How
do you revive an almost ghost town in remote Alaska? Ask the 20 residents of
Red Devil who are betting on Donlin mine.
Krysti Shallenberger, Alaska’s Energy Desk, October 2, 2019
Rebecca Wilmarth can see the empty school building across her lawn in Red Devil, Alaska. It shut down in 2009, and for a while, willows and alders shrouded it from view. Wildland firefighters recently cut them back to reveal a brown building with blue trim. For a place that’s been abandoned for ten years, it appeared in remarkably good shape. For Wilmarth, it’s a symbol of what was lost after the Red Devil mercury mine shut down in the 1970s. “It was like a domino effect of things that made this place so deserted. The school closed. Families had no other option but to relocate or send their kids somewhere else.” Wilmarth said. Red Devil is a tiny town with about 20 remaining residents. A mercury mine that built the town used to operate 3 miles away. But once it shut down, people started leaving for other jobs. Now Red Devil has no health clinic and no store. It doesn’t have a tribal council or city government. A handful of residents are fighting to get basic services back.
Related:
This old Alaska mining town is almost a ghost town. It has everything to gain from Donlin mine
Capitalism Is What Really Worries Global Warmists and Fractivists
Robert P. Murphy, Natural Gas Now, October 2, 2019
Capitalism, and revulsion to it, is at the heart of the opposition to oil and gas development by today’s global warmists and fractivists. They’re wrong. Presumably bolstered by the fiery claims of Greta Thunberg and the general theme of Climate Week, people on Twitter have been declaring that capitalism threatens humanity. This angst rekindled interest in a Guardian article that ran a few months ago, in which author George Monbiot argued that the very nature of capitalism is “incompatible with the survival of life on Earth.” Not only do such claims ignore the obvious progress of humanity staring us in the face—and the environmental activists are supposed to be the empirical ones in this debate—but even if Monbiot’s worries about the climate were correct, capitalism would still be the best social system to deal with the crisis.