The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
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Given the fluidity of the presidential contest, it may not be premature to dust off our hip pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution and worry about what happens if neither of the contenders gets the requisite 270 electoral votes to become the forty-fifth president. The road to 270 votes, at the moment, depends upon whether Mrs. Clinton can hold on to all the solidly blue states, plus most of the left-leaners. Today, Florida (with 29 electoral votes) is a tie. Six others, Ohio (18...
It has been a long time since I took high school civics, so it is easy to understand how things may have changed. However, one of its precepts that has served me to this day is the idea that there was a significant difference of opinion among our founding fathers as to whether the newly-formed nation should be a democratic or a republican form of government. (Please note the absence of capital letters.) Democracy was advanced as a way to allow the people to rule through a...
Recently, an interesting question about AS 38.05.275 came to my attention, and it seems to have implications for a number of holders of federal claims situated within State of Alaska-selected land. The statute allows an Alaska mining location to be placed on top of an unconveyed valid federal mining claim situated within a selection. Until the federal claim is abandoned or declared invalid, the overstaked Alaska claim is "at risk" and conveys no rights to the locator, except...
In 1831, 26 year-old French lawyer Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United State [sic] of America for about 10 months and returned to his homeland to write the seminal "Democracy in America" wherein he described the experimental democratic republic for the benefit of his European peers. His masterpiece is a fountainhead of observations and concerns and it advances prescience reminiscent of Michel de Nostradame (a/k/a Nostradamus). On the one hand, Tocqueville seemingly...
On March 28, 2016, six days after the U. S. Supreme Court rendered its unanimous opinion in the matter of "Sturgeon v. Frost," I offered testimony before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on behalf of the Alaska Miners Association. My testimony concerned six specific statutory recommendations for resolving many of the ongoing issues Alaskans are laboring under as the result of wrong-headed interpretations by the four major federal land-managing agencies...
God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. [T]he tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. - Thomas Jefferson, 1787 For openers, it appears that neither of the leading contenders for the presidency of the United States has identified any significant positions on the development of natural resources on public lands. Sen. (Hillary) Clinton, D-NY, it may be presumed, will emulate her predecessor and casually...
I do love metaphors and aphorisms; there's one for every occasion. For instance, it is often noted that, on the one hand, it is always darkest before the dawn and, on the other, that the light at the end of the tunnel is another train. It would be folly to believe that in today's environment, things will be better, economically, in Alaska, any time soon; however, experience teaches that the current disaster will, like all others, one day pass. Here's the scenario: Alaska is a...
I believe that the earth is warming; I believe that the sea level is rising; I believe that climate change is at least partially due to anthropomorphic activities such as burning wood around a campfire; I believe that the earth has been warming consistently since the last global maximum, about 12,000 years ago. I believe that cow flatulence and the melting of permafrost emit methane and probably other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere; I believe that if people who live...
Although not strictly a mining case, John Sturgeon's challenge to the National Park Service's regulation banning private hovercraft on the rivers in the Yukon-Charley Preserve goes to the heart of the perpetual question Alaskans have concerning access across federal lands. On Oct. 1, the Supreme Court of the United States granted Sturgeon's petition for certiorari. The grant of "cert" is noteworthy in and of itself because the high court grants certiorari to only a small...
"Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men? It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again! When the beating of your heart echoes the beating of the drums There is a life about to start when tomorrow comes!" - The People's Song, Les Misérables Perhaps it is premature to foster hope for revolution; however, it has long been my view that, in the wonderful world of political "science" (as if there is a science to politics), left and right are not a...
The famous quotation by Rahm Emanuel: "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that, it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before" is entirely fitting for Alaskans, and perhaps the nation, to ponder this week. At last check, the price of sweet crude was in the $44 per barrel range, gold was about $1,108 per ounce and copper was $2.32 per pound, more or less. For Alaska, as dependent as it is on revenue from resource development,...
A brief survey of the history of mankind suggests that most communities were organized around the successful exploitation of nearby natural resources. More "civilized" city-states were able to collectively develop the available resources with efficiencies that generated surpluses. Such efficiencies required a class of leaders, which, in many instances, favored the ambitious. Ambitious leaders, when they gained control of metals, were able to expand their aegis by conquest. As...
On May 29, 2015 the Alaska Supreme Court handed down two opinions relating to the Pebble Project: The first reversed the Superior Court's holding in Nunamta Aulukesti, et al, v. State, et al, regarding the revocability of Miscellaneous Land Use Permits, or MLUPs, and the second reversed the lower court's award of costs and attorney's fees against the plaintiffs in the Nunamta case. If obfuscation is integral to the stereotype of the legal profession, certainly the Nunamta and...
