With Amendment 846 Senator Joe Manchin Does the Time Warp For King Coal

With a couple of legislative amendments, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin hopes to make a big time warp to benefit King Coal.

            Recently, a federal court ruled that the EPA does in fact have authority over issues of water quality and could deny a permit to pollute streams with valley fills from the Spruce Mine No. 1, a mountaintop removal operation in West Virginia, even after those permits were granted by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Manchin, in the position of helping the coal industry as best he can, is offering amendments 846 and 850 to the Water Resource Development Act, a bill that is receiving a lot of pressure for passage because of the generous amounts of pork that lies within its legislation. These amendments would strip the EPA of its authority to deny fill permits, as the agency had done with the permit for the Spruce Mine.

            Manchin’s Amendment 850 would, among other things, reduce the time that the Secretary of the Interior could comment on a valley fill permit from three months to one month, making the task impossible to adequately administer. The truly astounding thing about his other amendment, Amendment 846, is that it has an effective date of October 18, 1972, the date on which the Clean Water Act was passed into law. Backdating this amendment, Manchin is attempting to make a legislative WABAC machine to a time when mountaintop removal was but a gleam in the eye of King Coal. According to the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, the backdating is intended to give the green light to a handful of mining operations whose permits were denied by the EPA over the decades. (The Coalition is waging a campaign for folks to call their Senators demanding that these amendments be stripped from the pending legislation.)

UPDATE 5/14/13: neither of Senator Manchin's amendments made it into the final bill, the Water Resources Development Act. The mountains and people of Appalachia are somewhat safer, as well as the fabric of the space-time continuum that were threatened by these amendments.