Senator Mitch McConnell Wants to Fast Track Mountaintop Removal Permitting With the Coal Jobs Protection Act

Not to be outdone by Joe Manchin, his Democratic colleague from neighboring West Virginia, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell announced plans to introduce a bill similar to Manchin's EPA Fair Play Act that would restrict the ability of the EPA to protect our land and water. In his press release, McConnell was joined by West Virginia GOP Representative Shelly Capito, who is introducing similarly worded legislation to the House of Representatives.

            McConnell’s “Coal Jobs Protection Act” would place time limits on the EPA’s approval process. Under the bill, the EPA would have 270 days, or slightly less than nine months, to grant Clean Water Act 402 water pollution permits. The agency would have a year’s time to conduct environmental assessments on proposed valley fills under the Clean Water Act’s 404 permitting process, something that the EPA estimates to take, on average, about three years. The proposed legislation goes on to say that, “Failure to act within that time frame for approval of a 404 permit would mean the application is approved, the permit is issued, and the permit can never be subject to judicial review.” In other words, McConnell wants hastily approved permits for mountaintop mines or they will automatically be approved by default. And after that, they cannot be questioned.

            The bill would also disable the EPA from regulating carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants.

            Unmentioned in the press release is the recent court victory that allowed the EPA to revoke the permit for the Spruce Mine No. 1 in West Virginia, but it does include figures on declining coal production in Kentucky, stating that in 2012 the state’s total coal production fell by over 16 percent and direct employment from coal mining fell by over 22 percent, with 4000 miners in eastern Kentucky loosing their jobs. Of course by including these figures in the press release McConnell implies that the EPA is somehow responsible for this lowered productivity and job loss, when it is in actuality the extremely low prices for natural gas that have industry abandoning coal.

Teaching Southern Californians About Southern California

I’m a member of the California Native Plant Society. I haven’t been a member very long, only about eight or nine years. As part of our outreach and education efforts for our local chapter, I lead hikes through some of our canyons and open spaces in which I explain to folks about the native flora and plant communities here. This past weekend I conducted a hike through Florida Canyon, a fairly well preserved native area in Balboa Park.

            I grew up in Appalachia, a place where, even if you didn’t eat them, everyone took note of the Mayapples, whose broad green leaves would blanket forest floors in early spring. In late summer we picked blackberries and in fall we would gather walnuts.

Besides the fruits and nuts that we would harvest and eat, most folks had some notion of the flora around them. It would be impossible not to notice the azaleas and dogwood trees blooming in springtime. And people had some idea of the oaks, sycamores, and elm trees growing around them.

San Diego is far different. We have two plant communities that are native to the coastal area where the city is, coastal sage scrub and coastal chaparral. Whenever people talk about these plants, if they talk about them at all, they are usually just called “brush.”

The landscaping around our houses and along our highways is all from somewhere else. We plant eucalyptus from Australia, iceplant from southern Africa, palms from the south Pacific and Mexico, and scores of other plants from the Mediterranean and South America. What we have made is some sort of international never-never land and is ubiquitous in our landscaped environment. It is possible to wake up in the morning, drive through your neighborhood, fight traffic on the freeway, and make your way to the office park where you work without seeing a tree or any other kind of plant native to southern California.

So for a lot of folks, even for people who have lived in southern California all or most of their lives, it can be an astounding eye-opener when I explain to them about the native sunflowers and sages that live in the canyons and open spaces around them. Many of them have never been up close and personal with their natural environment.

For southern Californians to be so cut off from our natural environment does have consequences. The average American uses about 90 gallons of water a day for cleaning, drinking, bathing, and other purposes. San Diegans use about 150 gallons a day, more than 65 percent more. Those 60 additional gallons that we use every day are used to water our lawns and nonnative plants that we have planted in our lawns and parks.

This water we ship in from hundreds of miles away. Half of our water comes from the Colorado, which is so overused and drawn upon that it usually dries up before it makes its way to its mouth in the Sea of Cortez. Also, shipping all that water takes effort. It’s estimated that 20 percent of the energy used in California is used to move water from one point to another, which has implications for energy security and climate change.

So folks join me on these native plant hikes. I hope they learn something and maybe appreciate their native environment. I hope that it somehow makes a difference.

Senator Joe Manchin Wants to Tie the Hands of the EPA by Reintroducing the EPA Fair Play Act

Earlier this week the U.S. District Court of Appeals handed West Virginia and the environment a victory when they ruled that the EPA could withdraw a previously approved Clean Water Act permit for the Spruce Mine No. 1, a permit for the largest such mine operation to be performed in West Virginia.

