Sunday, March 29, 2009
Mountaintop removal gets more scrutiny
Dan Radmacher
Recent columns
- Kaine saw much progress in his four years
- Virginia voted for gridlock on Tuesday
- Project Vote Smart tries to educate Virginia voters
- America should listen to this Cassandra
From the RoundTable blog
An announcement last week by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regarding increased scrutiny of mountaintop removal mining permits provoked both more celebration and more angst than it deserved.
While citizens groups that have been fighting mountaintop removal cheered, the National Mining Association warned that the announcement "puts thousands of mining jobs and coal production in Appalachia at risk."
The announcement did not mean, as both friends and foes of the practice initially claimed, that the Obama administration was putting a moratorium on new mountaintop removal permits.
Instead, the EPA announced an initiative to more closely scrutinize permits issued by the Army Corps of Engineers before their final approval to ensure they comply with the federal Clean Water Act, a long overdue action.
As Joe Lovett, director of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment, told Ken Ward Jr. of the Charleston Gazette, "This is the Obama administration reversing the past eight years. It is really a positive development."
I've been following the controversy over mountaintop removal for well over a decade now. Tuesday's announcement by the EPA is far from the most profound development, but it does offer hope that Washington will play a larger role in watching over the mountains, streams and valleys of states like Kentucky, West Virginia and, to a lesser extent, Virginia.
As Ward noted in his Coal Tatoo blog (tinyurl.com/cxeqkc), EPA's announcement in many ways simply turns the clock back to late in the Clinton administration when the federal agency started exerting more authority over both the Corps' permits and state permits to attempt to limit the size of the valley fills associated with mountaintop removal projects.
That scrutiny, and a lawsuit over lax regulations, eventually led to an agreement by the EPA, the U.S. Department of the Interior and other federal and state agencies to conduct an in-depth study of the cumulative environmental impact of mountaintop removal mining and valley fills on water quality and fish and wildlife resources.
Unfortunately, before that study was completed, President Bush took office. His administration twisted the focus of the study to "centralizing and streamlining coal mine permitting."
An opportunity was lost, though perhaps not forever.
Mountaintop removal mining results in environmental destruction on an almost unimaginable scale.
If you've never seen a mountaintop removal site -- either an active one or one that has been "reclaimed" -- you should go online to view some of the many pictures available. The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition has an excellent collection at tinyurl.com/2cukpb.
Entire mountains are stripped of trees, blasted into rubble and then shoved into nearby valleys, burying miles of streams.
It is difficult to fathom that such activity could fail to violate the Clean Water Act. The industry position, supported by the conservative 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, essentially claims that the small amounts of sludge and debris that might leak from a sediment pond at the bottom of a valley fill are subject to regulation by the EPA, but huge amounts of dirt and debris that actually bury and destroy a stream are not.
The late U.S. District Judge Charles Haden, in one of many key rulings overturned by the 4th Circuit, tried to convey the sense of scale when he wrote that "valley fills are waste disposal projects so enormous that, rather than the streams assimilating the waste, the waste assimilates the stream."
Obama definitely sounds more willing to take a serious look at mountaintop removal mining than Bush, who stocked the Interior Department and other important environmental agencies with former coal executives.
During a meeting with reporters from the Louisville Courier-Journal and other regional newspapers, Obama said, "This is one of those things where I want science to help lead us. I will tell you that there's some pretty country up there that's been torn up pretty good."
If Obama lets the science and law lead administration policy, there may yet be reason for true celebration by those appalled by the ongoing devastation.
Radmacher is the editorial page editor of The Roanoke Times.
