Senator Mitch McConnell Wants to Fast Track Mountaintop Removal Permitting With the Coal Jobs Protection Act

Not to be outdone by Joe Manchin, his Democratic colleague from neighboring West Virginia, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell announced plans to introduce a bill similar to Manchin's EPA Fair Play Act that would restrict the ability of the EPA to protect our land and water. In his press release, McConnell was joined by West Virginia GOP Representative Shelly Capito, who is introducing similarly worded legislation to the House of Representatives.

            McConnell’s “Coal Jobs Protection Act” would place time limits on the EPA’s approval process. Under the bill, the EPA would have 270 days, or slightly less than nine months, to grant Clean Water Act 402 water pollution permits. The agency would have a year’s time to conduct environmental assessments on proposed valley fills under the Clean Water Act’s 404 permitting process, something that the EPA estimates to take, on average, about three years. The proposed legislation goes on to say that, “Failure to act within that time frame for approval of a 404 permit would mean the application is approved, the permit is issued, and the permit can never be subject to judicial review.” In other words, McConnell wants hastily approved permits for mountaintop mines or they will automatically be approved by default. And after that, they cannot be questioned.

            The bill would also disable the EPA from regulating carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants.

            Unmentioned in the press release is the recent court victory that allowed the EPA to revoke the permit for the Spruce Mine No. 1 in West Virginia, but it does include figures on declining coal production in Kentucky, stating that in 2012 the state’s total coal production fell by over 16 percent and direct employment from coal mining fell by over 22 percent, with 4000 miners in eastern Kentucky loosing their jobs. Of course by including these figures in the press release McConnell implies that the EPA is somehow responsible for this lowered productivity and job loss, when it is in actuality the extremely low prices for natural gas that have industry abandoning coal.

Teaching Southern Californians About Southern California

I’m a member of the California Native Plant Society. I haven’t been a member very long, only about eight or nine years. As part of our outreach and education efforts for our local chapter, I lead hikes through some of our canyons and open spaces in which I explain to folks about the native flora and plant communities here. This past weekend I conducted a hike through Florida Canyon, a fairly well preserved native area in Balboa Park.

            I grew up in Appalachia, a place where, even if you didn’t eat them, everyone took note of the Mayapples, whose broad green leaves would blanket forest floors in early spring. In late summer we picked blackberries and in fall we would gather walnuts.

Besides the fruits and nuts that we would harvest and eat, most folks had some notion of the flora around them. It would be impossible not to notice the azaleas and dogwood trees blooming in springtime. And people had some idea of the oaks, sycamores, and elm trees growing around them.

San Diego is far different. We have two plant communities that are native to the coastal area where the city is, coastal sage scrub and coastal chaparral. Whenever people talk about these plants, if they talk about them at all, they are usually just called “brush.”

The landscaping around our houses and along our highways is all from somewhere else. We plant eucalyptus from Australia, iceplant from southern Africa, palms from the south Pacific and Mexico, and scores of other plants from the Mediterranean and South America. What we have made is some sort of international never-never land and is ubiquitous in our landscaped environment. It is possible to wake up in the morning, drive through your neighborhood, fight traffic on the freeway, and make your way to the office park where you work without seeing a tree or any other kind of plant native to southern California.

So for a lot of folks, even for people who have lived in southern California all or most of their lives, it can be an astounding eye-opener when I explain to them about the native sunflowers and sages that live in the canyons and open spaces around them. Many of them have never been up close and personal with their natural environment.

For southern Californians to be so cut off from our natural environment does have consequences. The average American uses about 90 gallons of water a day for cleaning, drinking, bathing, and other purposes. San Diegans use about 150 gallons a day, more than 65 percent more. Those 60 additional gallons that we use every day are used to water our lawns and nonnative plants that we have planted in our lawns and parks.

This water we ship in from hundreds of miles away. Half of our water comes from the Colorado, which is so overused and drawn upon that it usually dries up before it makes its way to its mouth in the Sea of Cortez. Also, shipping all that water takes effort. It’s estimated that 20 percent of the energy used in California is used to move water from one point to another, which has implications for energy security and climate change.

