Supreme Court Denies Arch Coal More Mountaintop Removal at Spruce Mine No. 1

The Supreme Court did a good thing today, rejecting an appeal from Arch Coal to review a decision by the U.S. District Court of Appeals. The original ruling of the District Court, which goes back to April of last year, found that the EPA could withdraw a previously approved Clean Water Act permit. The permits are granted to allow for pollution of waters and the filling in of streams. Coal companies need these permits to operate their mountaintop removal mines and dump the waste rock and soil or “overburden” from the mines into adjacent valleys and streams.

            Arch coal had sought the permit, and received the permit from the Army Corps of Engineers, to expand its Spruce Mine No. 1 in West Virginia. The Spruce Mine is already huge; with the permit it would have made it the largest such mine in the Mountain State. The EPA had rescinded the permit retroactively, after the Corps had granted the permit.

            Arch Coal said that wasn’t kosher. The District Court said it was. And now the Supreme Court has said that decision stands. We are not totally out of the woods on this, but this is a good turn of events.

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.

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.

An Image of Environmental and Social Degradation or Kiddie Porn?

Maria Gunnoe, a prominent opponent of mountaintop removal who has won the Goldman Environmental Prize, had been invited to testify at a hearing on the Spruce Coal Mine by the House energy and resources subcommittee.

Besides her testimony, she received something she wasn’t expecting: a questioning by police on suspicion of child pornography.

Gunnoe, who has testified for the committee four times before, had always felt that the members of the committee had not made eye contact with her, essentially dismissing her testimony with visible lack of interest or engagement. So Gunnoe decided to grab the subcommittee’s attention with a compelling image of West Virginians living with mountaintop removal mining. She chose a photo by noted photographer Katie Falkenberg that shows a five-year-old girl sitting in a tub of water polluted by mountaintop mining. The bathwater is a deep disturbing reddish orange. The photo, as well as other images of mountaintop mining can be found here.

The photo was pulled from the presentation by Doug Lamborn, the leader of the energy and mineral resources subcommittee, which is under the House Committee on Natural Resources. A GOP house member, Lamborn was noted as the most conservative member of Congress by the National Journal in 2009 and 2010. He is against energy conservation measures and for ramping up the extraction of domestic fossil fuels.

            Lamborn says that he did not see the photograph and relied on the judgment of his staff, who said that the photo was inappropriate. The hearing concerned recent actions by the EPA, which is currently appealing a ruling by a federal judge that the agency overstepped its authority in vetoing a permit for the Spruce mine.

            After her presentation, police questioned Gunnoe for 45 minutes.

If only we had more people like Gunnoe, who bravely stand up to the power of big money and King Coal. It’s too bad that besides politely ignoring her, the GOP controlled energy and resources subcommittee censors her presentation and harasses her.

            Mountaintop mining has brought West Virginia nothing good. It has destroyed communities, depressed wages, and filled in hundreds of miles of streams as it has flatted hundreds of mountains. It passes the muster of law only because the Appalachians are sparsely populated with individuals who are poorer than the rest of the U.S. and unused to working the levers of power. If things were otherwise, kingpins of Big Coal would be locked up along with the scum who peddle kiddie porn.