Baptists and bootleggers: Wilderness pilot opposes roads

There’s a big fight in Alaska about whether to build a road so that the mining companies can better get people, supplies, and copper to and from a remote mining site.Lobbying against this road are some locals, some environmental groups, and an airplane pilot who currently makes money by ferrying people and equipment across this very terrain, where there are no roads.Yes. The guy you need to hire because there are no roads is one of the guys lobbying against the road. This detail was almost buried in this excellent Bloomberg investigative piece on the Ambler Road project. The most important part of the Ambler Road story is how the Trump administration is using its regulatory control over this area to extract concessions from a mining company.The pilot-lobbyist detail was the second-most interesting story. It’s a classic case of Baptists and bootleggers.The bootlegger is the guy who profits from delivering a product amid constraints, wants to keep the constraints, and so he teams up with the Baptists, who have more moralistic reasons for supporting the constraints — in this case, the environmentalists.Here are the relevant passages from the Bloomberg piece:“More than most, Dirk Nickisch has a deep knowledge of the Ambler Mining District and how the road will change it. A few times a week, Nickisch flies along the Ambler Road as the co-owner of Coyote Air LLC, delivering tourists throughout the Brooks Range and resupplying camps in the area….WHEN A CONGRESSMAN IS HITTING ON HIS STAFFERS, IT’S WORSE WHEN HE’S MARRIED“Sometimes, Coyote Air restocks mining camps, helps fix mining helicopters and transports seasonal workers for mining outfits, an uneasy alliance given Nickisch and his family are staunchly opposed to the Ambler Road’s construction. ‘We’ve always taken that money, and then we’ve used it to lobby against the road,’ he says. ‘It’s kind of, you know, blood money. So it has to go to the right thing.’”Yes it’s an “uneasy alliance,” because Nikisch is lobbying to raise his customer’s cost, just like anyone who tries to use big government to limit competition.