Big Business Wants to Have their Cake and Eat It, Too, and They Want to Have Your Cake and Eat It Too, Too

One of the mantras of management that I heard throughout my years of working in manufacturing was the complaint of regulations. Whether they be for worker safety or environmental concerns management considers all law and regulations to be an impediment to their ability to do business. These news stories are therefore unsurprising. What is curious is the manner in which business is trying to play it both ways to get what they want.

In West Virginia, politicians from both parties rail against the federal government, particularly the restrictions that the EPA places on them to ensure that there is a modicum of clean water for the wildlife in the streams and for the people to drink.

            In this latest move, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Coal Residuals Reuse and Management Act of 2013 (H.R. 2218). The bill, which was introduced by Republican and King Coal friendly West Virginia representative David B McKinley, would allow states to set their own standards for the management and disposal of coal ash, the waste product that is left over when coal is burned. Coal ash has a number of uses, such as the production of concrete. But much coal ash from coal-fired power plants is dumped into landfills. According to the EPA, an average coal-fired power plant, one producing 500 to 1,000 megawatts, would create a landfill of between 74 to 148 acres of coal ash refuse. The National Mall in Washington D.C. is about 148 acres, just to give you some perspective on the size of these landfills. The coal ash is also toxic, containing arsenic, lead, mercury, and selenium. Theses large dumps of coal ash can therefore pollute runoff and groundwater.

            The dumping of coal ash is unregulated right now, but in the last few years the EPA has proposed rules that would govern the dumping of this industrial byproduct. The Coal Residuals Reuse and Management Act would essentially negate any coal ash rules from the EPA, leaving it up to the states to set standards for its disposal. Essentially, if H.R. 2218 passes, it would maintain the status quo of unregulated coal ash disposal. State regulation is weak to nonexistent.

            OK, so we have industry wanting to keep federal regulation at bay and maintain state regulation of the byproducts of their business. But business can’t merely keep things going on a one-way street. According to the L.A. Times, lobbyists in Washington want the federal government to step in and keep states from enforcing laws that have higher standards than the federal standards. In the crosshairs of industry is California, which has some higher standards for consumer protection, workplace safety, and environmental protection than the rest of the country.

            States can set higher standards than federal regulations, but the fly in the ointment here is the federal ability to regulate interstate commerce. GOP member of Congress say that they want to curb the progressive regulation of California to protect the rights of states whose industries don’t want to be faced with complying with California’s standards or to be cut off from the Golden State’s market, the largest in the country.

            Targeted by industry lobbyists are California laws to restrict toxic chemicals, a law that mandates that chickens on industrial farms have enough room to spread their wings, a ban on cutting fins off sharks to make soup, and a state law protecting an endangered fish. This sort of maneuver takes one of the bedrocks of conservative thinking, that the states can serve as individual laboratories to test new ideas before they might be adopted by the greater Union, and defenestrates it down a legislative and philosophical window in the service of big business. Everybody knows we can't have California making laws that enable sharks to hold onto their fins. What if the good state of Vermont wants to make a whole bunch of shark fin soup?

            So there you have it. Big business likes the federal government when the states get in their way, and big business likes the states when the federal government threatens to be too strict. Are there any principles here? I didn't think so.

Fed Court Won't Rehear Spruce Mine Veto on Mountaintop Removal Permit Ruling

Fed court won't rehear Spruce Mine veto ruling  - News - The Charleston Gazette - West Virginia News and Sports -

Back in April the U.S. District Court of Appeals ruled that the EPA could withdraw a previously approved Clean Water Act permit for the Spruce Mine No.1., which would have been an enlargement of an already huge mountaintop removal coal mine and would have made it the largest such mine operation ever in the state of West Virginia.
            Today, the court refused to rehear the case, a setback for the mining operator, Arch Coal, and King Coal in general, but good news for just about everybody else concerned. There is no word, so far, from Arch Coal as to whether or not they will try to take the case to the Supreme Court. I shudder at the thought of this case going before a Roberts lead Court. Roberts worked as a lawyer for coal companies before he got his present gig. I think I know how he would want the Court to rule in this case.