So folks join me on these native plant hikes. I hope they learn something and maybe appreciate their native environment. I hope that it somehow makes a difference.

Senator Joe Manchin Wants to Tie the Hands of the EPA by Reintroducing the EPA Fair Play Act

Earlier this week the U.S. District Court of Appeals handed West Virginia and the environment a victory when they ruled that the EPA could withdraw a previously approved Clean Water Act permit for the Spruce Mine No. 1, a permit for the largest such mine operation to be performed in West Virginia.

            In an unsurprising political move, West Virginia’s Democratic Senator Joe Manchin reintroduced the EPA Fair Play Act, Senate Bill 272. The summary of the bill reads thus:

EPA Fair Play Act - Amends the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (commonly known as the Clean Water Act) to remove the authority of the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to prohibit the specification of any defined area as a disposal site for discharges of materials into waters of the United States, or to restrict the use of any defined area for specification as a disposal site, once the Secretary of the Army has issued a permit for dredged or fill material.

To understand what is going on here, a little background on mountaintop removal is needed. Under the Clean Water Act, the Army Corps of Engineers is granted the authority to issue permits allowing for the discharge of pollutants or the placement of dredge and fill material into our nation’s waterways. Permits under section 404 of the Clean Water Act—intended to be used to allow the use of fill or dredge for the construction of levees, bridges, or other structures in or around water—are generally easier to get than 402 permits, which control the discharge of pollutants into lakes and streams. A court ruling that goes back over a decade established that the Corps can allow mountaintop removal operations to fill in valleys and streams with their waste material under 404 permits, as though these valleys and streams were somehow construction sites instead of dumping grounds.

            The ruling this week stated that the Administrator of the EPA has the authority “to deny or restrict the use of any defined area for specification (including the withdrawal of specification) as a disposal site “whenever he determines” the discharge will have an “unacceptable adverse effect” on identified environmental resources.” That is, the EPA, even though the Army Corps of Engineers has granted a 404 permit, can still determine that a valley fill would pollute or otherwise harm the environment and revoke the permit.

            So the EPA Fair Play Act would tie the hands of the EPA. No matter how bad a valley fill or other disposal of overburden might be, once the Corps issued a 404 permit, the EPA could do nothing to protect our rivers and streams.

            It is unsurprising that Joe Manchin, a strong supporter of the mining industry, would reintroduce this measure. West Virginia’s other Senator, Jay Rockefeller, supports the bill. He has at times stood his ground against King Coal, but in more recent years has grown friendlier to the industry. I imagine that this bill could get a lot of support in Congress, passing the Senate and House. We can hope that it receives a veto from president Obama.

Atmospheric CO2 Levels Soon to Pass 400 ppm

I have my clock radio set to KPBS, our local news station, and this story came on this morning right as I was trying to wake up. The Scripps Institute of Oceanography anticipates that the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere will begin to exceed 400 parts per million by next month.

            The polar icecap will not suddenly melt and Bangladesh will not be inundated with tidal floods on the day that the 400 ppm threshold is passed, but it does mean that the goal of keeping the global temperature from rising an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit will almost certainly be unmet. According to the campaign 350.org, established by author and activist Bill McKibben, scientists have estimated that 350 ppm of CO2 is the highest level of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration that will still allow the earth to avoid substantial harm from warming.

            The radio report talked to Ralph Keeling, who is carrying on the work of his father, Charles Keeling. Working through the Scripps Institute, the elder Keeling initiated the recording of atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa, Hawaii in 1958. Those initially recorded levels were at 316 ppm. According to the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, which handles climate change data and information analysis for the Department of Energy, the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1750, at the dawn of the industrial revolution and the mass use of fossil fuel, was 280 ppm.

            So we are passing the 400 ppm threshold; the whole world is passing the 400 ppm threshold. With our factories and automobiles we have raised the concentration of carbon dioxide by over 40 percent. It seems that this is news that should go beyond our local radio station.

