in the same kind of environment I'm in, it's still not a good idea unless you're also in the same financial situation. Basically, there is a return on investment (ROI) for going solar and all-electric. But it's nowhere near the ROI of investing in simple mutual funds across many asset classes, especially if you get tax breaks on them (i.e. Roth IRA's, IRA's, Roth 401K's). So build up your wealth first. Mine and my wife's wealth is already at the point where I can almost retire, and will be high enough in plenty of time for me to retire in my late 50's. So I'm putting a tiny portion of our wealth into solar/all-electric to reduce the variability of our energy costs. The energy portion of my budget jumps a lot, with gas at the pump every now and then shooting up, the cost of natural gas on the commodities market being 130% more than it was this time last year, and our power rates going up.
So if you've got a fair amount of wealth already built up, you're budget conscious enough to hate making Big Oil, Big Natural Gas, and Big Power rich every time the Dims reduce the competitors of Big Energy, and you're in a natural environment where solar makes sense, then go solar. Going solar at the utility level never makes sense (Exhibit A: California, Exhibit B: Texas).
To hell with the Alaska salmon, halibut and crab fisheries. We need electric cars more than the food produced and the jobs provided. Just put an end to the entire economy and way of life in the region. Those people will be getting UBI anyway...
Bristol Bay - three months of plenty and purpose when the fish are running followed by 9 months of poverty, dependency, alcohol and suicide during the long winter!
Pebble would provide thousands of year round jobs that the people need to break the the cycle.
Copper mines apparently are good for salmon. The most expensive and quality fish, the copper river red, spawns in the tailings of the massive Kennicott mine near McCarthy.
And pollution you say, in 1912 the Katami Volcano erupted and covered the Bristol Bay Area with two and a half cubic miles of highly acidic ash. The lakes are still discolored by the ash fall and yet contribute to the millions of pounds at salmon produced there.
Whoever is controlling biden doesn’t care about “green energy.” They want power and control.
Whoever is controlling biden doesn’t care about “green energy.” They want power and control.
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