Will W.Va. give Obama’s climate plan a chance?

Will W.Va. give Obama’s climate plan a chance?

Another great observation from Ken Ward. Of course the reaction from the coal companies and their politicians, like Shelly Moore Capito, are predictable. Sometimes I wonder, given the animus that most West Virginians have towards our president, would West Virginia support him doing anything?

No Heavy Metals For Kentucky's Public Drinking Water

This is from the Kentucky Division of Water. A study that looked at 12 years of data of Kentucky’s drinking water found that the drinking water was safe from heavy metal pollutants, even in the counties where there is a lot of coal mining.

            Using data from the National Cancer Institute, the study compared counties where coal production has been high with counties where coal production has been low and found no significant difference in cancer rates, although the study did find that cancer rates were higher in the eastern Appalachian mountains of the state.

            Other recent scientific studies have found high rates of cancer, birth defects, and other ailments afflicting those who live among mountaintop removal mines. These studies were peer reviewed. The study from the Kentucky Division of Water has yet to receive peer review. Also, the study only considered public drinking water and not well water. It is water drawn from wells that is usually fouled by mountaintop mining. And, as well, cancer rates were compared between counties of high and low coal production. Including counties where there is no coal production, a control group, was not included.

            Even still, I’d be interested to know more about some of this research and what might be concluded after this study receives peer review.

Judas Priest, heavy metal you might want photo: last.fm 

A coal ash spill, heavy metals you probably don't want photo: celcias.com

A Speech on Climate Change That I Can Believe In

While I have criticized the president before for his lack of action on global warming, I applaud the speech he made yesterday. It is a stance on climate change that I can believe in. While the GOP has delivered to the moneyed interests exactly what they want, a Congress that is legislatively stalled during a Democratic presidency, this speech, and the resulting actions that Obama promises by his administration, is all the president can do.

            He gave us what the second Bush administration denied us, an unequivocal statement on what the science is telling us about CO2 and our warming world. It’s a sad comment on our politics and a testament to the power of the energy companies and their ability to obfuscate the facts at hand, that long after the science has been concluded we have to wait years, decades really, for our president to make such a statement. But I guess it always works that way. “Separate is note equal” is a pretty simple and obvious observation, but it took generations after Emancipation before the Supreme Court made that ruling on civil rights.

Mostly by restricting emissions from power plants, president Obama’s proposed set of rules and regulations could reduce our country’s greenhouse gas emissions in the next seven years by close to 20 percent of 2005 levels.

            Of course, the coal companies don’t like it. Fox News is, predictably, not pleased. And Mitch McConnell has said that the president’s proposed course of action on the climate is a “war on jobs” and “tantamount to kicking the ladder out from beneath the feet of many Americans struggling in today’s economy.” What I’d like to know from Mitch McConnell is why, if he is so concerned about American’s having and keeping jobs, has he gotten in the way of any effort to help the economy recover after the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression?

            Over at Appalachian Voices, they rightly applaud the president, even urging him to do more. Executive Director Tom Cormons had this to say:

The president’s plan represents a good first step toward a 21st Century climate and energy policy for America. It’s essential that his administration implement one of the centerpieces of that plan–strong controls on power plant emissions.

Beyond what he spoke of today, there’s more the president must do to build a robust clean energy economy and ensure that heavily impacted areas like Appalachia don’t get left behind.

The devastating practice of mountaintop removal coal mining has no place in a 21st Century energy plan, nor in a positive environmental legacy for this president.

President Obama must stop industry from pushing the costs of doing business off on communities and our environment, while doing more to invest in energy efficiency and renewable sources particularly in Appalachia and other regions that have borne the brunt of a fossil-fuel economy.

For example, the administration’s plan to provide up to $250 million in loan guarantees to rural utilities to finance job-creating energy efficiency and renewable energy investments is a great start. Compare this to the $8 billion in the president’s plan for loan guarantees supporting fossil fuel projects, and its clear that we need to see a much stronger commitment.

Such investments will go far to create the jobs, economic security, and environmental health for these areas, consistent with President Obama’s goal of fulfilling a moral obligation to future generations.

Cormons is correct, and the warming of the planet and the devastation of Appalachia from out-of-control surface coal mining are most certainly linked. I’m willing, however, at least for now, to cheer president Obama for his actions on the climate.

The Immigration Reform Bill in Congress Throws the Environment Under the Bus

The Senate is set to vote on the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act (S. 744) today.

The word is that Democrats are on board to pass a reform bill with a “path to citizenship” for folks who presently lack legal immigration status. The Grand Old Party has its doubts about the legislation. To pull in enough of their votes for passage the Corker-Hoeven Amendment was added to the bill. This is the “border security” bit of the law that would add 20,000 more border patrol agents (a total that could place a border patrol agent along the U.S. Mexico border every 500 feet), 700 more miles of walls and fences, plus cameras, lights, drones, and a whole bunch of stuff that makes our southern border resemble some sort of latter day Maginot Line.

            To get GOP votes, I guess they figured that they also had to throw the environment under the bus. The bill would open up federal lands to motorized patrols, meaning that the Border Patrol could drive their jeeps and trucks over federally protected lands anywhere they wanted, and that they can build communications, surveillance, and detection equipment on these lands. The law stipulates the preparation of Environmental Impact Statements according to NEPA for these activities. These EISs, however, “shall not control, delay, or restrict actions by the Secretary to achieve effective control on Federal lands.”