            

The Keeling Curve from Scripps Institute of Oceanography

Good News For the Mountains: The EPA Can Revoke the Spruce Mine Permit

This is some great news! The U.S. District Court of Appeals has ruled that the EPA can withdraw a previously approved Clean Water Act permit for the mountaintop removal Spruce Mine No. 1. If there were to be any mine to get the thumbs down from the EPA, it should be this one, which would have been the largest such operation ever in West Virginia.

            More and more scientific evidence has been gathered showing a link between mountaintop removal and cancer, birth defects, and other health problems. And today the National Commission on the Health Impacts of Mountaintop Removal Mining, an independent group of physicians and scientists, has published a report that summarizes the findings of studies on the health effects of mountaintop removal and calls for congressional action that would place a moratorium on all mountaintop mining “until such time as health studies have been conducted that provide a clearer understanding of the associations between adverse health impacts, notably adverse reproductive outcomes, and MTR mining.” The paper, The Health Impacts of Mountaintop Removal Mining and sponsored by the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, recommends that the funding for further health studies should come from the corporations that have profited from mountaintop mining.

Scientists Discover That Mountaintop Removal Is Harmful to Appalachia

A new research paper takes a large and encompassing view of mountaintop removal and its effects on the land, ecosystems, and the rest of the world.

The authors of the paper, scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, Rider University, and West Virginia University, say that some past and current efforts, by focusing on water quality, both from a regulatory and legal framework, have lead to less research on mountaintop removal’s effects on forests and ecosystems. Titled The Overlooked Terrestrial Impacts of Mountaintop Mining, the paper has just been published in the journal BioScience.

Anyone who has spent much time in Appalachian knows that the mountains have always played a part in affecting the weather. Pocahontas County in West Virginia will get a lot more rain than areas east in Virginia, where the mountains aren’t as high. This new paper says that moving the mountains is affecting these weather patterns. “Topographic changes and land-cover changes associated with mountaintop mining have the potential to produce changes in climate at local to regional scales,” the paper says. “Modeling is needed to determine if the now extensive development of mountaintop mining is leading to such changes.” On a much larger scale, mature forests, which sequester carbon dioxide, are destroyed when mountains are flattened for coal. The reclaimed lands do not have the same capacity for sequestration. With more than 500 mountains succumbing to mountaintop removal, this disruption to the natural CO2 sequestration process of the Appalachian forests has implications for global warming.

            The authors also say that mountaintop removal causes damaging biographic fragmentation, affecting populations of raptors and songbirds. Back in 2006 scientists found that mountaintop mining was adversely affecting the cerulean warbler,[i] a wonderful songbird native to the Mid-Atlantic states that is “sharply declining in the heart of its range,” according to National Geographic’s Field Guide to the Birds of North America. A more recent scientific paper noted that mountaintop removal jeopardizes the survivability of Appalachian species as they shift their bioregions due to global warming.[ii] And another recent study found that the changes to habitat structure, water quality, stream chemistry, and the populations of macroinvertebrates in streams below the valleys filled with the overburden from mountaintop mines affected the abundance of salamanders in those streams.[iii]

            More and more the science shows that we are endangering and loosing great treasures, all so we can get cheap coal. Could we at least slow down long enough to ask if it is all worth it?

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[i] Wood, Petra Bohall, Scott B. Bosworth, and Randy Dettmers. "Cerulean Warbler Abundance And Occurrence Relative To Large-Scale Edge And Habitat Characteristics." Condor 108.1 (2006): 154-165. Environment Complete. Web. 19 Apr. 2013.

[ii] Beggs, Paul. "Horizontal Cliffs: Mountaintop Mining And Climate Change." Biodiversity & Conservation 21.14 (2012): 3731-3734. Environment Complete. Web. 19 Apr. 2013.