West Virginia Fish Protected Under Endangered Species Act

West Virginia Fish Protected Under Endangered Species Act

This is great news for West Virginia, it’s people, mountains, and streams. The diamond darter, which was once found in the Ohio and several other river and streams in the East, has been declared as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
            Folks have thought of the diamond darter as extinct until it was found to be extant in the Elk River in West Virginia. Of course the mining companies petitioned to keep the fish from being listed, but now that the fish is protected, it may help protect its watershed, which makes a large swath across the state of West Virginia, from the most egregious mining practices.

The North Pole Has Melted. Again.

The North Pole Has Melted. Again. - Eric Levenson - The Atlantic Wire

This just in from the Atlantic. The ice and snow that stretched into the horizon when Mathew Henson and Robert Peary first reached the North Pole over a century ago is no longer—at least periodically. As the photos from The Atlantic show, the North Pole is now a lake. The ice and snow up there melts away from time to time now.

            The globe is warming a lot. Welcome to a very different world.

The lake at the North Pole. What should we call it? Lake Hubris? image North Pole Environmental Observatory 

As Though Things Aren't Bad Enough: GOP Budget Cuts For the EPA and More Destruction For Appalachia

As though we don’t have it bad enough already, the GOP in the House of Representatives wants to slash the budget for the EPA and turn Appalachia into even more of a wasteland.

            Under the House Interior and Environment spending bill to come before the House Appropriations subcommittee today, the budget for the Environmental Protection Agency would be slashed by 34 percent from its 2012 level. With this kind of budget slashing, it’s hard to imagine how the agency could adequately keep our air and water clean. The EPA budget for 2012 was $8,449,385,000, a dollar amount that is only three quarters of what it was 20 years ago had the budget kept up with inflation. The 34 percent cut would essentially half the agency’s budget from what it was a generation ago.

            As though the third-world regulation of mining practices in Appalachia aren’t lax enough, the bill has in its crosshairs language in the Clean Water Act that is related to the stream buffer rule and the definition of “fill material” that is allowed in our nation’s waterways. The buffer rule, which restricts the dumping of mining waste to at least 100 feet from streams, and regulation on fill material can be applied to mitigate, at least somewhat, the destruction of mountaintop removal coal mining. Seeing the extent of the destruction from mountaintop removal, I have a hard time seeing how it could be less regulated, but I guess the House GOP has the bigger and bigger mountaintop mines dancing in their heads.

The changes to the Clean Water Act would invalidate a recent victory for the EPA, in which the agency revoked a permit for an expansion of a mountaintop mine that would have destroyed miles of streams. The bill would also block the Interior Department from toughening up environmental regulations on the dumping of waste from mountaintop removal mining.

            There are a lot of other bad things in this bill. Arts funding is cut, and the sulfur content of gasoline would not be reduced, as per the EPA. As part of this package, even though we are not at war, the GOP plans to increase military spending.

Another Dubious Distinction For West Virginia: One of the 15 Most Toxic Places On Earth

In his book, Combating Mountaintop Removal, author Bryan T. McNeal asserts that, though West Virginia is one of the states of the Union, the politics and much of the living conditions are the same as those in underdeveloped and what was once called “third world” countries.

From my perspective, this is an accurate assessment. There is widespread and deep poverty. A few years ago among the gifts that you could buy for folks in underdeveloped parts of the world through Heifer International were textbooks for West Virginia schoolchildren. Typically in the underdeveloped world such as a banana republic, politicians see themselves as merely the servants to dominant industries, a case in point that McNeal documents as business-as-usual for West Virginia, too.

Now another third world distinction can be added to West Virginia. Along with Chernobyl, the pollution choked cities of industrial China, and the waste-filled tributaries of the Ganges, the Appalachians of West Virginia have been declared one of the 15 most toxic places to live by the Mother Nature Network. Plain and simple it is mountaintop removal that places the Mountain State in the same company as the deforested mountains of Haiti and Dzerzhinsk, Russia, where 300,000 tons of chemical waste were improperly dumped from 1930 through 1998. The environmental news website had this to say about West Virginia:

Mountaintop removal mining is one of the world's most environmentally destructive practices, and it is most associated with coal mining in West Virginia's Appalachian Mountains. Whole mountaintops are removed to get to the coal, which increases erosion and runoff thick with pollutants, poisoning streams and rivers throughout the region.

The science behind West Virginia’s inclusion on this dubious list is pretty clear. Even still, as a West Virginian, this is not a list I enjoy being on. 

GOP (And Others) Still Denying or Ignoring Global Warming

I have not given up hope, but I’m beginning to think that the GOP and certain other politicians would rather die than to acknowledge global warming.