After six years of lackluster performance under the leadership of Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., Congress now appears poised to seize the initiative and rein in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's ambitious assertion of jurisdiction over the waters of the United States. The EPA has long used the Clean Water Act as a federal zoning tool and implicitly asserted jurisdiction over virtually everything that is wet, ever has been wet or ever will be wet. In Alaska, because...
Environmentalists are often perceived as watermelons (Green on the outside and Red on the inside) by the business community because of their total disregard of the social costs associated with their advocacy. Certainly, it seems fundamental that they freely embrace fiscal impact in their guerilla attacks; however, implying that they are committed Communists overstates the motivation of all but the most extreme individuals. For me, the definition of a Communist is someone...
For some time I have been musing about the global warming/climate change conundrum because, as is often the case, the proselytizers are so strident in their conviction. To question their rhetoric is tantamount to heresy. Unfortunately, there are more than a few problems in my mind with the thesis. In the first instance, it must be conceded, I think, that there have been ice ages on Earth for eons, and they have been interrupted by sequential warming trends. Within the most...
The Governor has stripped the state's Public Access Assertion and Defense Unit from the fiscal 2015 budget, potentially jeopardizing several programs critical to resources development in Alaska. Access to remote locations has long been a critical issue, first due to a lack of infrastructure, then due to the manpower demands of two World Wars in the Twentieth Century. Ultimately, as metals prices began to build, and funding for exploration became available, vast treasures were...
The following summary overview of the history of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was presented at the Alaska Miners Association Convention held in Anchorage earlier this month as part of the celebration of the association's 75th anniversary. The history of ANCSA is rooted in the occupancy of Alaska by Russia in the early 18th century. The Russian authority in Alaska was first decreed in 1766 when the Russian government declared the natives of Alaska to be Russian...
With the Ebola scare and the ISIS incursions dominating the international news and the various races for control of the Senate sucking all of the air out of the room domestically, it is easy to lose sight of the serpent slithering across America hissing and rattling and threatening to wreak destruction on all who would get in its way. The snake in the woodpile is the Environmental Protection Agency, and its current insidious objective is to leverage its dominion over all land...
All the rhetoric in the world will not be sufficient to mobilize the electorate to get off its collective derrière and fulfill its sacred duty to vote, unless the subject matter strikes a personal chord. I am mindful of the recent plebiscite in the United Kingdom where the question was up or down of whether Scotland should cease to be a part of Great Britain. Well over 80 percent of the eligible voters actually cast their ballots, and in some jurisdictions the vote...
The recent dam breach at the Mount Polley Mine in British Columbia has precipitated a bit of consternation among the Pebble Project watchers on both sides of the issue. Predictably, the naysayers have adopted an "I told you so" response, as if there are relevant similarities between what was constructed at Mount Polley, on the one hand, and anything that might be installed at a future mine at Pebble on the other; while the supporters of Pebble although mourning the event,...
I have long mused over the difference in how people solve problems. Every time we are confronted with an election, the debate resurfaces. One would suppose that individuals trained in analytical thinking would be inclined to reach conclusions lineally, consistent with the Socratic syllogism in which conclusions are based upon facts. In the course of my career, I have long dealt with individuals who are trained in the "hard" sciences, such as geologists and engineers. They tend to base their judgments on the thesis that "if...
I have often mused about why the mining industry is held in such disdain in the United States today. It wasn't always that way. When I was a child, the mining industry was the subject of song and saga, and before that, there was the day when the incessant stamp mills of mines like the A.J. in Juneau were the sound of a full lunch pail. People respected hard work and knew intuitively that basic industries were from whence our raw materials evolved into consumer goods that made...
The Spring Conference of the Alaska Miners Association was held in Fairbanks last week at a new location. The fact that the conference was held in a larger facility and was very well-attended verifies that despite the ongoing assaults the industry is experiencing, there is no shortage of optimism in the field. The trade show boasted over 130 vendor booths and the overall registration well-exceeded 300. A significant part of the discussions related to the future of the Pebble...
On March 13, 2014, Gov. Parnell released a report of Special Counsel Brent Cole on the federal Criminal Compliance Investigation conducted in the Fortymile mining district between Aug. 19 and Aug. 23 last year. The report is not lengthy and is available on the Internet for all to review. To be clear, the report found no evidence of criminal misconduct on the part of the investigators. But the report does underscore and lay bare a significant problem with the way the...
