Saturday, February 11th, 2012

EPA Halts Mountaintop Mining

By Mike Lillis
Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 3:37 pm

Yes, elections do matter.

Putting a quick halt to an Orwellian Bush administration rule allowing mining companies to kill mountain streams, the Environmental Protection Agency this afternoon announced that it will delay hundreds of mining permits while it takes a closer look at how the operations will affect local waterways.

“EPA will use the best science and follow the letter of the law in ensuring we are protecting our environment,” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a statement.

Of all the methods used to extract coal, none is so destructive to ecosystems as mountaintop mining — a process in which the tops of mountains are literally blasted away to access the coal seams beneath.

A 25-year-old Interior Department regulation prohibits mining companies from dumping debris into valley streams, but in December the Bush administration eased the rule to allow such dumping if the companies can make a case that it’s unavoidable. Complicating the picture, a Virginia-based federal appeals court last month ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers has the authority to grant mining permits. With the EPA’s announcement today, the agency has indicated that the Army Corps won’t have the final say.

In a statement issued moments ago, Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope cheered the EPA’s decision:

With the bulldozers and dynamite standing by, the Obama administration has taken decisive action to protect the streams, mountains and communities of Appalachia.

Already close to 2,000 miles of streams have been contaminated or destroyed by mountaintop removal coal mining, and communities throughout the Appalachian region suffer daily from contaminated drinking water, increased flooding, and a decimated landscape … Reviewing the permits will stop the bleeding, and now EPA should begin to fix the Bush-era regulatory loopholes that made mountaintop removal possible.

The coal industry’s many friends in Washington won’t like this decision. Stay tuned for a larger battle to come.

–

TWI: friend to mountains, streams, and all the little woodland creatures everywhere. Follow us on Twitter here.

Comments

12 Comments

ajm8127
Comment posted March 24, 2009 @ 2:17 pm

The EPA using science? Now that's change.

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knowbuddhau
Comment posted March 25, 2009 @ 6:50 am

Best news I've heard in a long time.

Take a look at that word, “decimated:” it means, to reduce by a factor of ten. Our lords of coal have done to Appalachia what our lords of war have done to Gaza.

Two examples come to mind. AMY GOODMAN: Democratic Congressmember Jay Inslee of Washington State also questioned the Senior Vice President of Exxon Mobil, Stephen Simon, about the kind of change that could be expected from Exxon Mobil when they’re investing less than one percent of their profits in renewable energy.

REP. JAY INSLEE: Mr. Simon, listening to your testimony makes me even more convinced that we need to act to create an incentive for decision makers in industry to really make real investments in the clean energy revolution rather than relatively small ones. And the reason I say that is that, listening to you, as far as I can tell, you’re spending less than half a percent of your gross revenues on clean energy research. Is that right?

STEPHEN SIMON: It would be a very modest amount. I would acknowledge that. But I would not acknowledge that we’re not doing a lot to address greenhouse gas emission.

REP. JAY INSLEE: Well, considering that we have to cut our greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent in this country below our levels by 2050, would you agree that if your company continues on its present course, it will fall several hundred orders of magnitude short of what we have to do to prevent cataclysmic global climate change?

STEPHEN SIMON: Well, the assumption there that that’s required in order to do that, I would—

REP. JAY INSLEE: Well, how else is it going to happen? I mean, oil isn’t going to all of a sudden become clean. We need to do the research to figure out these technologies.

STEPHEN SIMON: No, but the fact is that we are going to have oil and gas and coal, and it’s going to constitute about 80 percent of the energy equation. With that as a given, how do we then address and do what we can to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions with that being the case?

[[[Full-spectrum dominance /Our Commonweal///[[[{{{ENERGY}}}]]]]]

Spoken like a true economic hit man, eh? Perkins confessed to exactly the same kind of scheme: with certain givens built in from the inception, we oversell nations on destructive extractive industries, bribing whoever has to be bribed, racking up unforgivable public debt, then taking over upon default. This is how we do it.

Now consider Gaza.

[[[Full-spectrum dominance /Our Commonweal///[[[{{{GAZA}}}]]]]]

1100 dead Gazans compared to 10 dead Israeli soldiers. Now that's what I call “leveraging.” The difference is of two orders of magnitude; two “powers.”

Israel is razing Gaza to the negative second power, aka “bombing them back to the Stone Age.” The US is supplying the weaponry for Israel to exalt itself to the second power, aka deus ex machina aka “Shock & Awe.”

So there stands proud Israel over prostrate Palestine, propped up and powered by machines of war made in the USA. So do we call this “centimated,” or maybe “millimated?” No, I know: MEGAMATED. Jacked to hell and back, and stuck with the bill both ways (as the residents of Libby, Montana, now dying of mesothelioma, who brought home lethal vermiculite dust on their clothes for their loved ones to breathe, having been told myths of its safety by WR Grace and gov't health officials alike).

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The Washington Independent

EPA Halts Mountaintop Mining

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