According to this story on NPR, there is a great amount of support for a federal carbon tax. A carbon tax is one of the most effective and simplest means of reducing CO2 emissions. Everything that a company or a person uses as a fuel that throws carbon up in the air—diesel, coal, gasoline, natural gas, etc.—would have a tax. The tax would be based on how much carbon that particular fuel would put in the atmosphere. Coal would have a higher tax rate than, say, natural gas, because it makes more carbon dioxide than natural gas when it is burned. At a recent Senate panel considering a carbon tax, however, GOP members disputed that global warming is even happening.

The Keeling Curve from Scripps Institute of Oceanography

Average Temperature by Decade
This is the science, ignore it at your peril.

And Joe Manchin, a Democrat but one from the coal producing state of West Virginia, was the only Democrat to vote against the confirmation of Gina McCarthy to head the EPA. McCarthy, a highly qualified public administrator who has worked for both Democrats and Republicans, was confirmed after the Senate reached a deal averting the “nuclear option” and ending the GOP filibuster that had been holding up her confirmation. Explaining his vote, Manchin actually praised McCarthy, saying:

In fact, it’s not hard to imagine that she could have been nominated to be EPA Administrator by Mitt Romney if he had won the 2012 Presidential election. After all, she advised him on climate change when he was Governor of Massachusetts.

As Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette points out, Manchin, while he is railing against the EPA and espousing a “common sense” approach to energy policy, completely leaves out any mention or consideration of global warming and greenhouse gasses.

Today's GOP: "Please just make that horrible science and nasty global warming go away!"

Right Out of Kafka: Chevron Sues the Individuals It Harmed With Its Pollution

For a long time Chevron had been dumping toxic waste into waterways of the Amazon, causing great harm to the rainforest. After years of litigation, an Ecuadorian court imposed a judgment of over $17 billion against the oil company for their wanton pollution practices. Now here is the Kafka part of the story. Instead of paying the judgment, Chevron sued more than 50 individuals involved in the original lawsuit.

            I understand that Chevron would want to keep themselves out of a courtroom and wouldn’t want to pay the plaintiffs in this case. But this move to sue the plaintiffs is thuggish.

The company is claiming that, despite their wrongdoing, Chevron is the victim of a conspiracy among lawyers, environmental activists, and journalists. Even more bizarre, in their suit against the plaintiffs a judge in New York has granted Chevron access to the emails of the plaintiffs. For anyone involved in any sort of environmental work or any sort of activism, this is quite chilling. 

The Casualties In Coal's War on Us.

Rand Paul is keeping the “war on coal” meme alive. Meanwhile, increased use of coal in northern China is robbing millions of their lives. On average northern Chinese residents lifespan has been shortened by five and a half years, due to breathing the particulate laden air of that region.

            Published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study focused on deaths during the 1990s that were caused by heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, and respiratory illnesses.  The study compared deaths from these illnesses south of the Huai River with similar data north of the river, where the Chinese government has been providing residents with free coal since the 1950s.

            Despite Rand Paul, who once dismissed concern over mountaintop removal as “missing a few hills here and there,” it seems that our use of coal extracts a heavy price. Men die in coal mining accidents, where they also risk getting black lung disease, which has been increasing in recent years. A geography of increased disease and death encircles mountaintop removal mines, and the heartland of this country is hot and possibly going dry from global warming, caused by our throwing tons of CO2 in the air, most of which comes from coal.

            Maybe somebody should tell Rand Paul that it looks like coal has a war on us.

Hendryx leaving WVU, but research will continue

Hendryx leaving WVU, but research will continue

This just in from Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo blog: Dr. Michael Hendryx is leaving West Virginia University for a new position at Indiana University. Hendryx is presently the Director of the West Virginia Rural Health Research Center and Founding Chair of the Department of Health Policy Management and Leadership in the School of Public Health at WVU. The move, he says, is prompted by his wife getting a great job offer.
          Although mountaintop removal had been a mining practice since at least the eighties, no scientific studies had been performed on its health effects until 2007, when Dr. Hendryx published a study on hospitalization patterns among residents of coal country. A health expert with dozens of other peer reviewed scientific papers published, Hendryx has gone on to produce a number of other studies on the health consequences of large-scale surface mining. The findings of his work are staggering and scary. One study of mountaintop removal published last year found that folks who live close to mountaintop removal mines have cancer rates that are twice that of their fellow Appalachians who do not live close to these mines.
          Hendryx says that his work will continue. Let us hope so.

