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.