            In an unsurprising political move, West Virginia’s Democratic Senator Joe Manchin reintroduced the EPA Fair Play Act, Senate Bill 272. The summary of the bill reads thus:

EPA Fair Play Act - Amends the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (commonly known as the Clean Water Act) to remove the authority of the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to prohibit the specification of any defined area as a disposal site for discharges of materials into waters of the United States, or to restrict the use of any defined area for specification as a disposal site, once the Secretary of the Army has issued a permit for dredged or fill material.

To understand what is going on here, a little background on mountaintop removal is needed. Under the Clean Water Act, the Army Corps of Engineers is granted the authority to issue permits allowing for the discharge of pollutants or the placement of dredge and fill material into our nation’s waterways. Permits under section 404 of the Clean Water Act—intended to be used to allow the use of fill or dredge for the construction of levees, bridges, or other structures in or around water—are generally easier to get than 402 permits, which control the discharge of pollutants into lakes and streams. A court ruling that goes back over a decade established that the Corps can allow mountaintop removal operations to fill in valleys and streams with their waste material under 404 permits, as though these valleys and streams were somehow construction sites instead of dumping grounds.

            The ruling this week stated that the Administrator of the EPA has the authority “to deny or restrict the use of any defined area for specification (including the withdrawal of specification) as a disposal site “whenever he determines” the discharge will have an “unacceptable adverse effect” on identified environmental resources.” That is, the EPA, even though the Army Corps of Engineers has granted a 404 permit, can still determine that a valley fill would pollute or otherwise harm the environment and revoke the permit.

            So the EPA Fair Play Act would tie the hands of the EPA. No matter how bad a valley fill or other disposal of overburden might be, once the Corps issued a 404 permit, the EPA could do nothing to protect our rivers and streams.

            It is unsurprising that Joe Manchin, a strong supporter of the mining industry, would reintroduce this measure. West Virginia’s other Senator, Jay Rockefeller, supports the bill. He has at times stood his ground against King Coal, but in more recent years has grown friendlier to the industry. I imagine that this bill could get a lot of support in Congress, passing the Senate and House. We can hope that it receives a veto from president Obama.

Atmospheric CO2 Levels Soon to Pass 400 ppm

I have my clock radio set to KPBS, our local news station, and this story came on this morning right as I was trying to wake up. The Scripps Institute of Oceanography anticipates that the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere will begin to exceed 400 parts per million by next month.

            The polar icecap will not suddenly melt and Bangladesh will not be inundated with tidal floods on the day that the 400 ppm threshold is passed, but it does mean that the goal of keeping the global temperature from rising an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit will almost certainly be unmet. According to the campaign 350.org, established by author and activist Bill McKibben, scientists have estimated that 350 ppm of CO2 is the highest level of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration that will still allow the earth to avoid substantial harm from warming.

            The radio report talked to Ralph Keeling, who is carrying on the work of his father, Charles Keeling. Working through the Scripps Institute, the elder Keeling initiated the recording of atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa, Hawaii in 1958. Those initially recorded levels were at 316 ppm. According to the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, which handles climate change data and information analysis for the Department of Energy, the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1750, at the dawn of the industrial revolution and the mass use of fossil fuel, was 280 ppm.

            So we are passing the 400 ppm threshold; the whole world is passing the 400 ppm threshold. With our factories and automobiles we have raised the concentration of carbon dioxide by over 40 percent. It seems that this is news that should go beyond our local radio station.

            

The Keeling Curve from Scripps Institute of Oceanography

Good News For the Mountains: The EPA Can Revoke the Spruce Mine Permit

This is some great news! The U.S. District Court of Appeals has ruled that the EPA can withdraw a previously approved Clean Water Act permit for the mountaintop removal Spruce Mine No. 1. If there were to be any mine to get the thumbs down from the EPA, it should be this one, which would have been the largest such operation ever in West Virginia.

            More and more scientific evidence has been gathered showing a link between mountaintop removal and cancer, birth defects, and other health problems. And today the National Commission on the Health Impacts of Mountaintop Removal Mining, an independent group of physicians and scientists, has published a report that summarizes the findings of studies on the health effects of mountaintop removal and calls for congressional action that would place a moratorium on all mountaintop mining “until such time as health studies have been conducted that provide a clearer understanding of the associations between adverse health impacts, notably adverse reproductive outcomes, and MTR mining.” The paper, The Health Impacts of Mountaintop Removal Mining and sponsored by the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, recommends that the funding for further health studies should come from the corporations that have profited from mountaintop mining.

