Assembly decision was short-sighted

To the editor:

I am so disheartened about the Mat-Su Borough Assembly voting down a resolution asking the state of Alaska to conduct a Comprehensive Health Impact Assessment on Usibelli’s proposed coal mine across from our Ya Ne Dah Ah School.

I read in the Grist News that some executives are sitting atop pyramids that are black with coal, but they recognize that coal’s era has ended. Coal has been artificially cheap for a long time; new pollution standards that make coal pay for its health effects are just one effort to fix that problem.

Also, the water problem is a big one — and is largely due to climate change that the power plants themselves contributed to.

The New York Times notes that, in addition to making water scarce, global warming will warm existing bodies of water used to cool power plants — meaning they’ll be less efficient in power production.

Mother Jones described a real “possibility of the ocean becoming a vast, fetid grey zone, not quite dead but no longer able to provide a significant amount of food to humanity. And not in some unimaginably distant future, but rather in just four short decades, around the time when your aughts-era infant will reach middle age.”

The shortsightedness of too many of our assembly members, who don’t seem to realize or care how their decisions will affect their grandchildren and future generations, greatly saddens me.

Patricia Wade

Tribal Citizen of Chickaloon Village