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The Interior Department is writing new regulations for mountaintop-removal coal mining that would expand protection for waterways and require the restoration of dynamited areas.
Christopher Holmes, spokesman for Interior's Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, said the agency is rewriting its "stream protection rule" to boost environmental safeguards.
The proposal being drafted, Holmes said, would:
* Establish a clear standard for restoring dynamited mountaintops. The 1977 Surface Mining Reclamation and Control Act requires that mountaintops be restored to their "approximate original contour," but defining the term has been left to individual states.
* Yank the right of state regulators to grant exceptions to the contour-restoration requirement. Federal authorities currently allow states to set their own standards for granting exemptions, and state standards vary widely.
* Set a federal definition for "material damage" to watersheds beyond permitting areas. The surface-mining law prohibits mountaintop-removal mines and other above-ground coal operations from damaging watersheds outside areas covered by mining permits, but the requirement has been difficult to enforce because "material damage" has never been defined.
* Require companies applying for mining permits to collect more information on the environmental health of watersheds where they intend to work and to monitor conditions during and after mining. Mines that inflict environmental damages beyond what is permitted would be required to change their operations or close.
* Clarify that seasonal streams and temporary streams are covered by the regulations, even when the streambed is dry.
The changes under consideration would apply to new applications for surface coal mining permits and would not apply to existing coal mines, Holmes said.
This is just one step in a long process as the new stream protection rule writing is on-going and far from final. The Office of Surface Mining is still working on the assessment of the proposal's environmental impact. OSM officials will be meeting with folks in impacted states over the next month for a round of feedback on the proposed rule changes.
The proposed rule is due for publication in February, 2011. Then a lengthy public review process occurs with a final rule update not due to go into effect until 2012.
I had the pleasure of attending the West Virginia Young Democrats State convention last weekend in Shepherdstown. The Environmental Caucus met, which got a lot of people renewing their thoughts about Mountain Top Removal (for brevity MTR). MTR has unfortunately plagued this state for a number of years, so I though that naturally there would be a general consensus that it was indeed a bad thing. For the most part I was right, but the idea was met with some opposition.
When expressing their dismay about MTR, one young fellow persisted to defend its importance to the state saying "we should all just accept it as a part of our state and the state's economy as a whole
Personally, I oppose MTR. It wreaks havoc across the state and is an environmental nightmare. Just ask the distinguished environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about it. He has visited the state on numerous occasions, championing the expulsion of MTR as a way of mining.
I realized after this brief encounter with an opposing view in the Democratic party arena, that maybe there isn't unanimous dissent of this mining method. I, however, still oppose MTR on the grounds of what it is doing to the state.
This is going to be a really hard one for the science-driven Obama EPA to ignore. They just announced new air quality standards in line with most recent smog science, now how will the EPA react to established water quality threats from mountain top removal?
Wow, Gov. Manchin comes across looking even worse than I expected in this video. Major kudos to the activists who handled themselves so well in this exchange.
"We want to do everything. We're committed to attracting wind farms and attracting solar farms. We're looking at all of that."
Gov. Manchin, let me humbly suggest that reading up just a wee little bit on the Coal River Mountain project might just help "trying (to) find a balance."
It's quite worrisome that Gov. Manchin views West Virginia as an "extractive state." If he widened his view just a little, at least thinking of W.Va. as an energy producing state--that would open up avenues.
Otherwise, you might want to read up on the resource curse some more, Gov. Manchin. If you are going to define our economy on the basis of extraction, there's a lot of negative consequences.
And, really, there's nothing wrong with being the Mountain State. There's a lot of great things you can do with Mountains. You can generate wind power, distributed small scale hydro, create beautiful tourism opportunities (including white-water rafting), and provide a wild, wonderful place to live.
Update: See below the fold for a statement from Climate Ground Zero on today's action.
Data from the Kentucky Division of Mine Permits show that development was planned for less than 3 percent of the land - amounting to less than 14,000 acres scheduled to be reclaimed for commercial, residential, industrial or recreational development, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported Sunday.
I agree with Erik Reece of Lexington, KY. It's time for a 'new deal' for Appalachia(h/t to va dare for the link):
A form of strip mining called mountaintop removal has ripped apart all of the ridgelines that surround this forest, leaving miles of lifeless gray plateaus, lunar wastelands. Mountaintop removal entails the blasting of entire summits to rubble in an effort to reach, as quickly and inexpensively as possible, thin seams of bituminous coal. Trees, topsoil and sandstone are dumped into the valleys below. More than 1,000 miles of streams have been buried in this way, and an Environmental Protection Agency study found that 95 percent of headwater streams near mines have been contaminated by heavy metals leeching from the sites.