[iii] Wood, Petra Bohall and Williams, Jennifer M. “Impact of Valley Fills on Streamside Salamanders in Southern West Virginia” Journal of Herpetology 47.1 March 2013 119-125

Poll Finds Young Clergy Bucking Trend, Don't Believe in Global Warming as Their Peers Do

The results of a poll conducted by LifeWay Christian Resources, a Southern Baptist organization that specializes in Bibles, church literature, books, and music, finds that most pastors don’t believe in global warming.

            “I believe global warming is real and man-made,” was affirmed by 43 percent of pastors, a figure up from 36 percent in 2010 but lower than the 47 percent of respondents in 2008. The majority of pastors, 54 percent, disagreed with the statement. The number of those disagreeing with the statement was higher than in 2008 (48 percent). That figure was 60 percent in 2010.

            The demographics of the poll are unsurprising. GOP pastors denied global warming at a far greater rate than those identifying as Democrats (49 percent to five percent). Northeast pastors believe in global warming at a greater rate than their southern counterparts. Pastors in larger cities acknowledge global warming at a greater rate than pastors form small towns. Lutheran, Methodist, and other mainline Protestant ministers believe in global warming at a greater rate than Evangelical preachers.

            The survey results I found to be a bit surprising is that older pastors believe in global warming at a greater rate than younger pastors. The survey found that 32 percent of pastors 65 years and older believed in man-made global warming, while 20 percent of pastors 45-54 and 19 percent of the pastors between the ages of 18 and 44 believe in global warming.

            What is going on here? A Gallup poll on global warming from a year ago found that younger people are more worried about global warming than older folks. A PewResearch poll in 2009 found similar results. It seems that young pastors are bucking a generational trend.

            We can take part in a lot of armchair speculation here. The young persons going into the clergy, do they have a more conservative mindset than their peers? Is the training now being offered in seminaries and bible colleges shaping the worldview of their students as they train them in the spiritual guidance of their congregations? We can’t tell from the statistics of the poll, but this is a curious finding.

Update on Eradicating Algerian Sea Lavender at the San Diego River Estuary

Yesterday was one month since we had started our trials of differing eradication methods for the Algerian sea lavender that is plaguing the estuary at the mouth of the San Diego River.

An Algerian sea lavender infested plot one month ago before treatment

The solarization has yet to show any effects upon the Limonium ramosissimum underneath the black plastic cover. This is unsurprising, given that most solarization projects leave the solarization material in place for at least two months.

Limonium treated with solarization one month after being covered with plastic

One month later there is an apparent difference between the area in which the sea lavender was scraped away and the area where we pulled the weed out by hand. The regrowth of the sea lavender is slightly greater in the area that was scraped. Neither the hand pulled plot nor the scraped plot, however, have a great deal of regrowth, with less than five percent of the plot area taken up by the sea lavender. The regrowth of the native flora is about twice as great in the area that was hand pulled. So far it looks like hand pulling is more successful in getting rid of the sea lavender and promoting growth by natives. Stay tuned for more updates on the Algerian sea lavender.

A plot that was scraped of limonium one month after treatment

A plot in which the limonium was hand pulled one month after treatment

A Visit to Our Border Wall

I’m with my friend Jill. We’ve just spent the last 45 minutes driving on route 94, a winding two lane that climbs the mountains east of San Diego, and are now a few miles east of the small town of Campo. Besides a convenience store with a sign that says that it does NOT have a public restroom, there is not much to Campo. The big attraction here is a railway museum with an old depot and acres of old rail cars and engines. On weekends you can ride for several miles on some of their bygone trains. Next to the train museum is a Border Patrol station. The station has a big parking lot filled with white vans and trucks, all with the green stripe and lettering that says BORDER PATROL.

