Well, this is not a
reversal, but it’s still not good news. Patrick Morrisey, the Attorney General
of West Virginia, has joined 26 other states in filing a friend of the court
brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to review a case that challenges the EPA’s
authority to withdraw a previously approved Clean Water Act permit for a
mountaintop removal mine.
The
mine is a currently existing mountaintop mining operation in Logan County, the
Spruce Mine No 1. The permit was for an expansion of the mine and would have
made it the largest surface mine in West Virginia.
In
April of this year, the U.S. District Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the EPA, and in July refused to rehear the case.
I’m
not hopeful if the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case. The conservative majority
has been business friendly and not prone to supporting environmental
regulations. John Roberts has worked as a lawyer for coal companies. The cases
he worked on concerned labor issues—benefit payments and collective bargaining
rights—and not those of environmental protections. Still, his relationship with
the coal companies has been cozy and does not lend itself to the image of
Justice blindly weighing the scales. Do you think he should recuse himself?
More
than the status of one mine could be at stake here. The push from the right,
the GOP, and big business has been to curtail the ability of the EPA to protect
our air, land, and water. If the Court hears the case and rules in favor of
Arch Coal, the owner of the Spruce Mine, the EPA’s ability to deny pollution
permits across the country will be jeopardized.
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