The Mountaintop Removal Word For the Day: Thwart

Thwart is the word for the day, when it comes to mountaintop removal.

According to this story from The Hill, the GOP in the House of Representatives is set to thwart efforts by the Interior Department to reset environmental standards that protect Appalachian streams from the harmful effects of mountaintop mining.

Under president George W. Bush, the Interior Department rewrote a section of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act to do away with the 100-foot buffer zone rule. That rule restricted mining companies from dumping mining waste and overburden to areas 100 feet or more from rivers and streams. The proposed legislation, H.R. 2824, would keep the present administration from reinstating that rule and returning the regulation to what it was before George W. Bush entered the White House. The Hill says that the bill, called “Preventing Government Waste and Protecting Coal Mining Jobs in America,” will likely pass the House Natural Resources Committee. If it becomes law, regulating the areas where mining companies can dump their waste would be given over to the individual states, with their tradition of more lax regulation and oversight giving way to the federal rule.

The second example of thwarting comes from my old college town of Huntington. According to Huntington’s Herald Dispatch newspaper, an Energy and Natural Resource Symposium, sponsored by the Huntington Regional Chamber of Commerce, is to be held at a conference center at Huntington’s Saint Mary’s Hospital. Robert M. (Mike) Duncan, president and CEO for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, an organization set up by the coal industry to promote coal and coal mining, is to give the keynote address.

            The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OHVEC), a nonprofit that has worked for decades to end or mitigate mountaintop removal, has planned a rally in opposition to the hospital hosting the event. The hospital is seeking an injunction to thwart the efforts of the environmental group. The hospital says that it seeks the injunction to prevent disruption to its normal functions. The environmental group says, however, that disrupting the hospital is not their goal, as reported in the Herald Dispatch:

Janet Keating, OHVEC's executive director, said the rally is based on the principle that it's inappropriate for a facility meant to heal to host an event promoting coal mining, which numerous medical studies have linked to health problems.

“There's been a lot of silence from our state leaders about these health studies and the impacts on communities around coal,” Keating said. “It's a mystery to me why a hospital would want to host this. Our whole thing is, ‘Let's not have it at a hospital, where you're supposed to be helping people.’”

She said the organization has a reputation for peaceful protests and those who join the rally will be asked to remain on the sidewalks outside the property, which is located near the corner of 5th Avenue and 29th Street.

“We had no intention to be on their property or at the hospital,” she said.

As Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette, who gets a big hat tip for leading me onto this story from Huntington, points out in his blog, Coal Tattoo, there is something a little funny about a hospital hosting a function for an industry whose mining practices have been shown in a larger and larger body of studies to contribute to the ill health of the residents who live among the mines.

UPDATE 11/12/13: The judge in this case, Paul T. Farrell has denied the restraining order sought by the hospital. I guess you can only thwart so much.

UPDATE 11/14/13: The House Natural Resources Committee approved H.R. 2824. 

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.

Mountaintop Removal and the Continuation of Evil

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are out of office, but much of the damage that they and their administration accomplished continues. One of the most insidious eleventh hour rule changes made by the last administration was a change to the part of the Clean Water Act that allows mountaintop removal coal mining companies to dump their wastes anywhere that they please.

            Before the Bush change, mountaintop removal mines had to maintain buffer zones of 100 feet between streams and the material that they dumped as waste from their mines. With the change of just a few words, the Bush administration changed the idea of a stream from that of a natural area to that of a construction site and the waste from the mine to being construction material. The mine companies could then dump their waste and bury streams any which way they wanted.

            Obama and his administration want to change the wording of the regulation to resemble its original intent. It seems, however, that this small step in the right direction is being impeded by House GOP members who are, in a fairly obvious tactic of harassing the Interior Department and the administration, subpoenaing documents in relation to the planned changes to the regulation.

            Edmund Burke, the British statesman who developed the philosophical underpinnings of modern conservatism, said “when bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” When I think about mountaintop removal and run across an incident like this subpoena—only one of the ways that the GOP is guaranteeing that this most horrible and destructive mining practice continues—I can’t help but sometimes despair that Burke was a blind optimist who had no experience of the corruption of greed and money.