More Science Reveals the Harmful Legacy of Surface Mining for Coal

It’s looking like the science is telling us what we have pretty much figured all along, that surface mine reclamation is only a half measure at best. In a recently published scientific paper, “Exploring the legacy effects of surface coal mining on stream chemistry,” scientists studied 30 surface mines in a southern Ohio watershed. The study found that, though reclamation efforts to reduce acid mine runoff seem to be successful, the conductivity of stream water continued to remain high, with some concentrations high enough to impair the biota of many streams. Levels of aluminum in the streams remained high as well.

            The study examined stream waters in the Raccoon Creek watershed, which flows directly into the Ohio River. The study found that, when it came to conductivity, reclamation efforts had little effect. The greatest predictor of high conductivity in a subwatershed was the percentage of the area of that watershed that had been surface mined. The greater the percentage of land that had been mined, the higher the conductivity.

The Raccoon Creek watershed shown in blue, the watershed examined in this study map from  epa.state.oh.us

Conductivity is the measure of water’s ability to pass a current of electricity. High conductivity of water is usually an indication of the presence of inorganic dissolved solids, such as chlorides, nitrates, sulfates, and phosphates. High conductivity can also indicate the presence of sodium, magnesium, calcium, iron, and aluminum. In streams conductivity is measured in microsiemens per cubic centimeter (uS/cm2). Streams that have a good mix of native fish have conductivity ranging from 150 and 500 uS/cm2. Ecological impairment and decreased biological diversity are found in streams with conductivity exceeding 500 uS/cm2. Eight of the 30 sites in the study had conductivity levels exceeding the 500 uS/cm2 threshold.

            Aluminum is a common trace element in coal. It can be disruptive to streams and lakes and, as it has been associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, is not desired at high levels for drinking water. The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency limits the amount of aluminum in drinking water to 0.20 milligrams per liter. This limit was exceeded at 20 of the 30 sites. Moreover, aluminum toxicity to fish has been observed as low as 0.10 milligrams per liter.

            Reclamation, to me, has always seemed like a Humpty Dumpty scenario. Take apart a hillside or a mountain, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never replace the land, streams, and ecosystems as they once were. Common sense tells us this, now the science is confirming it.

            

From the World Meteorological Organization: You Are Living In a Changed World

This is just in from the World Meteorological Organization, a report confirming that the last ten years have been the warmest on record since modern measurements got under way 160 years ago. The report says that, yes, the unusual heat waves in Europe and Russia and the droughts in the Amazon and Australia are all indicators of global climate change. The Arctic sea ice is rapidly melting and the melting of the ice sheet covering Greenland is accelerating.

Global warming is no longer a threat on the horizon; it is here and now. We are living in a changed world.

The Keeling Curve image from Scripps Institute of Oceanography

World Temperatures by Decade  from The Global Climate 2001-2010: a decade of climate extremes 

Can't Deny Global Warming? Jonah Goldberg Just Changes the Subject

For years the coal and oil industries relied on an out-and-out denial of global warming as their strategy. Obfuscating the issue and confusing people allowed them to stave off regulations and continue business as usual with their CO2 producing products.

            There are still people and organizations that work at global warming denial, attack climate scientists, or repeat the “more research needs to be done” meme. But now as the glaciers retreat farther, the seas rise higher, and temperatures inch up every year, it’s harder and harder to get people to take you seriously when you deny that there is global warming. So what is a GOP supporting, right wing rhetor supposed to do when he is confronted with climate change?

            He changes the subject.

            That’s what Jonah Goldberg tries to do in his latest op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. In the piece, Goldberg takes aim at Bill McKibben, who took part in a short piece for The Atlantic titled “How and When Will the World End?” The author, environmentalist, and co-founder of 350.org had this to say about the world’s end:

In a sense, the world as we knew it is already over. We have heated the Earth, melted the Arctic, and turned seawater 30 percent more acidic. The only question left is how much more fossil fuel we’ll burn, and hence how unfamiliar and inhospitable we’ll make our home planet.

