It won’t be too easy to save the Stikine. The Red Chris Mine was owned by the Newcrest Corporation that was bought in 2023 by the Newmont Corporation. Newcrest was only founded in 1990. Four years ago Newmont bought the Canadian Goldcorp and became a very large corporation. Newmont has returned nearly 7 billion dollars to investors in the past several years. It is the world’s largest gold mining corporation; a multi-national corporation listed on the N.Y.S.E.
The Stikine River king salmon return is estimated to be just 10,000 fish this year. The run used to be millions of fish. The Red Chris Mine about 60 miles away on a tributary of the Stikine, located in a rain forest, is a large open pit copper mine with low grade ore. The corporation wants to expand the mine drilling tunnels horizontally underground and blow them up to sort through the debris. When water runs through the mining channels and demolished rocks it leaches toxic chemicals into waterways eventually.
I have the impression that those large mining corporations typically sell off depleted mines to some foreign shell company. The very rich harvest the profit and leave the cleanup to the E.P.A. and Superfund sites occasionally. The cost of cleaning up the Stikine someday if worst cases develop like that of Leadville Colorado and Helena Montana could be billions. With the E.P.A. being cut there may be fewer dollars for the work. In the future maybe governments will increase funding to cleanup depleted mining sites.
Gemini described a shell company; “A shell company, or a single-purpose entity, is a legal entity with minimal or no active business operations. Large corporations often use them to sell companies with ecological liability, such as mining companies, to limit their own exposure to potential lawsuits or fines. This is done to shield the parent company from liability for the actions of the subsidiary”
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