  Turning off the highway, we head south on a road called the Shockey Truck Trail. If Edward Hopper had painted southwest landscapes, they would have looked like this. Long driveways lead to modest two and three bedroom homes adrift on huge lots, their midwestern architecture contrasting with the austere landscape. About a mile in, the pavement gives way to a dirt road and the houses disappear. The reason we’ve chosen this route is that, according to the map that Jill has, Shocky Truck Trail heads south and comes within a hair of the US-Mexico border. We’ve come to see the border wall. Until the nineties there was no structure of any sort through this expanse of landscape and no way of telling if you may have wandered from the US to Mexico or vice versa.
          Coming up over a crest, a vista opens. The fitful breeze retains a midmorning chill and the smell of sage gives a sense that the landscape has just been scrubbed clean. We’re at about 3000 feet above sea level in the Peninsular Range, a swath of granite mountains that runs north northwest along the California coast. The range contains Mount Palomar, where the famous telescope is, as well as a few peaks that exceed 10,000 feet. In this region of the range the rough terrain comes to an end and stretches out in a relatively flat expanse with a few rolling hills, the sort of vista that might be featured in the opening scenes of many a 1950s western movie. Looming over us and trailing off to the east are high power lines, and we can hear a low constant electrical hum from the wires. We spy the border wall about a few hundred yards across the chaparral. A fence with private property and NO TRESPASSING signs keeps us from approaching the structure. Pulling out the binoculars, we get a glimpse of a white cross. Jill tells me that it’s a memorial to a Border Patrol agent who was killed out here a couple years ago.
          Within a few minutes of our arrival, a Border Patrol agent drives up in an enormous truck. Jill and I have walked the border down by Tijuana before, and from that experience we both know that if you’re anywhere near the border wall, Border Patrol agents will come up and talk to you. It’s their job to check out the few individuals they see out here. Also, their days must be plagued by long stretches of boredom. They probably just want to talk when they see someone. It breaks up their day. Like every other agent, this guy is one of the most pleasant persons you might ever meet. He lets us know that if we double back and take another dirt road off to our left we can get right up to the border and also get to the memorial.
          I’ve been expecting this feeling as we get close to the wall, but I’m still surprised by the degree of disquietude that comes over me. The Border Patrol, and for that matter, the rest of the government, calls this a fence, but it most certainly is a wall. It’s a deep rust brown and stands at about ten feet. The wall is made of army surplus plates of steel - 12 feet long, 20 inches wide, and 1/4 inch thick - that had been used to make landing strips in Vietnam during the war. Each mile of the wall uses over 3,000 of these panels. Every six feet, steel pipes that are buried eight feet into the ground hold the fence up. As though the wall has been visited by an obsessive compulsive tagger, all of the eight foot sections are numbered with spray paint, giving it an odd sort of slapdash inner city quality. About 62 miles of the border have this type of wall. The wall stretches off to the horizon. Its plumb line straightness is dizzying.

The border wall

Adjacent to the wall is a dirt road. Visually its’ impossible to separate the wall from the road. Following the two off in the distance, the image of the road dominates. For a dirt road it is wide and amazingly smooth. I assume that the Border Patrol wants the road smooth so they can hurry from point to point along its extent if they need to. Off to the side the eroded gullies lead into the landscape. Construction of this wall started in the early nineties as part of of Operation Gatekeeper, a Clinton era initiative that was spearheaded by Janet Reno. Depending on the source, Operation Gatekeeper was Clinton’s response to diffuse pressure from the right, while other sources say that it was Janet Reno, appalled by the conditions she found at the border, who initiated the program.
          This scene goes on all along the border with Mexico. Nearly 650 miles of additional fencing is up, and the numbers of Border Patrol agents exceed 17,600. At last count, four unmanned drones patrol from California to the Gulf of Mexico. there are probably more now. We tend to think of this as a Border Patrol operation, but besides the Border Patrol agents, 1200 National Guard soldiers are also stationed along the border. More than 450 camera systems monitor the area between the U.S. and Mexico.

  The landscape through which the wall passes here is chaparral. Most folks, even those who live in the chaparral, are confused as to what chaparral is. If you ever watched the 1960s television show High Chaparral, the landscape you saw was not chaparral. The series was shot outside Tucson in the Sonoran Desert, not a chaparral environment. If, on the other hand, you watched any of the Dukes of Hazzard, the 1970s TV show that took place in Kentucky, you’ve seen plenty of chaparral, as the action scenes were shot in the chaparral covered canyons around Los Angeles.