When it comes to mountaintop removal, a certain fatalism seems to take hold in Appalachia -- the coal companies are too powerful, some politicians are corrupt, the regulators won't regulate and the news media don't care. But we cannot give up on rehabilitating Appalachia.
Erik Reece continues outlining not only the problems we face, but a hopeful future for new solutions as well.
Appalachia's land is dying. Its fractured communities show the typical symptoms of hopelessness, including OxyContin abuse rates higher than anywhere in the country. Meanwhile, 22 states power houses and businesses with Kentucky coal. The people of central and southern Appalachia have relinquished much of their natural wealth to the rest of the country and have received next to nothing in return.
To right these wrongs, first we need federal legislation that will halt the decapitation of mountains and bring accountability to an industry that is out of control. Then we need a New Deal for Appalachia that would expand the Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative, or create a similar program, to finally return some of the region's lost wealth in the form of jobs and trees, rebuilt topsoil and resuscitated communities.
Financing should come from a carbon tax on Appalachian coal bought and burned by utility companies across the country -- a tax that would also discourage the wasteful emissions of greenhouse gases. Such a project would educate and employ an entire generation of foresters and forest managers, who would be followed by locally owned wood-product industries and craftsmen like Patrick Angel's brother Mike, who makes much sought-after hardwood chairs just like ones his grandfather fashioned.
We know that our species, and most other species, will survive only in a future that burns no coal or oil. The question now is whether we have the nerve to get there before the world's oldest mountains are gone.
I couldn't agree more. Let's start investing financial resources in sustainable development. The extraction economy has been a disaster for this region--liquid coal is not the answer. Sustainable energy solutions are sustainable economic solutions.
Flickr photo credit: Erik Reece by Kentuckians For The Commonwealth
This post co-written by Mary Anne Hitt, Deputy Director of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign
Very big news out of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) this morning - the agency has determined that all 79 mountaintop removal mining permits submitted to them for review by the Army Corps of Engineers would violate the Clean Water Act. After eight long years of rubber-stamp permits being issued during the Bush Administration, this is one of the most dramatic and encouraging actions yet by the Obama Administration, and marks a welcome return of the rule of law to the coalfields of Appalachia.
Mountaintop removal - a devastating form of coal mining that involves blowing up mountains and dumping the former mountaintops into neighboring valleys, burying streams - is governed by a patchwork of laws and federal agencies. Permits to bury streams with mining waste are initially issued by the Army Corps of Engineers, but EPA has ultimate oversight and may veto Corps-issued permits if they fail to comply with the Clean Water Act.
American Electric Power thinks so. They have asked the Federal government for stimulus funds to help them buy the additional coal they need to burn once they start carbon capture and storage (CCS) in September at Mountainer Power Plant in New Haven, W.Va.
Unless AEP pledges to buy coal only from companies who mine underground, those Federal stimulus dollars will be going to perpetuate mountain top removal.
West Virginia Environmental Protection Secretary Randy Huffman's testimony in June at a congressional hearing on mountaintop removal has drawn a lot of comment, and even helped fuel a protest calling for his resignation.
It turns out that even some folks within Huffman's own agency were none too happy with his staunch defense of the coal industry before a hearing of a Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee.
Behind the scenes, a respected biologist at the WVDEP's Division of Water and Waste Management responded with a strongly worded memo that challenged Huffman's statements and urged agency officials to make sure the secretary "will be better informed the next time he represents our agency's current state of knowledge to federal authorities and elected representatives."
There's a real management issue over at the West Virginia Dept. of Environmental Protection that Secretary Huffman did not have accurate information before his Senate testimony (and hadn't even seen the corrective memo today).
Sec. Randy Huffman is in quite a pickle now. He's either incompetent at running an agency that requires the free-flow of scientific information or he committed perjury in his Senate testimony.
It is a real embarrassment to the state of West Virginia that a major state government agency is in danger of federal takeover for mismanagement.
Ken Ward, Jr. reported the news yesterday over at Coal Tattoo. Patriot Coal Corp. is idling a large MTR site, resulting in 314 layoffs. Ken Ward, Jr. points out this is not just any mining location:
The first time I went there, it was called the Red Warrior Mine, named for the Cabin Creek community where it was located. That was 15 years ago, April 1994. Then-owner Arch Mineral Corp. was still assembling the dragline shovel it brought in from a mine in Illinois.