Goldberg has worked for the American Enterprise Institute, an organization that receives a great deal of money from Exxon-Mobile and that tried to buy off scientists with large cash payments to write articles critical of the IPCC’s 2007 report on global warming, and he doesn’t like what McKibben has to say. He knows, however, as the science backs up what McKibben is talking about, he cannot criticize what McKibben says. So Goldberg just changes the subject and rejoices in the facts that malaria is virtually unknown in North America, smallpox is eradicated across the globe, much backbreaking labor for people in the industrialized world is now mechanized, and—despite the mechanized slaughter of modern warfare—humans, we assume, kill each other less frequently than we did when our ancestors lived in caves.

            While I don’t necessarily share Goldberg’s happy faced view of human history, he does make a good point. At least for a good number of people who live in an industrialized society life in the 21^st century is bitchin’. But that has nothing to do with what Bill McKibben said in The Atlantic. We not only have the ability to wreck the planet with CO2 and other greenhouse gasses, we have already irrevocably started down that path, that is McKibben’s point. That I’m not threatened by Neolithic tribal warfare has nothing to do with McKibben’s dire statement.

King Coal Gins Up Animus For Obama and the EPA

Mines have been closing throughout Appalachia, with hundreds of miners laid off. Some of these men have been on the job for years; others have worked decades in the mines. These men are laid off in an area that has been economically depressed since at least the early eighties. Prospects for finding other well-paying work are not good.

            Mine closings also affect the barbers, restaurant owners, waitresses, and just about everybody else who works for a living in a mining community. Paychecks that no longer come in also affect the children.

            Mines close and everybody suffers.

Poverty reigns where they mine coal. Lose your job and the chances of finding other good-paying work are slim.

Miners and residents of coal communities have a right to be upset and angry when their mines close. I just don’t like it when the coal companies spend time and money to channel that anger to advance their agenda.

            Coal companies are spending big bucks to sponsor rallies, and PR campaigns to get the message out that miners have lost their jobs and Appalachians suffer because of Barack Obama, the EPA, and environmentalists. Big Coal and its supporters have created organizations such as Coal Mining Our Future that sponsor rallies and distribute T-shirts with pro coal industry messages. These organizations also encourage Appalachians to contact politicians with pro coal mining memes. Like any other industry, King Coal has always had its lobbyists. But by enlisting the public to contact their Congressional representatives, they have created a coal constituency to support their industry in the state houses and Capitol Hill.

            Apparently, these campaigns are paying off for King Coal.  Public opinion favoring the coal companies and their mining practices has increased in the last six years. In a speech titled “From Villain to Victim: The Coal Industry’s New Image in Appalachian Kentucky,” Al Cross, the director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky, said of the coal companies, “[They] are in a defensive mode, and they’re gathering their friends around them. This has created, I think, kind of a siege mentality and a regional solidarity. There used to just be sympathy for miners. Now there is sympathy for an industry.”

            Traditionally, miners viewed their employers with a jaundiced eye. For good reason. They knew that without their union, the coal companies would have them working under extremely hazardous conditions for subsistence wages. So for me, having grown up in West Virginia, it’s a little disorienting to see miners taking the side of the coal companies, but I guess that a well-planned and financed PR campaign can bring over a lot of people to your side.

A scene from Matewan, about the beginnings of the United Mine Workers, when miners trusted water moccasins more than the coal companies

Regulations on power plants aside, coal mines have closed because of increased transportation costs and a great decline in the price of natural gas. Warmer than average winters also mean that people are burning less coal and lessening the demand for the mineral. Are these reasons for the decline in coal mining brought up at the industry sponsored rallies?

            I didn’t think so.

            Burning coal throws more CO2 in the atmosphere than anything else; one of the best strategies to reduce our CO2 emissions would be to phase out its use. I can understand that miners’ discontent, and if we as we as a country make the decision to turn away from coal, we owe the miners and other Appalachians a path for them to move on economically, whether that be through regional economic development, education and job training, or aided migration to other areas of the country that aren’t as economically depressed.

            Whether it be the automobile industry exiting Detroit and leaving that city in an economic vacuum or clothing companies buying garments from unsafe factories in Asia, the track record of corporations caring about their workers is not a good one. I don’t believe that the coal companies really care about the miners holding onto their jobs. The coal industry wants less regulation, and they are successfully channeling the anger of the miners, their families, and their neighbors to achieve that goal. But while they hold rallies and hand out T-shirts, mountains crumble, people get sick and die from polluted waters, and others lose their homes and communities to rising seas.