  Chaparral is not a plant, but a plant community, a designation like northeastern hardwood forrest or northwestern rainforest. Covering foothills and mountain slopes from the northern section of the Baja Peninsula all the way to the Rouge River Valley in Southern Oregon, chaparral is the most extensive plant community in California and its most characteristic wilderness.

          Through this area the most common plant you see is chamise, an evergreen that grows about six to seven feet high. Large fragrant sugarbush and ceanothus, now in bloom with blue flowers, dot the landscape. Nearly 900 species of plants occur in chaparral, among the plant communities with the highest in native plant diversity and has a greater number of rare and endangered species.

  It can also be fragile. Chaparral does not have great resiliency to bounce back from human interference. Nonnative species have a pretty easy time pushing out the native chaparral plants, too. The border wall and Mexican immigration through this section have implications for the chaparral. In one study of the five-year period after the start of Operation Gatekeeper in late 1994 “there were 772 meters of new trail created per 1,000 unauthorized immigrants, accompanied by 656 square meters of area disturbed per 1,000 immigrants, fifty kilograms of litter left behind per 1,000 immigrants, eleven illegal campfires per 1,000 immigrants, and 1.7 hectares burned by wildfires attributed to illegal immigrants.”

  We walk east a bit to find the memorial. Just like when we were kids playing on the farms, we limbo through the old barbed wire fence that parallels the wall about thirty yards north. For decades the demarkation between the two countries might only be an out or repair fence like this, or no barrier whatsoever. In the border area known as the “Soccer Field,” where there was no wall or fence, migrants would gather during the day by the hundreds. After dusk they would dash north in the darkness and hope for a more prosperous life. Like damming a river with a paper cup, the few Border Patrol agents assigned to this area at the time could do little to keep the migrants from passing into the United States.
  I’m surprised by the size of the cross, about 12 feet high, it occupies the center of a clearing the size of my front lawn. Flowers and photographs encircle the structure. Judging from the pictures, this was a young man who was killed, a guy in his twenties. A teenager from Mexico was convicted and sentenced to 40 years for his part in the crime. The remoteness just seems to make the memorial all the sadder.

  Under this cross, with only Jill and me here, it’s hard to believe that this huge wall is needed to control immigration. We certainly cannot go back to the days of the Soccer Field, and I do believe in some form of border security. But the costs—the billions of dollars, the scarring of the environment, and the lives lost—are too high.

Jill taking a photo of the memorial to the slain border patrol agent

SB 243: Keeping Fracking Under Wraps in West Virginia

It looks like West Virginia is following in the footsteps of other states like Pennsylvania with a new law that would place gag orders on doctors, nurses, and any other health professional who might be treating a person who has been sickened by the chemicals used in fracking. As with the Pennsylvania law, West Virginia’s Senate Bill 243 requires that a fracking operation disclose the constituents of their fracking mixture to a health care professional when such an individual requests that information. But the heath care professional cannot further disclose that information, event to the person who has been made ill by the fracking chemicals.

            SB 243 has passed the West Virginia Senate and is now before the West Virginia House Judiciary Committee. Like “Ag Gag” laws, this is just more help from governors and state houses to make dubious industry operations and practices opaque to the American public.

New Research Shows Irreversible Ecological Damage From Mountaintop Removal

“In many ways, this has been a disappointing effort.” With those words President Jimmy Carter summed up his feelings when he signed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) in 1977. Congress had passed two previous bills with better protections for the environment, but both had been vetoed by Gerald Ford while he occupied the White House. Carter felt that, owing to the influence of the coal companies that the law was designed to regulate, the legislation he signed that day had weaker provisions than the bills that received Ford’s veto. Carter’s greatest objection to the new law was that it allowed mining companies to blow up and remove entire mountains. We now call this mining process mountaintop removal.[i]

            In the 35 years since the passing of SMCRA, we have seen that Carter was correct to have his misgivings. This past week a group of scientists at a conference of the Ecological Society of American provided some of the first ecological scientific findings on mountaintop removal. The research sadly shows that the harm done to the ecosystems of Appalachia is irreversible. The damage that these scientists have found goes beyond the blown up mountains, from altered stream flows and flooding to reductions in bird populations.