So, in essence, go ahead and prepare the EIS, just don’t let it get in the way of driving your Border Patrol jeep anywhere you want, and you don’t have to pay attention to those geese and tortoises whose nests you have just trampled on. There has already been a great deal of environmental damage because of the border buildup; we don't need more of the same. According to the govtrack website, however, the bill has only a 27 percent chance of passage, so I’m only slightly concerned.

Dont' let the geese and tortoises get in the way of your Border Patrol jeep

Breaking news: Citizen groups seek OSMRE takeover of West Virginia DEP’s mining program

Breaking news: Citizen groups seek OSMRE takeover of West Virginia DEP’s mining program

This story is a big deal. People are standing up for the rule of law in West Virginia.
           This is from Ken Ward and his blog Coal Tattoo. Ken is a reporter for the Charleston Gazette. His reporting over the last 20 years on the subject of coal, coal mining, and mountaintop removal has been outstanding.

Complain About Your Tap Water? You Could Be a Terrorist

In Maury County, Tennessee yesterday, at a meeting convened to address citizens’ concerns over the quality of their drinking water, an official of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation said to residents, “We take water quality very seriously. Very, very seriously. But you need to make sure that when you make water quality complaints, you have a basis, because federally, if there's no water quality issues, that can be considered under Homeland Security an act of terrorism [Italics mine].”

            Sherwin Smith is the Deputy Director of the TDEC’s division of water resources, and what he said to this group of concerned citizens is, in a large sense, true. If someone were to put poison in the aqueducts that bring Colorado River water to southern California, threatening the lives of millions, that could most certainly be considered terrorism. Correspondingly, if someone were to make the threat of poisoning the aqueducts or to make the false claim that they had done so, spreading fear and panic, under current law that could be considered terrorism as well.

            Smith, however, was not speaking to representatives from al Quaida hell bent on dropping anthrax into the local water tower. He was speaking to the Statewide Organization for Community eMpowerment, a civic group that had been working with Maury County residents to address water quality complaints. Some county residents have complained about cloudy, odd-tasting water for years. In recent months children have become ill; some say it’s because of bad tap water.

            Industry, some GOP politicians, and right wing rhetors have been quick to label folks that get in the way of industry as terrorist or eco-terrorists. Examples are here and here. And the FBI as made it easy to blur the line and label minor offenses as terrorism. This is the first time that I’ve run across a state government official doing the same. It’s seems to me that it was just his way of telling this group to shut up, to intimidate the citizens who showed up for this meeting. In this way, he is using this rhetoric of terrorism just as industry and right wingers do, as a verbal cudgel.

            It’s difficult enough to make a complaint to government officials. People should not have to fear that they will somehow be considered in league with Ted Kaczynski or Osama bin Laden if they call up someone at the water department to say that their tap water is cloudy and tastes funny. And considering that extractive industries are quick to attack those who question or criticize practices, it could be a facile tactic on the part of the oil and gas industry to pick op the ball from Sherwin Smith and label the folks who say that their wells have been fouled by fracking as nothing but a bunch of terrorists.

Environmentalists Sue Landowners Over Pollution From Closed Coal Mines

The damage to people, communities, and the environment have always long outlasted the life cycle of a surface mine. What I recall from growing up in West Virginia were dozens of scarred landscapes from mines that had been abandoned ten or even twenty years earlier. Waterways suffer long after a mine closes. As I wrote in a previous blog, as a schoolchild I remember passing over a very polluted Simpson Creek. The acid mine drainage that stained the rocks and sand in the creek a rusty orange and killed all the fish was from mines that had been closed years before.

            Now, in a move that is intended to address this mining legacy, three environmental groups are suing the Pocahontas Land Corporation and Hernshaw Partners LLC over alleged violations of the Clean Water Act in a U.S. District Court in Huntington, West Virginia. The environmental groups—The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, and the Sierra Club— say in their lawsuit that pollution still flows from two former mines in Mingo County that are owned by the companies, even though the mines were “reclaimed.” The reclamation of these mines entailed cleaning them up and planting them with vegetation. The environmental groups say that state and federal regulators are not working to end the pollution, so the landowners should be held responsible. The lawsuit demands monitoring and sampling, a restoration program, and a judge to fine the defendants $37,500 per day for each violation.

            When they wrote the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act in the late seventies, it was supposed to mitigate the damage to the environment that I grew up with. That never really happened. The enforcement of SMCRA in the past has been lax to nonexistent.[i] And the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has in the past been exceptionally negligent in fulfilling its protection of West Virginia and its people. In the late nineties investigative reporter Ken Ward uncovered that the department did not know the number of acres permitted for mountaintop removal. The DEP could not even provide to Ward the number of permits that it has granted for mountaintop mining.[ii] Given the even worse track record of the second Bush administration, I have no reason to hope that things have changed much in the last fifteen years.

            With the failure of the regulatory framework for surface coal mining, this move by environmental groups is an obvious and wise move. Whether it is the coal companies or the landowners, somebody should be responsible for what they are doing to Appalachia and Appalachians.

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[i] Loeb, Penny “Shear Madness,” US News and World Report (August 3 1997)

[ii] Ward, Ken “Flattened,” Charleston Gazette, 9 August 1998