On day one, the 46th President was stupid enough to kill the Keystone pipeline! He also depleted the Strategic Petroleum Reserve!
The 46th President harmed US energy independence and mining operations in several more ways! Reckless and irresponsible!
I blogged about the 46th President's legacy here.
"... on June 27, it ignored the administration’s glaring contradictions in its climate policy. The day after the debate, the Interior Department squelched the last hopes of the proposed Ambler Road project in northwest Alaska.
Denying the construction of the Ambler Road blocks off a wealth of minerals needed for the administration’s clean-energy agenda. Mining proposals across the U.S., including Twin Metals and PolyMet in northeast Minnesota, have faltered because of the administration’s opposition to any development of natural resources. But if Biden — or a potential Harris-Walz administration — wants to do more than virtue-signal its green ambitions, it needs to promote domestic mining.
The Ambler Road would have spanned 211 miles in Alaska’s Northwest Arctic Borough and unlocked access to significant deposits of cobalt, copper, lead, silver, and zinc. Building the road and its proposed mines would create almost 5,000 direct and indirect jobs. Even the most promising potential mine would produce 149 million pounds of copper, 173 million pounds of zinc and 26 million pounds of lead — annually.
The other three potential mines have no estimates available because it is extremely difficult to explore and plan for a mine without a road to access the area. The Interior Department doesn’t seem to understand this chicken-and-the-egg problem, based on one reason it listed for denying the road: “There are no active mines in the area and no mine plan proposals pending before the federal government.” ...
Alaska’s Pebble Mine, a proposed copper mine in Bristol Bay, was vetoed by Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in January 2023 by a little-used section of the Clean Water Act (Section 404(c)).
In Alaska, 28 million acres were put off limits to oil, gas, and mining exploration in 2024, adding to the nearly half of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska that was put off limits in 2022. The administration also revoked leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) that were specifically intended for oil and gas exploration. It seems the administration would prefer it if western states were enormous nature preserves fully dependent on tourism.
But why should Minnesotans care about what happens in the remote corners of the Alaskan tundra? Minnesotans face the same indecisive flip-flopping that deters investment and hurts local economies. In January 2022, the Biden administration thoroughly derailed development of the Twin Metals mine, planned in the Duluth Complex in northeastern Minnesota, by canceling two federal mineral leases in the Superior National Forest. Twin Metals estimates its mine would create 750 direct jobs and 1,500 jobs within the local community.
The canceled leases flip-flopped the Trump administration’s 2017 decision to reinstate the leases and renew them for 10 years. Mr. Trump’s actions were themselves a reversal of an Obama administration decision to deny the lease renewal application in 2016. The future of Twin Metals is now also jeopardized by a 20-year mining moratorium on 225,000 acres in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness ..."
Caveat: I did not read the entire, long article.
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