            With mines so large that you can see them from space, it makes sense that there would be extensive ecological damage. Some of the scientists at the conference called for a moratorium on mountaintop mining to stem the damage. So far, the Obama administration has shown some inclination to give greater regulatory review of this destructive mining practice, but a moratorium seems quite unlikely.

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[i] “Carter Signs Strip-Mining Bill,” New York Times, 4 August 1977

The Coal Industry Initiates the Appalachian Research Initiative for Environmental Science. Should We Be Wary?

The coal industry has instituted the Appalachian Research Initiative for Environmental Science (ARIES), an organization involving multiple universities and whose stated goal is to “address the environmental impacts of the discovery, development, production and use of energy resources in Appalachia.” If the tobacco industry, cell phone manufacturers, the makers of lead paint, and the industries that find global warming to be an inconvenient truth for their bottom line provide us with any past experience to draw on, science and getting to the truth about environmental impacts may not be a top priority with this new endeavor.

            ARIES is headquartered at Virginia Tech, where Michael Karmis directs the Center for Coal and Energy.  When ARIES was launched a year ago Kamis said that, “the coal industry, at least in the USA, is under major attack” by the government, the press, and NGOs. Supporting his assertion, he cited “unreasonable regulations” based on “questionable science,” “false assertions,” and self-serving interests.”  He called EPA water quality standards for surface mining “arbitrary” and not enforced “in an equitable manner.”

            Does this guy sound impartial when it comes to environmental research?

            On the ARIES website, their Research Bulletin No 1 disputes the use of conductivity, the ability of water to carry an electric charge, as an indicator of water quality in some Appalachian streams. High conductivity usually indicates that the water has high concentrations of nitrates, sulfates, magnesium, or other substances considered to impair the ability of a stream to support life or to be suitable for drinking. While testing for conductivity will not specify which of the inorganic solids are in the water, measuring conductivity is easily done and inexpensive. It is thus used a lot for water quality monitoring. Their second research bulletin is one designed to cast doubt on the recent scientific studies that found higher incidences of mortality for those who live in proximity to mountaintop mining.

            To keep selling cigarettes, the tobacco companies knew that they didn’t have to show that cigarettes were good for you. All they need do is to cast doubt on what independent research found, that cigarettes can give you high blood pressure, heart disease, and cancer. The research bulletins of ARIES don’t show the mountaintop mines improving the environment or the lives of Appalachians. They do, however, work to cast doubt on the prevailing science. That shadow of a doubt may not last forever, but it can give talking points to coal company executives and politicians friendly to King Coal. Attempts to rein in mountaintop mining can be staved off for years and years. And a lot of mountains can be flattened in that amount of time.

Three Years After the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster King Coal Still Rules

Three years ago today 29 coal miners died in an explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in southern West Virginia. Two other miners were seriously injured.

            In the three years since the disaster, King Coal still rules, and it is more of the same for the people and miners of West Virginia. Laws to reform mine safety were passed by the West Virginia legislature in 2012. The laws were considered to be weak by many safety experts, and even these weak standards have not been fully implemented. Though Barack Obama spoke at the miners’ memorial, his administration has done nothing to improve mine safety. Congress had the time for lengthy hearings over the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, but there have been no hearings for the lives of the 29 miners.

            The Mine Safety and Health Administration has implemented more than half of the 100 recommendations it received after the disaster and are on track to take action on the remaining recommendations. That might be some good news, but the sequestration is forcing the Labor Department to disband a legal team that had been assembled to improve mine safety. Health and safety regulations for anthracosis (black lung) have also become lax. Of the 31 victims of the Upper Big Branch disaster, autopsies and medical examinations showed that 22 of them had evidence of the disease.