Scientists Discover That Mountaintop Removal Is Harmful to Appalachia

A new research paper takes a large and encompassing view of mountaintop removal and its effects on the land, ecosystems, and the rest of the world.

The authors of the paper, scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, Rider University, and West Virginia University, say that some past and current efforts, by focusing on water quality, both from a regulatory and legal framework, have lead to less research on mountaintop removal’s effects on forests and ecosystems. Titled The Overlooked Terrestrial Impacts of Mountaintop Mining, the paper has just been published in the journal BioScience.

Anyone who has spent much time in Appalachian knows that the mountains have always played a part in affecting the weather. Pocahontas County in West Virginia will get a lot more rain than areas east in Virginia, where the mountains aren’t as high. This new paper says that moving the mountains is affecting these weather patterns. “Topographic changes and land-cover changes associated with mountaintop mining have the potential to produce changes in climate at local to regional scales,” the paper says. “Modeling is needed to determine if the now extensive development of mountaintop mining is leading to such changes.” On a much larger scale, mature forests, which sequester carbon dioxide, are destroyed when mountains are flattened for coal. The reclaimed lands do not have the same capacity for sequestration. With more than 500 mountains succumbing to mountaintop removal, this disruption to the natural CO2 sequestration process of the Appalachian forests has implications for global warming.

            The authors also say that mountaintop removal causes damaging biographic fragmentation, affecting populations of raptors and songbirds. Back in 2006 scientists found that mountaintop mining was adversely affecting the cerulean warbler,[i] a wonderful songbird native to the Mid-Atlantic states that is “sharply declining in the heart of its range,” according to National Geographic’s Field Guide to the Birds of North America. A more recent scientific paper noted that mountaintop removal jeopardizes the survivability of Appalachian species as they shift their bioregions due to global warming.[ii] And another recent study found that the changes to habitat structure, water quality, stream chemistry, and the populations of macroinvertebrates in streams below the valleys filled with the overburden from mountaintop mines affected the abundance of salamanders in those streams.[iii]

            More and more the science shows that we are endangering and loosing great treasures, all so we can get cheap coal. Could we at least slow down long enough to ask if it is all worth it?

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[i] Wood, Petra Bohall, Scott B. Bosworth, and Randy Dettmers. "Cerulean Warbler Abundance And Occurrence Relative To Large-Scale Edge And Habitat Characteristics." Condor 108.1 (2006): 154-165. Environment Complete. Web. 19 Apr. 2013.

[ii] Beggs, Paul. "Horizontal Cliffs: Mountaintop Mining And Climate Change." Biodiversity & Conservation 21.14 (2012): 3731-3734. Environment Complete. Web. 19 Apr. 2013.

[iii] Wood, Petra Bohall and Williams, Jennifer M. “Impact of Valley Fills on Streamside Salamanders in Southern West Virginia” Journal of Herpetology 47.1 March 2013 119-125

Poll Finds Young Clergy Bucking Trend, Don't Believe in Global Warming as Their Peers Do

The results of a poll conducted by LifeWay Christian Resources, a Southern Baptist organization that specializes in Bibles, church literature, books, and music, finds that most pastors don’t believe in global warming.

            “I believe global warming is real and man-made,” was affirmed by 43 percent of pastors, a figure up from 36 percent in 2010 but lower than the 47 percent of respondents in 2008. The majority of pastors, 54 percent, disagreed with the statement. The number of those disagreeing with the statement was higher than in 2008 (48 percent). That figure was 60 percent in 2010.

            The demographics of the poll are unsurprising. GOP pastors denied global warming at a far greater rate than those identifying as Democrats (49 percent to five percent). Northeast pastors believe in global warming at a greater rate than their southern counterparts. Pastors in larger cities acknowledge global warming at a greater rate than pastors form small towns. Lutheran, Methodist, and other mainline Protestant ministers believe in global warming at a greater rate than Evangelical preachers.

            The survey results I found to be a bit surprising is that older pastors believe in global warming at a greater rate than younger pastors. The survey found that 32 percent of pastors 65 years and older believed in man-made global warming, while 20 percent of pastors 45-54 and 19 percent of the pastors between the ages of 18 and 44 believe in global warming.

            What is going on here? A Gallup poll on global warming from a year ago found that younger people are more worried about global warming than older folks. A PewResearch poll in 2009 found similar results. It seems that young pastors are bucking a generational trend.

            We can take part in a lot of armchair speculation here. The young persons going into the clergy, do they have a more conservative mindset than their peers? Is the training now being offered in seminaries and bible colleges shaping the worldview of their students as they train them in the spiritual guidance of their congregations? We can’t tell from the statistics of the poll, but this is a curious finding.