At nearly 2,300 acres, the Red Warrior permit was easily the biggest strip-mining permit ever issued by West Virginia regulators. In 1994, Arch renamed the operation the Samples Mine, after company Chairman Ronald Eugene Samples. Samples had been instrumental in Arch Coal buying the property from Lewisburg coal operator Lawson Hamilton in 1989.
[snip]
Since that first permit, the operating company Catenary Coal has received permits for more than 10,000 more acres in the area. Just about two weeks ago, WVDEP Secretary Randy Huffman approved the latest permit, a 276-acre one called the "N-Extension."
As much as any mining operation in Appalachia, the Samples Mine has been at the center of the debate over mountaintop removal. In large part, that's because parts of it are visible from a public road far up Cabin Creek and from Larry Gibson's family cemetery at Kayford. Photos from Larry's place have appeared in news media around the world (including the masthead of Coal Tattoo).
This closure is all about economic conditions, not environmental ones.
While coal industry supporters would probably love to jump on the Samples closure as an example of how environmentalists or the Obama administration are hampering surface mining in the country, Patriot officials did not mention in their announcement any problems the company has had getting needed permits to continue at the site. As I mentioned, the company had just received one new permit, and no permits for Samples appear on the lists of Clean Water Act authorizations that the Obama EPA wants to look at more closely.
No matter what the reason, a mass layoff of 314 employees is troubling and will be very difficult for those laid off, their families, and the communities that rely their coal mining income.
For example, the pain of commenter Brandon at Coal Tattoo is very real:
Brandon { 08.03.09 at 6:38 pm }
Well, I am jobless now. I know this website and newspaper will spin the story saying environmentalists had nothing to do with it. I beg to differ. Each time the environmentalists come up with another mineral that's not "up to standard" in the downstream water, or a new regulation, this costs the companies money. Ken, not to long ago I mentioned that the environmentalists, including you, had a big push for selenium regulation. You guys have te DEP regulating the amount so low that the streams coming off of a mine site have to have a significant lower selenium level than our drinking water, plastic bottles or tap water. So, that is another example, enviro-extremists put fish before people. These jobs that were just lost are at least $75,000/year salaries. That is someone that didn't work a lot of overtime.
I'm sure the Sierra Club, OVEC, etc. will claim victory for this shut down, but don't doubt the fight has just begun. Now, us mountaintop removal guys have time to be like the members of these extreme environmentalist groups and can go protest, have gaterings, and so forth in support of this practice of mining. I challenge anyone to find jobs that pay $24.10 an hour to guys that are 40-60 years old without a high school diploma. Further yet, what about the guys that just graduated high school, where are they going to find a job that pays this good. Oh yea, I'm pretty sure GE or any other "green companies" can't pay this, being they don't have a plant in WV. Oh well.
So, keep it up, maybe you can get more mountaintop removal sites shut down and knock families out of their jobs that won't be replaced by "green" jobs.
I did my best to respond, but really, I don't think there's any words I could offer that would be of much help to ease his pain.
Clem Guttata { 08.03.09 at 7:24 pm }
Brandon, I am very sorry for the loss of your job. It really stinks to get laid off. No doubt that is going to be a huge adjustment for you and everyone else at the site who got notice today.
It's too late for me to offer advice about saving up money for an inevitable rainy day or anything like that. All I can say is you have been very blessed to have such a high paying job-I can't think of anywhere else in the country where jobs that pay that well are commonplace for workers without a high school diploma. (That's the reality of life in today's economy and it does indeed suck. There were more jobs in this country when Pres. Bush took office then 8 years later when he left; at least today we have a President who is making job creation a priority.)
I can't help but think the people to get angry at, though, are not environmentalists. The people to angry at are company owners and Wall Street bankers who are taking home huge bonuses even as banks and corporations continue to lose money. They are the ones grabbing a bigger and bigger slice of revenues and leaving the rest of us with crumbs.
The environmentalists I talk to are actively trying to bring good jobs to Appalachia. You are right, not all those jobs are going to pay as well as coal mining sometimes has. But, as you well know, those coal mining jobs have been disappearing for several decades (even when environmental rules were pretty much ignored). The coal mining jobs are going to go away one way or another-cleaner, safer, steadier work would at least be something.
The big question is if West Virginia is going to act in time to attract any green jobs before they all go elsewhere.
Meanwhile, I sincerely hope that you and everyone else that has been working at that site get put to work as soon as possible with remaining restoration work. That's a project that would make all of us happy.
The entire Coal Tattoo post (including Ken Ward, Jr's comment on selenium) are well worth reading. Also check out an earlier (brief) announcement with an extended discussion of reclamation obligations.
Image credit: Dennis Dimick via James Bruggers - Watchdog Earth
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