            In his recent book, Combating Mountaintop Removal: New Directions in the Fight Against Big Coal, American University assistant professor of anthropology Bryan T. McNeil compares the economics and politics of West Virginia to that of a banana republic. Indeed, an independent investigation and report done through Wheeling Jesuit University on the Upper Big Branch mine disaster found that Massey Energy, the company that owned and ran the Upper Big Branch mine, used its influence to run West Virginia as a fiefdom, essentially using the state an extension of the coal company.

            Although a disaster on the scale of that of the Upper Big Branch has not occurred in the last three years, miners continue to die on the job. They also get black lung. And with so little change for mine safety, another Big Branch disaster could be around the corner.

No-Fly Zone over Mayflower, Arkansas: Is the FAA Helping Exxon Mobile to Hide Its Oil Spill?

There is in place over the skies of Mayflower, Arkansas, a no-fly zone. Planes, helicopters, even zepplins are restricted from flying over the town that just experienced a large oil spill from Exxon Mobile. The flight restriction is in place “until further notice.” The no-fly zone is being administered not by the FAA, but by Exxon Mobile.

            Over at Fox News, the restrictions are depicted as being in place for safety reasons, but if past oil spills are any example, the no-fly zone is there to restrict press coverage. And this is all with FAA approval.

            It is understandable that Exxon doesn’t want the press to broadcast images of its oil spreading all over Mayflower, Arkansas. And I guess that anymore I should not be surprised that a department of the federal government would help them do it. It happens elsewhere. Statehouses are helping meatpackers and slaughterhouses to keep their operations under wraps with “Ag Gag” laws that would that make it a crime to expose animal cruelty or unsanitary conditions in slaughterhouses or other agricultural productions. In Michael Shnayerson’s book on mountaintop mining in West Virginia Coal River he writes that anyone who wanted to review a copy of a mountaintop mining permit issued by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection—like a license or property title, a public document—needed to file a Freedom of Information Request.

            Exxon, BP, Massey Energy, they all want to keep their secrets. Our tax dollars should not be helping them to do so.

People Believe the Darndest Things

Within our society a number of people believe very fantastic things. This recent poll found that 28 percent of American voters believe that Saddam Hussein had a hand in the terrorist attacks of September 2001. The same percentage believes that there is an elite cabal who is driven to put the world under one authoritarian government, a New World Order. Other fantastical theories get their due: Seven percent of voters believe that the moon landings were faked; Barack Obama is believed to be the Anti-Christ by 13 percent of voters, with 22 percent of Romney supporters believing this of our president; and 14 percent believe that Bigfoot walks the woods of California.

            Most popular is the Kennedy Assassination conspiracy theory, an admittedly seductive notion. Even Lyndon Johnson, as he accepted the Warren Commission Report, had his doubts that a single man had been behind the killing of his predecessor. This belief is held by 51 percent of Americans.

            Right after the Kennedy conspiracy, 37 percent of voters believe that global warming is a hoax. There is a great divide between the political parties on this, with only eleven percent of Democrats believing this and 58 percent of GOP voters holding this idea.

            Looking at this poll, I can’t help but think that once there is a crazy idea, then it takes on a life of its own. The headlines of flying saucers landing in Roswell are nearly 70 years old, yet 21 percent of voters believe that little green men landed near the New Mexico city. Paul McCartney has continued to perform in concerts, make recordings, and appear on television, but hundreds of thousands of people continue to believe that he met his maker in 1966.

            So I have good news for the oil companies and coal companies and the industries that they fund to deny global warming. You can tell all the folks at the Heartland Institute, Fox News, and all the other organizations that do their best to cast doubt on the science of global warming that they can take it easy. They can take a long vacation, spend time with their hobbies and families. They don’t have to keep selling the meme that global warming is a hoax. People will believe crazy ideas on their own. You no longer have to finance the global warming denial industry. This poll should be proof enough.